We had the first decent snowfall of the season last night. Because it started snowing as the sun was going down, I did not realize how much snow there was until this morning. When we went outside, it was an exciting surprise to find enough snow for a quick snow-fight before we all headed off for school and work. It’s very beautiful and lots of fun, but cold! My coat is not warm enough for this weather, so I need to keep moving around. The ground is slippery too; slick with ice in places. Cars were skidding on the slope from the bridge up to the church.

Despite the unusual weather, the office feels normal again today, with the usual background morning coffee chatter. It’s a nice change from the ‘I Am Legend’ atmosphere of last week. It’s not motivating to come in to work and sit completely alone.

My main task for this week is to continue with thesis revisions. As well as that, I will give some thought to the three-day teaching course I’m to take next week and follow up on some student contact. But the most important thing is to keep that darn thesis moving.

It’s the week between Christmas and New Year. Most of the office is away on holiday, so it’s very quiet today. We missed out on a white Christmas (beyond a few fitful flakes), but the weather seems to turned colder over the last couple of days. It would be nice to get some snow sometime in the coming week.

I took a couple of days off last week, but today I’m back at my desk. There’s really only one job for me to concentrate on; my thesis revisions. I’m going to focus my efforts towards presenting something at my research group meeting next Monday. Having small doable short-term goal is probably a good way in to this big scary task.

I’m teaching in the Danish university system, where there is a rather confusing 7-point grading scale (though not as confusing as the previous 13-point scale). The seven possible grades are (from lowest to highest) -3, 00, 02, 4, 7, 10 and 12. One could think of these as analogues to the Australian scale (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) or American (Fx, F, E, D, C, B, A) …but not quite.

Each grade has a description for the level of work required to achieve that grade. Reading these descriptions gives a better idea of what the various grades mean in terms of the quality of the work.

-3 is given for a presentation that is unacceptable in all respects.

00 is given for a presentation not meeting the minimum requirements for acceptance.

02 is given for a presentation meeting only the minimum requirements for acceptance.

4 is given for a fair presentation that demonstrates some command of the relevant material but containing some major weaknesses.

7 is given for a good presentation that demonstrates good command of the relevant material but containing some weaknesses.

10 is given for a very good presentation that demonstrates a high level of command of most aspects of the relevant material and containing only minor weaknesses.

12 is given for an excellent presentation that demonstrates a high level of command of all aspects of the relevant material and containing no or only few minor weaknesses.

A still grey day today. Across the water, workmen are slowly moving. Seemingly, their work requires a boat, a front-end loader and a flat-deck truck. I have no idea what they are doing.

Its a busy week for the students of User Experience Design; Their final week. There’s an exhibition today (Tuesday), an exam on Thursday and on Friday we will hold a course reflection session. Everyone has remained focused over the last week, so they simply need to put in a final effort now to gather all the threads of their project into a coherent story.

The purpose of the reflection session on Friday is to look back at what we did in the course, highlight the things that worked well, and suggest changes that we could make to the course for next year. I hope for a positive and constructive dialog with the students.

Otherwise, work continues in other areas:

• On Monday, Wendy and I met to hash out a rough structure for an edited volume of research papers that are emerging from the SPIRE centre.
• On Wednesday, Trine, Carsten and I will meet with Lars Bo and other representatives from FOCON to discuss progress on a Delphi Survey we are running as part of the Tracker project.
• Today, I’ll set up a wordpress blog for the SPIRE centre so we can start writing about who we are.
• …and the thesis revisions.

It was snowing here last week. The days are getting shorter and darker. There seems less time in each day than the one before.

Last week, on Friday we went to visit Thomas at Bagsværd Sø. The students put a lot of work in to making sure that their prototypes all worked and could be tested with Thomas and the rowers. After an intensive week like that, the tendency is sometimes to relax and recover a bit. I hope the students don’t do this, because next week is the final week for the course and there simply isn’t time to rest right now. What I need to help them do this week is very quickly transform their experiences and feedback from the visit into an improvement on their design that they can implement in time for next week’s exhibition and exam.

Now that User Experience Design is (like the year) drawing to a close, other projects are rumbling and grumbling back to life. The edited volume with Wendy needs to be given an initial shape, and the Delphi survey with Trine and Carsten (and soon Tamim) requires a push through to completion. And somewhere deep down (growling, howling) is the thesis. It needs to be brought back to an everyday-work-routine.