Here We Go Again...

One of the things I like about academic life (apart from the fact that you can witness people juggling and tightrope walking in Hyde Park, or riding Unicycles or mini-Penny Farthings down Woodhouse lane, as a matter of course) are the rhythms of campus life. Term time is always bustling, and come the summer, the space on campus is always a welcome change of pace - postgrads, researchers and staff are all still around, of course, and conferences and outreach events are going on, so campus is far from deserted, but for two months, the campus is a relative oasis of calm, a break after the intensity of exam boards and  graduations. And then, just when it's starting to feel a little too quiet, the undergrads are back and the whole campus explodes back into life. We're at just such a stage this week: the students are back, and the corridors and cafes are once again bustling with energy. It's a nice feel.

    I sometimes lament the periods where you do much but get little done - that is work a lot on various different big jobs that for weeks never quite get finished. That's not a problem (it's all progress, after all), but it can be dispiriting to see nothing disappearing from your To Do list after several weeks' work. This time of year is nearly the opposite: you do much, and get a lot of things ticked off the To Do list, but they're all such small jobs (book parking for visitors in week 1, make the VLE page live, update this set of slides), that they don't have the same sense of satisfaction as finally ticking off one of the big jobs.   Still, it's all progress, and these are the things that can snowball into big problems if not sorted out now. For a want of a nail, and all that...

    Right now, life revolves around preparations for term. I've written my exam, I've prepped my VLE areas (the automatic rollover of VLE areas from one year to the next is largely blessing, qwith a little bit of curse - as you have to work through and check for any rogue documents that might be out of date, make sure assignments are set up, that release dates for material are correct). Checking timetables, getting the timetable imported into my diary, meeting new tutees, presenting the UG projects that I'll have available.

     But there's also been the launch of the Sadler Seminar Series on Augmenting the Body with Stuart Murray and Sita Poppat among others (Follow @augmentedbodies on Twitter or see the LIHR Sadler seminar page for details. This will be exciting, though I'll be off at a LUDI network when the first one takes place (*sob*) but that still leaves me with five to attend. Also papers, proposals - just trying to get everything in place before teaching really kicks in - and learning to use our 3D scanner. I love my job.

Here's to the 2016/17 academic year!

Loose Ends

There I was, hoping for a whole batch of posts on the Engineering Imagination, but with one thing and another, it's been a busy old summer. Term is just a week away, and so now is the time of tidying up loose ends before starting anything new.

I've been trying to make sure my handouts are all printed, and my exam and several new lectures written before the start of term hits: once you're in the thick of teaching, you don't want to be stuck in reactive mode! Also finishing off two papers, preparing for a transfer viva, delivering a review and trying to finish off a grant proposal. These are all things that have been chugging merrily along for the summer, but need to be polished off before the impetus lost, and new things pop up on the horizon.

And there are a fair few things on the horizon for this autumn: a trip to the next LUDI workshop in Malta next month; the AHRC Tracking People network gets up and running with its first meeting in December, and the Augmenting the Body seminar series with Stuart Murray gets going for me in November (the first seminar is in October, but I'm in Malta then...). Also our current Postural Sway Assessment Tool project will be getting into data gathering mode in the next few months, and I'll be presenting at a seminar in our ethics centre.

So, I'll be trying to put some of that up here. And time permitting I'd like to get a reading list for the Engineering Imagination up here.

Only time will tell - stay tuned!