Research group and activities for the year

Well, it has taken me a little while to get around to this, but the tenure file is in and now back to all the other things that need to be done.
By my calculations our active research group is now: Wendy, Nobuko, Hedieh, Seeta, Maureen, Julie, Gerald, Gloria, Joan–and, from other research groups, Kimberley and Nathan. From some preliminary discussion I was looking to have research meetings every other Wednesday at 1.00pm. I will be setting up Breeze accounts on the new server shortly. We have had some problems with the logins for students, so I will set up the accounts, the system will notify you of your access information and if you have trouble logging in you can reset your password at the login window.

Most of this group are doctoral students at various stages of program so that should make for good shared discussion around thesis related issues, and so part of each of our research meetings can focus on a couple of people presenting updates or getting feedback on things like coding schemes or study design and so on. In addition I think we should continue the shared reading of key articles that people find and want to discuss. We can also talk about conferences people might be interested in submitting papers to, writing projects and other academic activities.

This year I am planning to submit to CSSE and AERA conferences but not more than that so I can focus on developing new research studies related to GRAIL; a possible SSHRC collaboration with IKIT; a TVO partnership with documentary film makers and WRITING–a number of journal articles that are in the manuscript stage with various students in the group. I can talk about all these projects in more detail during the meetings.

Now that we have a new beta version of the GRAIL environment I want to develop a series of research studies starting out with some usability testing, so I need volunteers!
The developers are still finishing up some details, but I would like to also have my January class try it out. In the meantime it would be good to look at what other functionality would need to be there to really use it effectively.
I will be emailing shortly re details of the meetings and when they will start.