University of Southampton

I’m in Trento, Italy for the second conference of my academic career: UMAP (User Modelling And Personalisation) 2009. The first was back in November at DIGITEL 2008, in Banff, Canada, but someone convinced me not to take my laptop and typing a blog entry on my phone was too much hard work!! Conferences are an [...]

InterFace 2009 One of the things that has been keeping me busy recently is being on the organising committee of a conference: InterFace 2009. My friend Leif (who I met on a training course way back at the start of my PhD) is doing a PhD in ECS department, but with a co-supervisor in Archaeology, [...]

There was a long period over the summer where I didn’t write a blog entry, and it all stems from what I spoke about in my June entry: my 9-month report! What happened was that I worked fairly heavily on it during June to get it completed for the end of the month. During this [...]

Lots has been going on. I will tell you about it due course! However, my topic today is planning, organisation and motivation. The plan is mostly to share some resources that I have found. I have a problem with planning. I am really good at making plans, but have difficulty sticking to them. Maybe it’s [...]

If I have any ‘regular’ readers (though the only feedback is from my dad!), then I must apologise for my lack of activity on this blog in recent months. June is the time for the first piece of assessment, of sorts, in my PhD, so I have been building up to and working on this. [...]

Thus far I have been concentrating on looking at existing uses of video games in education, but I have not investigated virtual worlds as much. There is some research looking at using MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), and their predecessors, MUDs and MOOs, in education, but less so in the area of non-game [...]

My next two monthly reports November was a month of more training. This started with the ECS Induction sessions which introduced us to reading groups, gave us the chance to practice making a conference poster and panel sessions with existing PhD students and with PhD supervisors, allowing us to interrogate people with varied perspectives on [...]

One of the interesting new things that has been introduced to ECS postgraduate life this year is an element of personal development planning and regular reflection. These are techniques and processes recommended in educational literature and also government teaching strategy. Having read about these ideas during my Individual Research Project last year, I felt I [...]

I am writing this post now because next Tuesday is the first day (of many!) that the UCAS students come to visit ECS to be convinced that Southampton is the best place for them to come to study. The process of applying to university generally involves submitting a form to an organisation called UCAS. On [...]

SOUTHAMPTON, 24th October 2007 – Computer Scientist discovers how to speak to press and avoid a media fiasco! Joyce Lewis, in association with the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths (FESM), took over the brand new lecture theatre in Building 32 to host a Media Training workshop. This wonderful event combined audience-led activities by two experienced [...]