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Project Work, Page 12

Knowledge Transfer

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 a result of overestimating what I can do, but then doing enough of it to satisfy whatever my targets were, by the *hard* deadline. Continue reading →

Summer Term is here!

The summer term has started, and I have been welcomed back with an ever-increasing workload. A couple of pieces of coursework, a few labs for various modules, class tests for others, and revision beginning soon. It’s good to be back. No, really. The cricket trials were held for the University team over the last five days of the Easter holiday, and were great fun, despite some sore muscles and joints after a couple of five or six hour days. Continue reading →

Semester Review

Wow. It’s been a very long time since I sat down to do this (sorry, fans!). In the meantime I have had quite an eventful few months, starting with the week following my last blog, when my computer decided to die on me. After that, it wasn’t long until I departed for a ski trip with the university snow sports club. Continue reading →

New Years Resolutions…

Happy New Year to all! Nope guys, I am not dumbing down. I know it started a month earlier but I was busy with exams and forgot to wish you. And for me, it has just started as I have taken my last paper :) We had a wonderful party to start this year. The year 2007 has significantly changed my life. It has put me back on track as I successfully resumed my long-awaited study. So far, I am very happy with my course and my university choice. Continue reading →

MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games)

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 3D virtual worlds. The best known example of these systems is Second Life. Continue reading →

PhD Induction Sessions

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 PhD life. The middle of the month was consumed with preparing for and participating in the FESM Generic Skills Intensive Training course. Continue reading →

Comedy is the Key to Learning

Unfortunately we are human beings! Learning at ECS is really fun. I love the way teachers use humour to reverse the class attitude, especially when we are bogged down into some horrible details. A couple of weeks ago, our lecturer was talking about WSDL and WS-Addressing. The topic got so complex that I started looking for my coffee to keep my eyes open. Other fellows were looking at the wall-clock and even the door! I was confused with the irony of the topic. These (WSDL etc. Continue reading →

Time is Always Against Us

“Time is always against us”. By Morpheus, in one of my favourite movies - Matrix-Reloaded). The beauty of the quote is – you can easily replace “us” with “students” and still enjoy it ;) I would never be able to understand why we are given such a “short-time” to complete our coursework ( e.g. “just” two weeks to write one-page table, three weeks to prepare a 15-slides presentation and a month to read 20-pages standard specification). Continue reading →