(Belated in organisation, but now done.)
The WIP-PPIG is a workshop for students and established researchers to present ongoing work in the psychology of programming and will be at the University of Sussex on 21-22 February 2008. The call for papers for the PPIG Work-in-Progress Workshop 2008 is now online. Submission of extended abstracts (1 to 2 pages) is due by 14th January 2008.
"A feature of the PPIG workshops has been their openness to a wide spectrum of concerns related to programming and software engineering, from the design of programming languages to communication issues in software teams, and from computing education to high-performance professional practice. Similarly, PPIG entertains a broad spectrum of research approaches, from theoretical perspectives drawing on psychological theory to empirical perspectives grounded in real-world experience."
More information available from the workshop website.
Thursday 6th December was the Human-Centred Technology Postgraduate Workshop that we* organise at the University of Sussex.
This year things were done a bit differently. Rather than traditional research paper presentations the day was re-focussed on research methods (by year) appropriate to everyone's level and interests. The idea was to take full advantage of the functionality of the Sussex Creativity Zone (CETL) and provide the chance for all attendees to critically reflect on the research approaches they are taking.
Unexpectedly I found out the week before that I was to take part as well. I am glad I did - even if my digital poster did suffer somewhat from being generated at the last moment - as it was enjoyable and useful.
So, on the day, I finished class early so that we could all get to the workshop. We arrived during Ben's talk on 'Doing a PhD: Managing Your Supervisor', and I quickly had to jump up again to make refreshments for the first tea-break. The day was then split into alternating sessions; digital poster presentations by year, and practical sessions targeted to level.
In my case:
All in all a really useful day for me, and probably a good motivator for helping me to clarify just what I need to be doing at this stage in my game.
Challenges:
Positives:
Drivers:
Tips:
My photos of the day are here.
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* Thankfully this year I was allowed to take a backseat organisational role and was only responsible for registrations, payments and receipts.
Second time round and the Research Methods in CSAI course I lead for incoming DPhil students in Informatics is now over. As ever the students in this class were a pleasure to work with - I don't think I shall ever miss working with those behavioural-problem teenagers that kicked-off my teaching.
We just managed to squeeze in a class in the CETL (probably my last, as the space is now booked up for teaching right through to January 2009) and had lovely talks from Blay Whitby (on research ethics) and Mike Herd the director of the Innovation Centre.
If I do this again next year I need to remember not to presume knowledge in advance. I was astounded to discover that I had made the mistake of presuming that everyone knew the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research. It presumed a lot of underlying philosophical knowledge that CS students might never have been exposed to. My shock when I realised was tangible, and resulted in some restructuring of the course.
Now all I need to do is face the marking (and possibly spend some time designing clear lesson plans, based on my experiences, to follow for next time).
I thought I should write a quick note to say how excited I am about the 'stage' concept at Agile 2008.
"Agile 2008 has adopted the metaphor of a music festival that provides multiple stages to attract audiences with common interests. The stages within our program are designed and organized by experts (acting as stage producers) who are truly passionate about their particular areas. Each stage will have a feel of a smaller, focused mini-conference whilst providing the conference attendee with a wide choice of stages to choose from."
I will be helping out with some small aspects of Brian Marick's Designing, Testing, and Thinking with Examples Stage. This particularly appealed to me after my experiences with teaching, and fits well with the model used at the Sussex Creativity Zone (CETL).
"...it won’t merely accept the need for examples, it will glory in
them as one of the primary ways we learn, teach, communicate, test,
design, code, and decide how to act in the world. The stage is
therefore open to any kind of session that puts the concrete example
front and center."
and
"We encourage risky sessions. If your session has a chance to
succeed spectacularly, we won’t mind that it might fail disastrously.
The success of the stage will be more about how high the peaks were
than what the average session ratings were."
I am rather excited to see how well pushing for concrete examples, as the logical step beyond experience reports, works in practice.
I don't know yet whether or not I can attend, but I really hope so.
