Catching up: Part I

Fourteen months is a long time between blog posts!  There’s no way that I can manage to put together a post that sums up all that time, so this will be a multi-part series of postings to try to catch up.

I find myself living in Windsor, Ontario with my spouse, two daughters, and two dogs.  We arrived in Windsor just over a year ago as a result of Nobuko accepting an offer of an assistant professorship at the University of Windsor.  The change was one of the biggest ones ever for me:  I found myself without an official job for the first time in almost 30 years.  I’ll be honest:  it was a difficult transition!  A year later, though, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the opportunities that have presented themselves and feel supremely lucky.

I’ve had the good fortune of being able to collaborate with some pretty wonderful colleagues locally and globally:

1. I’m continuing work with Nobuko Fujita on FARGO,

2. Laurie Freeman-Gibb, Nick Baker, and I were awarded a Sigma Theta Tau  / ATI Research Grant to conduct “a study of the integration, use, and evaluation of simulated patient scenario video clips within a synchronous online learning environment” (press release),

3. I have been working with Maarten de Laat and Bieke Schreurs at the Open Universiteit Netherlands on the “Network Awareness Tool” to develop interactive visualisations,

4. I have extended the visualisation tool that I developed for OUNL to work with SocialLearn, a project at the Open University UK led by Simon Buckingham Shum and Rebecca Ferguson, and

5. I have been appointed as a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Science at the University of Windsor where I am working with Dr. Phil Graniero and Bev Hamilton on some cutting-edge academic analytics.

So it’s been a busy and productive year so far!

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