I’ve just come across a most interesting blog on Design. Innovation. Ethnography. Technology. Qualitative Research: MindSpace. Have a look!

In the next few weeks I have a quite busy schedule. On Thursday next week I’ll be giving a seminar at the Design school where I hope to initiate discussions concerning cross-disciplinary collaboration. I’m really excited to get a chance to present my linguistic research on conversational structures and communicative patterns to an audience of interaction designers, who might have (further) suggestions for practical applications of my results.

The week after I will present a paper together with my colleague Maria Lindgren at a local conference on university pedagogy, where we will discuss advantages and drawbacks of net-based learning, building on our experiences from our English courses. I will focus on social presence and real-time interaction, which is in line with what I’ll talk about later that week when I’ll be teaching a practical/theoretical course in HUMlab on different platforms for real-time interaction in distance education.

On top of this, I am also planning for my final observations. A lot to do, but it’s all very exciting!

There is still time to submit proposals for a conference here in Umeå on “Identity and Power in the Language Classroom”, co-organized by some colleagues at the Modern Languages Department. One of the suggested themes concerns the relationship between identity, language and medium, which should interest some of the readers of this blog. What a wonderful opportunity to visit Umeå and get a glimpse of the midnight sun (the conference is on June 11-12)! You better hurry, though – deadline for submission of abstracts is in two days… Read more here.