Two presentations at Staff Development Festival

On Thursday there was the "Assessment, Learning, and Teaching" (ALT) Day at the Leeds Met Staff Development Festival. It began and ended with plenary keynote speakers, and in between there were two workshop sessions. Originally I had proposed to hold three workshops, but only two workshops were possible due to the schedule constraints. So I gave the following two workshops: one workshop together with Prof. Roderick King about a software for teaching physiological processes during sports activity, using a game that we and the company Kooji had developed in a joint project; and one workshop about the learning object editing tool CourseLab. Everything went well, except that the room where the CourseLab workshop was held, was completely overheated, due to a problem with the ventilation.

Originally I had offered to hold three workshops, but out of time constraints, I had to withdraw the workshop on the TQEF project about a particular tool my colleague Prof. Claudio Vignali had developed.

Opera in the Park

In Temple Newsam, in the south-east corner of Leeds, an open air event took place: "Opera in the Park", with the Opera North. Several ten-thousands of spectators grace the large lawn, throughout sunset from 20:00 - 22:30, and listen to excerpts from operas. The event ends with Borodin's orchestral piece "Polovtsian Dances". Gives me inspiration to re-work my own rendition of this music, which I had done back in 1994 (actually, I only had worked on the very first part of this wonderful piece).

Open Day at Leeds Met

This Saturday was a very rainy day, strong showers, also some wind gusts (gales, as they say here in UK). This was the first event I am aware that took place now in the temporary Marquee tents on the Acre here in Headingley.

Open Day for the whole university. Each faculty has a stand and presents their offerings to prospective students and their parents. I have decided to show my geotracking application. Is not extremely "cool", just to have that one little icon representing me there on the web screen. But some people are actually genuinely interested in this.

There is a couple from New Zealand whose daughter has decided to come to Leeds Met in a year for a MSc degree. She is specifically interested in Leeds Met - no wonder, some of the buzz has obviously made its way around the globe already!

Many other parents come and ask for our curriculum, courses, opportunities for study. A busy day, starting at 9:30 and ending around 15:00.

New Semester Begins

This Tuesday is for me the first day of teaching in the new semester. It starts with two 2-h tutorials for the final-year project supervision. Fortunately, the tutorials are shared, and we supervisors can take turns in supervision.

The students propose interesting projects - in the tutorial we give them advise for the development of their ideas. They will have to showcase them in May.

I am also up for two "guest lectures", and I give one tutorial on "Innovation and Enterprise". Besides that, I still keep my group for which I am the "Academic Coach". Is quite reasonable, but I also have to move the Centre for Creative Technology forward... we need to prepare bids and publish the achieved results.

Shilpa Shetti gets Honorary Degree from Leeds Met!!!

Today in the morning, as we, the INN staff, assembled in the Ghandi Hall for the "Academic Procession" in the morning graduation ceremony, the Senior Executive Team (SET) came in for a photo shoot. And with them was - the famous Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetti! She had been in the news very often in the past months - half a year a go was the controversy in the Big Brother container. But here she was in person, ready to get an honorary award.

The ceremony went well, as usual in our bravourous Leeds Met style. In the afternoon now, there will be a second graduation ceremony, this time for the Post-Graduates.



More pictures are on Facebook... - one more reason to join this community!

Wiki School Competition

That was a busy time last week: the 3-day Innovation North Faculty Conference, the launch of the Centre for Creative Technology, the visit of our Austrian students from the Danube University Krems, the ethics debate, and on Thursday the Post-Graduate conference. After those 4 days, I took off one day on Friday.

But this week, the activities continue: this Monday was a Wiki School Competition, organised by David Griffin from Innovation North. School from the region have been invited to present their Wiki, with the theme "Why Technology Matters". Initially there had been 20 candidates, by last Friday the field had narrowed, and by Monday there have been 3 candidates left. Shame on those who withdrew! But these remaining candidates were able to demonstrate their excellence and their enthusiasm for Web 2.0 projects in their Wiki: in the lounge behind the MetCeno, they set up their laptops, and each of these Wiki sites showed something unique. I was one of the 7 judges, and it was difficult to pin down and weight the contribution of each team fairly. But in the end, the prices were distributed among the teams: 4 mountain bikes (donated by Red Hat), 4 iPods (donated by Apple), and e book vouchers (donated by the British Computer Society).

Good-Bye to Colleagues

Monday afternoon, a celebration was held in the "Ghandi Hall" (formerly the "Great Hall") for those members of staff from our faculty Innovation North who will leave us with the end of this semester. Due to restructureing of the curriculum, a significant number of staff members had been offered "redundancy" packages, allowing them to move into early retirement or pick up new challenges at "pastures new". A nice gesture from our management to celebrate these members and to acknowledge their contribution.

Research and Ethics

Today was the last day of the 3-day INN research conference. In the morning was Prof. Alistair Black's session on libraries, which he began with an interesting talk about the architecture of libraries. I used the opportunity of the presence of the students from Krems to have a few meetings with individuals, to discuss plans and progress.

In the afternoon then the session of the PRAXIS centre, which is led by Prof. Dave Webb. The afternoon ended with the scheduled debate between me and Phil Webber, about the importance of ethics in research. Each of us held a 20 min talk, outlining our views on this issue. Actually, we both spoke about slightly different things: while I addressed the basic philosophical issue behind this question from the point of view of the scientist, Phil addressed the issue from the point of view of the funding opportunities, which in his view were too much targetted towards commercial and military benefits rather than ecological and social. So we did not directly address each other's opinion, but after our statements we answered questions from the audience, and a vivid discussion arose.

As a PowerPoint junkie, I had of course prepared a set of "viewgraphs" (vugraphs) which are available for download.

Busy: conference, presentations, demonstrations

What a busy time! Yesterday began the 3-day Innovation North Research conference, and in the evening we celebrated the launch of the Centre for Creative Technology with an array of presentations and demonstrations by staff members, covering many of the topics in creative technology. First I gave a presentation, then we had a buffet, and my colleagues presented technology demonstrations in the Music Studios. I was asked to write a 200 word summary to be posted today on our web site. And our Vice Chancellor mentioned the launch in his daily refection today. But I had no time to pause much - today I was session chair in the conference session Creative Technology. Our keynote speaker Dr. Kia Ng from Leeds University opened the session with a fascinating insight into his wide range of work - being a trained violinist and computer scientist gives him the unique insight into this area between creativity and technology.

It was great to welcome our distance students from Danube University Krems. Tomorrow we will have the last day of this 3-day conference, and I will participate as one of the speakers in the afternoon session on professional ethics. Time now to get some thoughts together for this presentation.

And then, I have to complete the reviews for 7 papers... and write a paper for another conference ... and prepare my presentation for another upcoming conference... busy times!

Preparations of the launch of the "Centre for Creative Technology"

The idea of establishing research centres at Leeds Met has been circulated since sometime in spring of 2006. These centres are supposed to coordinate research activities, and at a meeting in April 2006, our Dean Cath Orange said she would be very disappointed if we would not have a "Centre of Creative Technology". So it was up to me and my colleague Prof. William Latham to get together and decide on the establishing of such a centre.

The goal of a centre is to foster research, to stimulate collaborations, and to work on obtaining funding for those activities. At our faculty Innovation North we already have many researchers working on a large variety of topics, in computing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction technology, computer graphics, computer music, and other areas. So what could the establishment of a center improve? Well, one of the issues is to streamline the research activities, to create a coherent picture of the research topics and bundle them together so that they can be pursued within larger project frameworks. In the current research situation, most of the researchers have been working as individuals. There have been some remarkable group activities, but that was the exception.

With this centre, we plan to encourage researchers to exchange ideas and work together on larger-scale projects. Let's hope that this works out fine.

After Prof. William Latham left Leeds Met for another position (at Goldsmith College, London), he still remained connected to Leeds Met as a Visiting Professor. But now it is up to me to complete the centre, and I will serve in it as Director.

For next Monday, 9. July, we have organised an evening event to celebrate the launch of the centre. The program is currently online at creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk - but this site is destined to host the web site of the center. Here is a preview of the site - things on the site are still pretty much in development, but hopefully will be final by next Monday.

The "Trevor Baylis Break-Out Room"

Today we had an honorable guest at Leeds Met: the inventor Trevor Baylis, OBE, joined a celebration event in the "Old Broadcasting House". Trevor's passion is in ensuring that inventors get recognition - and appropriate protection of their intellectual property. A room in this Old Broadcasting House was named in his honour, to provide a sanctuary for trusted conversations about patentable ideas. He gave a speech in which he enthusiastically celebrated the profession of an inventor - fabulous his imitation of a nerdy inventor type who for some reason had a German accent... (remember Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove?)

This event was for me the first opportunity to visit the new Old Broadcasting House, a building formerly housing the BBC. Now freshly renovated, it hosts the Leeds Met New Technology Institute (NTI), an Innovation Showcase, the Teaching and Learning Excellence Centre, and several seminar rooms. A great venue!

Technology-Enhanced Learning

Today was a one-day workshop held at the Carnegie Stand, organised by our Pro-Vice Chancellor for Assessment, Learning, and Teaching, Sally Brown. I somehow had missed this event - and yesterday evening Sally invited me to participate. I was only able to attend in the morning, because I again had a meeting this afternoon that had been previously scheduled.

We discussed the use of online learning and the issues associated with it. It emerged that the current implementations are still quite away from the ideal solution, where students can use these online "eLearning" systems for individual learning - but we are on the way. Leeds Met has invested significantly into WebCT, and will continue to use this system.

One issue that was brought up was that students nowadays do not always accept the "institutional" online systems provided by the university (email, discussion boards) - and rather use forums and discussion boards outside of the university. This just has to be accepted - one cannot "force" students to use a specific system, as they have a great choice of where they want to participate. The solution might be to link to these other resources and to provide an attractive and easy to use portal. There may still be some work to do on our side...
Graffiti Board with questions and issues.

Inaugural Lecture of Prof. Sue Clegg

Thursday evening was again one of these inaugural lectures at Leeds Met, which provide the frame for the academic staff to come together, listen to an inspiring and thought-stimulating talk, discuss academic issues, and have a bite at the delicious buffet povided by Leeds Met Catering. Prof. Sue Clegg is working on Research into Higher Education, a topic at the very core of a university. In addition to the inaugural lecture, she also had organised a one-day conference on Monday 18.June, to launch her Centre of Research into Higher Education. I only could attend at the morning, because of other commitments and meetings.

Leeds Met Honorary Doctorate

A very "mysterious" word-of-mouth message was passed on to members of staff at Leeds Met on Thursday morning: there would be a meeting in the James Graham Building at noon, with an event and important announcements. Nobody who told me about this, knew what the exact nature of that event would be - we suspected that it would be related to Leeds Met getting the "Greenest Uni of UK" award, which just had made the news on our website.

As we went to the James Graham Building, there was first a kind of buffet dinner in the Acre room. Then we were ushered into the "Great Hall". This is a central piece of the James Graham Building - it had been used as a part of the library during the past years, with a "false ceiling", so that none of its former glory could be seen. Now it has been renovated, and this was the first time for me to be in that hall. High ceiling, large windows, quite a festive and representative facility for Leeds Met! Unfortunately I had not taken my camera with me... so I have no pictures from it.

The event turned out to be a Honorary Award ceremony for India's Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel who received a Honorary Doctorate of business administration - the secrecy of this award probably had to do with security concerns. Amazing, what the event organisers were able to pull out on such a short notice! The Black Dyke band provided the musical frame, the senior administration was in official Uni gowns. A bit more on the story is on the Leeds Met website.

This event is in conjunction with the "Bollywood Oscars": in the next days, Leeds is this year the venue for the annual award ceremony of the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA). In the past days, Bollywood celebrities have flown into Yorkshire, and there has been quite a media buzz.

And of course, Leeds Met is prominently involved in this, as the official education partner of IIFA and Wizcraft, the Indian event organiser.

LeedsMet INN Undergraduate Showcase

Yesterday (23.May) and today the annual Undergraduate Showcase takes place here at Leeds Met at the Headingley Campus. This is the event when level-3 graduate students present the results of their last year project.

As usual, there was a nice buffet in the James Graham Building.

The Vibra-Chair project: a chair which translates acoustic input into haptic vibrations.

The group which created an interactive tour guide through our Innovation North facilities.