Mike Oren.com

I've spoken previously about struggling to find balance simply in terms of time, commitments, academic pursuits, etc. However, now that my class started (so far there have been two meetings of the class) and the REU students are here, I've begun to find new struggles for balance. With the class, I'm struggling to keep things interesting (for me and the class), teaching to where I see the 'high bar' at, while at the same time trying to make sure everybody has the requisite knowledge to do well on the projects. I feel like I've been failing this struggle so far, not a complete failure but I don't feel like I've been doing at well at it as I'd like. I am really enjoying the involvement of the off-campus students with the class, although finding the best way to keep them involved without distracting me (or the on-campus students) is still a work-in-progress.

With the REU students the struggle is slightly different, I see my top priority with the REU student as making sure they feel like they can speak openly and honestly around me. That way, if they have issues with their graduate student mentors, a faculty member, or have any feedback about the program I can try to help them resolve it. To do that, I feel like I need to establish more of a relaxed rapport around them--especially since I think a big part of the REU program should be about treating the students as essentially equal to an entering graduate student (as adults capable of doing independent resarch as part of a team). At the same time, I am responsible for teaching certain classes and going over more administrative things with them that puts a power distance that I see as somewhat conflicting. With the classes I teach them, the struggle for finding the right balance between getting certain content across while keeping things interesting (for me and the students) is somewhat of a struggle as well--although with this first one part of that was I threw things together last minute (which is always a bad idea--but in this case I didn't have many alternatives since I wasn't sure how much of what I wanted to talk about would be discussed during the morning session by the guest speakers).

So I'll have to work on that this summer. In other 'news', I saw Pixar's Up today--it was a really enjoyable movie and had one of the best montage sequences I've seen in a long time (make fun of montages all you want, but the one in Up was very touching). I'm looking forward to spending a week in California in July when I go down for the HCI International conference and get to meet up with my friend Mariya.

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.