Mike Oren.com

The semester ended about two weeks ago for me--the last week of the semester was pretty frantically busy but the semester ended up fine (A's in everything, kept my sanity, etc.) I really enjoyed some of the final papers I ended up with, so it was overall a rewarding semester class-wise. I had some good things come out research-wise but no real substantial papers (so far) out of the work done this past semester. One snag I've run into is that tagging up the videos has been taking me considerably longer than I had anticipated--I also need to find (at LEAST) one other rater in order to calculate interrater reliability to ensure my tags are appropriately empirical. Having gotten used to slightly more rapid production of results, the slowdown is slightly frustrating since there are other studies I want to run (directly related to my overall research agenda and at least one more directly tied to my funding). But sometimes that's just the way research is, I think I have been lucky so far so I guess it's time I paid the proper price--and I'm still pretty excited about how the results are looking so far and the overall thrust of things.

I've also been working on final preparations for HCI 596 (starts on Thursday)--on-campus enrollment is a bit lower than I had hoped for, but I know of a few people who were interested in sitting in on a few lectures so hopefully discussions will still work alright. The off-campus enrollment was about what I expected, so that's good. I'm trying to put a lot of different things into the course and I'm slightly worried some things might still be overreaching despite some trimming down I did of course content/project expectations. We'll see how it all goes though, I have some plans on how I can adjust things if too much is going on--I do want to make sure I address everything the students are saying they hope to get out of the course though. Also worth thinking about is this post on how learning is "caught not taught".

I also met up with some old friends this past weekend, that was a fun experience. Lots of alsos in this post, but another one is that I got fitted for a tux on Sunday (I'm a groomsman in a friends wedding coming up in June)--it's the first wedding of a friend I'm going to, so I think it'll be fun.