Thursday, February 21, 2008

Week Weak Wheeeek

This week has been one of the most intense I have experienced for a long time. The amount of work I have had to do (and have managed to do) has been large. I am surprised by my ability to deal with it as while my body feels like it is filled with sandpaper and my brain is a bloody welt inside my skull (I am so tired) I don't feel the stress that used to accompany such avalanches of tasks. Lets review shall we:

Monday. Visit to HUMlab by Kempe Foundation. I attended while preparing conference abstract at the same time. Children sick at home so duties divided between partner and myself. I work morning and then with children after lunch. HOWEVER, I have a conference meeting in Second Life at 13:00 so I return home in time to make lunch and then log into SL. While preparing for the presentation I have to give in SL I also so a jigsaw puzzle with my youngest son ( I end up doing the jigsaw 5 times). The SL meeting is part of a research project that is described here. My contribution to the meeting goes very badly as my voice chat is not working. At one stage I try to speak to those gathered in SL though a mobile phone one of the moderators holds next to his microphone; nobody understands what I am saying. I eventually get to present some of my research via text chat. The next few hours after the conference is spent with the children and then after dinner I resume working on the wiki I am using for the culture studies course I am teaching this term. The class has their first meeting on Wednesday but i do not start teaching until March. I go to bed around 1am.

Tuesday. Up at 7am to take eldest child to school. No appointments for the day which I spend in my office writing. I mange almost 2 pages of thesis text, which is a lot but the first I have written for almost a week. Meeting in HUMlab in the afternoon where we discuss new research ideas. The evening is spent working on the culture studies wiki. Bed around midnight

Wednesday. Staff meeting at 8:30 after getting son to school. Meeting goes till 10am when I meet the class I will be teaching cultures of the Commonwealth with. Today is the deadline for a pedagogy project outline for a course I am doing (meets Friday) so I work on that. At 1pm I have a dental appointment which goes until 3pm- enough time to return to my office to gather my work materials for the evening before collecting my son from school. Once again the evening is spent working, this time on on the pedagogy project which I submit (3 pages with notes and bibliography) at 9pm online. The spend time working on the Association for Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference abstract which is due Friday.

Thursday. After the usual early start I spend two hours in HUMlab recording a set of instructions for part of the Qviz project website (actually fun but time consuming). While doing this I prepare another power point slide for a presentation in the video conferencing program Marratech which be run at 1pm today as part of the same research project that the SL session was. I also have to answer a set of questions about the session on Monday, as it went so badly I have no idea what happened. I spend the two hours between the Qviz session and lunch preparing for the research session. The video conference goes from 1pm till 3pm. I then rush to pick up my son as my partner has yoga class on Thursday. Upon arriving home there is no class today (sore back) so I can work on the AoIR abstract. I am to attend the open house at my son's school at 6pm (he is singing) so I work on AoIR until five and then cook dinner before going to the open house. Return at 8pm, put oldest boy to bed (bath, teeth, story) and then finish the AoIR abstract: Submitted and waiting (YYIPPPEEE). The I turn to the pedagogy course tomorrow; I have to give an 8 minute video presentation and have read about 30 pages of text. I do a quick visually orientated power point, take some preparatory notes and speed read the texts. It is not 11:40 and I have to get up in 7 hours and do it all again; lectures from 8:30-16:00,a presentation and a video conference during my lunch break........

I am really surprised I actually feel good, just so bloody tired.

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