Eventyr

Brighton Coding Dojo Night

I have been so in shock at the Coding Dojo Night being over and done with that I have been very lax in posting about it.

Due to the generous sponsorship of the University of Sussex, Agile Alliance and Future Platforms we managed to create something quite special in a lovely venue.  We were able to provide food, plenty drink and prizes (books courtesy of Apress, and Sushi lessons thanks to Okinami). 

We had a badgemaker  (manned by Dom), thanks to the lovely resource centre, which allowed everyone to name themselves and give us a feel for the mix of programming levels present (people chose a colour badge according to whether they felt they were a novice, journeyman or master).

The night started with a Aikido demo (co-staring my brother and Tom Hume), and was then followed by a talk from Karl Scotland briefly explaining agile and the history of the coding dojos.

We then launched into our four groups of ten people to have a stab at programming in Inform 6. (Although Inform 7 would have been easier to pick up and had a nicer interface, we liked the very traditional style of Inform 6).

Each group worked together for an hour and a half to collectively create a text adventure game.  They weren't the most playable of games given such a short space of time to learn and produce, but they were fun to produce.  The code should appear here soon should anyone want to take a look.   

The photo pool from the night is looking fabulous as well:

     

 

I'm really happy so many people came and contributed to help to make it such a great night.

Thanks to the lovely people at InQbate for helping set this up - and putting so much effort into making the venue really special.  And obviously thanks to everyone who organised this alongside me.

HCT Seminars

The HCT Seminars that we organise at Sussex kicked off wonderfully on Friday.

Paul Brna (from University of Glasgow) gave a talk entitled 'In Search of Narrative Interactive Learning Environments' - which fascinated me for presenting NILE's as more interesting than I had previously considered, discussing work I had previously helped out with at Hertfordshire, and by wondering whether Narrative Inquiry should be used to investigate NILE's (thus making my ears pick up).

Hopefully his slides will be available at the seminar page soon.  (Annoyingly due to server issues at Sussex the page sadly isn't visible off-campus at present.  Hopefully that will be rectified soon.)

Quote of the talk:
"How do you get at the value of things without going deep and looking at Narrative?"

I'm already looking forward to the talk next week, where Mark Walker from SCIP has kindly agreed to come in and talk for us.

CommecialiSE

Thursday and Friday last week were spent working at a lovely hotel outside Portsmouth. 

I managed to get myself a place on the first round of the SEEDA-funded CommercialiSE Fellow Scheme:

"CommercialiSE Fellows Training offers a free package of support to enable academics, university staff, students, alumni, SME's and entrepreneurs based in the South East region to develop business ideas i nto a fully worked, realisable business plan. The training will last 6 months, and will focus on developing your business potential. The CommercialiSE programme includes possible access to the South East sector consortia, SEEDA Enterprise Hub Networks and the CommercialiSE Mentoring Scheme."

I spent two busy but enjoyable days working alongside a people from Portsmouth, Brighton and Sussex Universities - after I made it there*  - on the training course run by Hi Consulting, and I am greatly looking forward to the next one!

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* The Shoreham tunnel was shut due to a peacock (or was it pheasant?) in the tunnel.  Either way I way very glad to have my radio warn me to detour at exactly the right moment.

HCT Seminars - Summer

So, we are starting to set up for the HCT Seminars for the summer term - revised website and speaker list soon.  Thankfully we only have four talks left (or five depending on external circumstance). 

It has been a long run, some very interesting talks, but I admit I shall be glad to hand over the HCT Seminars for next year's fresh-faced research students to organise.

Filling in the Gaps

Just as I am having a hard time filling the gaps in on my ethnographic data I am finding my posting has slowed. 

There was a long list of things I needed to post here - and this has been my task for the day.  Good for me, but should anyone subscribe to this (gawd forbid) then they may feel a bit inundated.

So sorry, but I am about to post loads and backdate even more.

Pausing for Term End

So I find myself relieved to reach the end of another term at Sussex.  No more HCT seminars for a month (after some very interesting talks and a lot of lovely cake), and no more classes to lead* until the autumn at soonest.

If I didn’t have a lot of data collection for my PhD to do then I would have some rest next week.  Hoping that will come the week after.

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* Although I do still have plenty of marking to shift.

Questions

Supervision Notes:

• What am I asking?
• How am I asking it?
• Will it weave in to what I have to say?

Time considerations:

• Data Gathering - until end March 2008
• Analysis and Write Up - until start March 2009
• Funding - until end March 2010

Studentship

Find Permit A-38 in "The Place That Sends You Mad": A mind-numbing multi-storey building founded on bureaucracy and staffed by clinically unhelpful people who direct all their clients to other similarly unhelpful people elsewhere in the building. Asterix eventually beats them at their own game by asking for an imaginary permit that nobody knows about, sending the place into disarray. Eventually Asterix is given Permit A-38 just to make him leave and stop causing trouble.
(Number 8 of the Twelve Tasks of Asterix)

The research council awarded me a studentship in late August.  Since then it has been passed between departments at the University.  Today they discovered another form for me to urgently fill before anything can be done.  I completed it.  I have been informed that once one other person has signed off on the second page of another form (the second page got lost in admin space), it can then be processed in time for the payroll deadline of Thursday.  This means there is a slight chance I may yet receive some money before January. 

Which will be nice.

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UPDATE:  There appears to be another lost section of form that two other people need to sign before anything can be done...  Ah well, maybe by Easter then.

Linked

While not really being convinced by the usefulness of social networking sites, two invites in one week have prompted me to join LinkedIn. 

Beyond having given me the opportunity to link up with an old friend, I am not sure what benefit can come from it. 

But I shall see.

HCT Seminars

Last HCT Seminar of term yesterday.  They have been a great group of talks (with even better cake) but I admit I shall be grateful for the reprieve.

So this term we had:

• John Rimmer (University College London) 'The Use of Information and Technology by Humanities Scholars  - an overview of the UCIS project and a report on some current research findings'
• Magnus Nilsson (Roskilde University) 'Representing time in calendar and scheduling systems - on scheduling and temporal coordination in home-care work'
• Sandrine Balbo (University of Melbourne) 'Leading usability evaluations to WAUTER'
• Ryan Baker (University of Nottingham) 'Developing Systems that Detect and Adapt to When Students Game the System'
• Ann Light (Queen Mary, University of London) 'Designing the Not-Quite-Yet' (Workshop)
• Charles Crook  (University of Nottingham) 'A cultural stance towards learning science and learning technology'
• Aris Alissandrakis  (University of Hertfordshire) 'Social Learning for Social Robots'
• Katherine Howland  (University of Sussex) 'ScriptCards: A Visual Programming Language for Games Authoring by Young People'

I am already looking forward to the talks from several of the speakers we have lined up for next term.