Searching for funding for teaching research.

I've been looking for a small fund to pay to pilot a small teaching centered research project. It's harder than I thought.

It looks like both Joint Information Systems Commiteee (JISC) and the higher education academy only fund what they ask for. It's interesting how funding bodies have changed over the years. The EPSRC have a open mode when you can apply any time any where.  Clearly JISC/HEA decided to try and 'control' research by coming up with what they want promote and only funding that. Its one of those short term gains long term failure things.

Spoke to Information & Computer Sciences Higher education academy centre in Ulster. They told me they are getting shut down due to government cuts and have stopped doing things until they hear if they survive the cull. They moved the entire funding cycle up to spend the money before it got taken away from them.

They told me that there isn't really another body to apply to.

My life is all set backs at the moment.

I guess I have to wait until I see thing go by o nthe JISC conveyer belt.

Chi papers in

OK my primary paper choked ( on the stats ) but I ended up making a good writing contribution to another and it got in on time.

Well Chi is a lottery but as with most lotteries if you don't play you can't win. I'm now back to planning my next series of studies. Oddly with ShareIT gone I feel it strangely liberating.

Given the grant famine we are about to enter I'm thinking about how to take advantage of our current generation of hardware to make some more results.

CardSorting

Interesting article about card sorting - I think the thing that most struck me was that there was no common software both to do the test but also to analyse the results.

Naturally all the info about how to look at the results ( merge all the answers together) was also interesting.

back to Chi-panic

Kids In Space

Daniel Fitton from Lancashire

Worked on Hermes Photo display stuff at Lancaster

http://eprints.comp.lancs.ac.uk/1058/1/p47-cheverst.pdf
http://eprints.comp.lancs.ac.uk/742/2/mhci_short_n.pdf
http://eprints.comp.lancs.ac.uk/742/2/mhci_short_n.pdf

Now lecture at University of Central Lancashire - ChiCI child computer interaction group.

Alston Observatory -
25 children with Wii motes in Planetarium -
educational multi-user games.
how to interact.
control mapping.

working with kids developed idears for 4 games which he went away and developed 2 Wii games, using 4 pads. Then evaluated - used smilies + would you play it again.

Preferred faster buttons to slower gestures

Kids really wanted something to shoot at.
finding what they where controlling was problematic
Hard to develop gestures ( sounds like needs some kind of tool kit to me ).

GOT Microsoft Surface

Game with pipes leaking

Surface hard to move around - initally gender in-balance for collaboration. Did boys get board more quickly or just less coordinated.

Children  liked chess games on the surface.

what is it about the flatness that seems to afford 'thinking' or board games... 

Children

Statistical frustration

I have some statistical work to do at the moment for the CHI paper and I am underwhelmed by the choice of software. SPSS/PAWS is just terribly buggy - it can't even stay open for a few minutes or open a file, really pathetic.
Datadesk - which has a nice interface won't open a text file ( its still OS9 compatible ) - I guess it hasn't caught up with OSX yet.
Excel - has problems processing so much data ( very slow) I'm not sure I trust it.
there is R - which goes back to the command- line ( ugh!)

There are some free apps which don't let you explore the data.
I could just program stuff in JAVA with a lib from apache.

Not exactly a great set of choices.

I really want Statview 512.

Even blogger is not working correctly.

ipod nanno

Hmm - very cool. How long before people start turning them into jewellery and wristwatches?

Back to work - huge amount of marking and admin just when I want to be writing CHI paper.