Follow-up (autumn 2013)

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This is the fourth and last summary in a row that covers different aspects of last year's activities. This time I turn my gaze to the blog posts I have written during the autumn to see if there is any additional information I might add and that clarifies events that have since happened.

I've done follow-ups three times before and here is the previous follow-up, covering the first half of 2013. I have recently realized that a few projects that were initiated during the late spring or early summer would not have been covered in the previous follow-up and would not be covered in this blog post either if I strictly limited my gaze only to stuff I have written about after the summer. This is a weakness in my "follow-up methodology" and I will thus from now on go back a full year to see if I need to pick up and shortly write about any additional spring projects that weren't covered in my previous follow-up half a year ago.


Spring 2013
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Back in February I went to Switzerland and the first international conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) - by train. The second ICT4S conference will be organized by KTH and held in Stockholm at the end of the summer (August 26-28). The deadline for submitting papers is in the end of February so do consider writing something for the conference if you do work in this area!


August
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Back in August, we submitted an article about the use of social media in higher education. I was rejected and a list of changes and improvements were suggested by the two anonymous reviewers. I'm the third out of four authors and it mostly fell on the first author to do another round of work on the article to improve it during the autumn.

We also handed in a proposal for a book chapter on "Cheating and creative play in EVE Online". Apparently the editors were inundated with proposals and ours was rejected. I still think we have a good thing going and might develop our proposal into a stand-alone journal article and send it to one of the journals in the area of (computer) games research.


September
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After the Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) conference, both of the papers I had written (together with others) were invited to a special issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production. That is, they were determined "to have potential for upgrading" and then be submitted to the journal. Unfortunately the deadline is this month and doesn't fit my schedule at all so I have declined. In December, I got a second invitation, this time to rewrite the article into a book chapter in a book/project about the global dimension of engineering. You might ask yourself what the "global dimension" is (I certainly did) and it "refers to all the non-technical topics that will impact the engineering profession at at a global level over the next 20-30 year". Sustainability is one of these topics.


October
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The Science Fiction workshop I led and that I wrote about was one out of four workshops on the same theme that I either led or partook in during the autumn (with three different groups of people). I have been entrusted with the resulting materials and one of my many project for my sabbatical during the spring term is to have a look at and analyze the results of these four workshops. It might be fodder for an article if something interesting turns up but I think it might to a large extent also be up to my scientific imagination to tease out mening from this material.


November
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In the beginning of November I wrote about my family's plans to move to the US for half a year. This is a topic I have come back to several times during the last two months, but now it's very close in time. We have been on vacation for the better part of a month and one week from now we will have arrived to the US and will be settling in. Much of what I write about during the spring will for sure have a lot to do my location during the spring (University of California, Irvine).


December
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We had a very successful and productive whole-day brainstorming retreat with the sustainability team at our department and one of the outcomes was our new name, MID4S (Media Technology and Interaction Design for Sustainability). In the very last meeting of the term, we built on the results to formulate something like a dozen goals for the 2014 MID4S activities.
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