Follow-up (spring 2014)

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Ongoing projects often generate follow-up blog posts. A submission to a conference will generate a blog post about that conference (some months later). A research project will generate a new blog perhaps three or six or nine months later. Some "projects" (blog posts) don't generate follow-up blog posts even thought they "should". A blog post about an article that was submitted but that was rejected will most often not generate a follow-up blog posts, so, every six months I go back and look for "loose ends" to follow up and tie up.

In these follow-up blog posts, I don't follow up everything that has happened, but only create closure for those projects and blog posts that can come to an end by writing a short blurb about them.

I here primarily look at things that has happened during the spring (Jan-June) but have also started to go back a full year looking for loose ends to tie up. It turns out that this time around there aren't that many loose ends from the almost 50 blog posts I have published since January. Some of those 50 blog posts contain temporary loose ends that I will come back to later and that I thus don't bother to write about below.


Autumn 2013
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Me and my colleague Björn applied for a small amount of (KTH-internal) money for a project, "Social annotation systems and formative peer feedback for bachelors' theses", and we did get that money. We have worked on that project during the latter part of the autumn term and during the first half of the spring term and Björn presented the results in the beginning of June. Our project and the results were much appreciated by some of the "high and mighty" at KTH and we apparently gained goodwill (a currency that is good for getting our next project approved).

I participated in a course on "Research supervision" during the autumn term. The attendance rules were draconian and since I missed one meeting I had to do an extra assignment. We agreed to customise that assignment and I was to interviews two US Ph.D. students and compare the situation of Ph.D. students in the US and Sweden. I did the two interviews back in April but only managed to submit my assignment last month (June). It is however done now and I did pass the course - yay!

Me and Björn wrote another application for (CSC-internal) pedagogical funds in December so as to develop the work we have done procrastination and we got that money too. Our application was called "Do it now! Support for better education about procrastination" and we more specifically promised to "develop our own teaching materials - a tailored, KTH-adapted compendium - dealing with the topic of procrastination and nearby areas such as study habits, distractions and the use of technology". This is one of the projects that I wanted to work with on my sabbatical, but I haven't and it is one more reason for why the autumn term will be very busy. We plan to put together a 75-page compendium that will replace the ragtag readings we have been using this far.

Me and Björn wrote yet another application for (CSC-internal) pedagogical funds for yet another project in December about social annotation systems, "Increased thesis quality through increased goal focus and peer- and self-assessment". Also this project application was funded (again with just a small amount of money though). This project overlaps, but is still different from the social annotation project above. Björn have managed these two (social annotation, peer feedback) projects and while I've been working with both of them remotely, it's a little hard for me to be on top of all the facts when I was in the US. I think we have done everything we were supposed to in both of these projects (and if not, I expect Björn to tell me).


January
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I wrote a (popular) blog post about my negative experiences of using Airbnb this past winter when on vacation in Argentina. It all worked out for the best in the end though and I have used Airbnb a ton since. Now that I know how to better use the service, I'm really quite happy with it. I will go to a conference in Germany in August and another conference in Helsinki in October and have already booked apartments through Airbnb...

February
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I wrote a blog post about Barath Raghavan's visit to UC Irvine. This was the first time I met with Barath personally and we have since written a paper together that recently was accepted to the NordiCHI conference. This was just the start of a fruitful cooperation and we have two more papers in the pipe as well as planning for a workshop that will be held next year, e.g. there is more to follow...

March
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I'm the co-author of no less than three papers that were submitted to the upcoming ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) conference in Stockholm. One of the papers, "Green websites for next-generation screens", was rejected but the other two papers (here and here) were accepted and both were furthermore nominated for the best paper award (only eight papers were nominated).

April
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Malin Picha and I submitted an article, "Explorative scenarios of emerging media trends" to the Journal of Print and Media Technology Research. It has since been accepted for publication but I don't know when it will be in print. Hopefully some time later this year.


Nothing has happened since April that can be followed up yet, stay tuned for the next follow-up half a year from now though...

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