Arrival in Montpellier

On the night of 23rd/24th Feb we drove to Montpellier, taking 2 hour turns driving and sleeping. According to TomTom this is around a 9 hour drive, but this assumes that we will drive non-stop at somewhere near the 130kph limit on French motorways. We don’t. We find night driving both relaxing and economic. Mostly you are the only person on the road for miles, and you can hold a comfortable 100-110 kph without having to work at it. But this was quite a hard drive, at least till we were South of Orleans. The weather was foul, freezing and often quite thick fog. We had breakfast in the Vulcans (its over 1000m high in this area of the massif central) and lunch in the Aire beside the Milau bridge, and arrived at LIRMM for a 1500 meeting with Stefano. As so often, as we dropped down from the hills into the Mediterranean plain, the sun came out, and it was a pleasant 18 deg C in Montpellier.

At the time that I had left I had delivered some information to Madalina Croitoru at LIRMM (ex ECS PhD) who is working on a grant application with us. We had no had a hand-shake yet and needed re-assurance that she had everything she needed. Once done, we left the van and headed down into town on our Bromptons (folding bikes) to find our home for the next few months.

Our arrival was not auspicious. We have found the place quite easily – the joys of Google maps. But it is getting dark and we have to find keys that have been carefully concealed. And there is something going on in the road – there is rather seedy looking man keeping a watch on the house opposite – I think there is a drug deal going on: he is either keeping an eye out for the police or he is a policeman – can’t tell which – but it makes extracting keys from hiding places difficult. And now I climb three stories up an ancient steep stone spiral staircase in the near dark to reach our flat (leaving Su to guard the bikes) and to dump the bike bags and find the key sets that have been left for us. Then I return down and Su goes up to deliver her bike bag and to bring back the bike lock which I have accidentally taken up. And in pulling it out of the bike bag she also pulls out a bottle of 2002 Premier Cru Volnay which we had brought as a gift for Stefano. So the first thing we have to do in our new flat is to work out how to clean up £30 worth of precious wine and glass of the white tiled floor and stairs.

We now have an hour left to find out our way round the flat and to bike up the hill for supper with Stefano and his wife Gianna. It is that most difficult of times in a new place – finding where the light switches are and where things are kept and where we are supposed to keep the bikes – and rather disappointingly the kitchen is in a bit of a mess. And of course no one has been in the flat for a few weeks and it is cold and rather musty at night.

We found our way to Stefano’s house OK (the wonder of Google maps) and had a lovely Italian meal – and we did still have a gift of a bottle of Laphroaig whisky as a gift which had not been broken!

On the way back the handlebar mount for my iPhone broke and deposited my iPhone on the floor – comprehensively breaking it. Upsetting. And that night we are cold – we have not yet worked out how to turn on any heating – and any attempt to turn on the hot water seems to throw the main trip switch.

But it gets better!

Preparation to leave on Sabbatical

Preparation for a sabbatical would seem simple enough. Find a place that will host you; find somewhere to live; find someone to rent your place when we are away.

Of course, once you get going, the devil’s in the detail. LIRMM were great. Stefano organised us as visiting academics, put us in contact with some people that led to us getting a third floor flat right in the historic centre of Montpellier, and he organised for us to keep our van at LIRMM. (Montpellier centre is a wonderfully traffic free zone).

Getting someone to stay at our place was a bit more stressful. The house is in a fine state (we had major works last year) but we have a cat – or to be more accurate, a cat has the house. When we planned the sabbatical we had not really expected Cat to still be around – he was a well mature adult when we moved into his house 11 years ago. He must be around 18 years old now, and although he is getting quite arthritic, he shows no sign of leaving us yet – especially since we installed his under floor heating and sunroom. So whoever takes the house also takes Cat. And there is the matter of our cleaner, Julia. When you have a good cleaner you don’t want to lose them – I’d rather pay her while I’m away and know the house is looked after well.

Finding someone to accept these conditions, and our rather unusual home was not so easy. We had hoped to let the house to a visiting academic on a six month sabbatical in Southampton. But the university accommodation service were next to useless. As we got to Christmas we got nervous, and following a personal recommendation from a friend we approached Safelets in Southampton. They were excellent, and got everything sorted in no time, and after a couple of weeks a couple of Finns walked through the door, smiled and said “this is the house” at the same time as we said “these are the people”. We signed on the spot, and had them round to dinner. I hope they are very happy (and careful!) with our house. Actually they are visiting academics, and this could all have been done by the university accommodation service if they had shown the slightest motivation!

I have not yet mentioned the matter of the broken foot. Last winter I had a serious accident falling off my bike (wrong kind of leaves) and broke my leg and my ankle and did untold damage. Last summer I gave myself a big programme of exercise and physiotherapy in order to get fit again (the prognosis was to recover 80% of the facility – I was keen to do better – and thought maybe I had got to 90% recovery?). But one day as I was cleaning out the camper ready for its trip to France I stepped out and turned my ankle in what for most people would be a minor issue. But I heard a snap – and thought “there goes another ligament”. After much cursing and swearing and application of ice and arnica I was persuaded to go to the hospital for a check up. I had broken my meta-tarsal. It would appear that my muscles have not recovered enough elasticity – so when I turned the ankle they yanked the chunk of bone they were attached to straight off ☹.

I managed to persuade the people in casualty not to put me in a Back-Slab and to let me wear my trusted Beckham Boot (Aircast) – but when I went to see the specialist two weeks later they persuaded me to go into a cast (otherwise it would possibly not mend at all). The trouble is that at this moment it was three weeks until we were due to leave for France and they wanted me in a cast for 4 more weeks. They agreed to take the cast of a week early. But in the meantime I had the job of packing our house into boxes on my own while wearing a plaster cast.

A few words on why I was packing on my own. The main reason was that Su had the examinations from a class of 150 students to mark before we could go. The other reason was that Su is psychologically incapable of packing; I think it reminds her of a childhood of constantly packing to move somewhere else (an army family). So many thanks to Jake and Tom who did enough of the heavy work to enable me to leave the house in a good state. Funnily enough, when it came to getting the garden in a fit state Su was quite capable, and managed to find lots of time to do this. We filled a skip with stuff mostly left over from the builders last year.

There were so many other things to do. The camper needed a new fridge, a service, its water tank cleaning, new tyres, etc. (and all this time I couldn’t drive as I had a plaster cast). All those little jobs that need doing in the house now actually have to be done. And people at work have to believe that I am actually not going to keep turning up to a couple of meetings every day!. And the wine club needs sorting, and the house need insuring, and the gas needs testing and an energy audit must be done on the house and I need to make sure that I have a double supply of my prescription medicine before I leave and I need to get someone to mend the wall and put the fence back up (thanks Jerry!) and damn – I have a PhD to read and report on, an EU application in preparation, a consultancy to finish, a paper deadline for a journal submission all to do this week we are due to leave our house.

On Monday 21st Feb the hospital took my cast off and pronounced me fit to drive. On Tuesday Su packed. On Wednesday Su went off with her bike to a meeting in London, leaving me and Julia to clean the house (actually still packing the kitchen into boxes) while a rather taught lipped woman attempted to make an inventory of the contents.

I left Soton at on Wed 23rd Feb 1630 (van mileage 51120) and headed into the rain and mist and M25 rush-hour to Dover. At this stage I had not eaten anything all day and had drunk one coffee for early breakfast. I made it to Dover and met a wet and cold Su at 1930. We caught the 2030 ferry, and by time we had adjusted to CET and re-fuelled at Auchun in Calais, it was midnight.

Motivations for My Sabbatical

I can’t remember exactly what it says on my sabbatical application, but as far as I am concerned, the objectives are Work, Rest and Play.

Work:

1. There are a few papers I really want to find the time to write. I don’t often get the chance to do first authored papers.
2. I’d like to develop a new key-note talk.
3. I badly need to get more involved in the European TEL community, and to get some EU grants. These need not be framework grants – there are many other channels – but I need time to develop one or two good applications, and friends who are more experienced.
4. At the same time both Su and I are very much interested in the developing Web Science area – and its curriculum. Stefano’s group are keen to become involved and lead the way for France. So a good outcome will be some shared teaching and curriculum development in addition to the research.

Of course, while I am doing this I will not be able to ignore Southampton entirely – I still have the Southampton Learning Environment to be concerned about, two JISC projects that need to be nurtured, and two PhD students (I had tried to get the timing right so that all my PhD students would have finished or be writing up – but things are never that perfect!).

Rest:
I have worked my ass off since around 1992 when Microcosm first started taking off, and have never stopped since. I have lived on adrenaline for too long, and although I am pleased with what I have achieved, in the last couple of years I have started to notice that in my latter 50’s I can’t do what I could do before: I can’t work right through the night and then go and teach in the morning any more – and I can’t answer the quantity of email I get every day. Consequently I go to bed every night feeling guilty about what I have failed to do. This sabbatical will be a chance for me to stand back from this, reflect on what I can reasonably do (and how to do it well) and what I can’t do (and how to stop doing it!). Of course, a period of absence from the university is always a good way of getting things to work without you.

Play:
Su and I have always loved France. It has been our main destination for our camping van holidays. We love the weather, we love the food, we love the wine, we love the open spaces and we rather admire the people for their national independence, principles and self respect. (How come France is not falling to bits financially? People have been saying for *years* that they cannot go on the way they do – but they are still doing it).

So on this sabbatical I want to learn French (my French has never got past asking directions and ordering a meal). And I want to get a feel for what it is like to actually live in a Mediterranean city. And I want to explore parts of the country that are too crowded and too hot when I normally visit the area in my summer holiday.

Intro to Hugh Davis's Sabbatical Blog

I have decided to Blog my sabbatical. I’ve never really had time to Blog before – but have always valued the things I learn from those that do.

I don’t care if anyone reads this – I’m doing it for me – but one thing I have learned in the last ten years is the joy of sharing in the experience (both professional and informal) of friends and colleagues who blog and tweet, so maybe someone will have a quiet laugh?

As well as time, another reason I have not blogged before is some lack of confidence. I have been “old school” in believing that anything written has to be carefully thought through, immaculately phrased and meticulously evidenced. This Blog will not be like that.

So the background: sometime last year, our Head of School awarded Su and I a fully paid sabbatical – meaning that we would be free of teaching and admin duties for the second semester in academic year 2010/11, so we could go somewhere else to do our research. Along with our colleague Thanassis Tiropanis, we had for some time been developing relationships with Stefano Cerri’s group at LIRMM (University of Montpellier 2), and this was our opportunity.

We are away from the start of February until the end of September. We have a shared office at LIRMM and a 3^rd/4^th/5^th floor apartment in a 14th (?) century stone building in the middle of the true historic centre of Montpellier with a roof terrace overlooking the town and Pic St Loup and the Languedoc. Its traffic free and we have a small space to fold our Brompton bikes in the entrance to the building.

For Su and I this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to experience and to get to really know the area we holiday in, to get to know colleagues much better and develop new working collaborations. And of course the time and space will give us exciting new opportunities that we don't even know yet.

Who Can See What?

One of the projects I lead at Southampton is the EdSpace project which is funded by JISC under the institutional exemplars programme. We are producing an institutional share for educational resources. (See edshare.soton.ac.uk)

As we develop our educational share we are inevitably raising interesting issues about who should be able to see the information that has been shared?

The technology allows the user who deposits an item for sharing to choose whether they wish to make the shared item to be visible to:

1. Only themselves
   
2. Only people in their School
   
3. Only people in the University of Southampton
   
4. Anyone in the World

(There is also an option to allow a named list of users)

The first set of issues then centres around the question of which of the above options should we encourage people to choose, e.g. by setting it as the default selection. The search engines such as Google will be able to see all resources shared to the world, and we can expect a significant increase in the number of people who download and view such resources.

The emerging political correctness of “Open Content” suggests that generally educators should wish to make their content (designed for students in a privileged UK University) available to all, especially the less privileged. Also there are possible knock on effects in terms of the publicity and esteem that we might gain from being seen to have a wealth of high quality teaching resources. And if a culture of open sharing were to emerge we might hope for a reduction in the workload in preparing some courses and a corresponding increase in the quality of materials we exposed to our students.

On the other hand the university management is worried about copyright and IPR. Will we get into a lot of trouble if our resources are seen to include significant amount of material that is lifted from elsewhere? They want EdShare users to jump through the hoops before they are allowed to deposit an item. The EdShare team is trying to resist this sort of regulation, as it will kill enthusiasm to use the system; we would rather ask users to apply a reasonable risk analysis (Where did you copy this material from? Was it Disney, in which case expect to be aggressively sued, or was it from another academic’s openly available website, which you have cited?). We believe that such a sensible approach, coupled with a clearly articulated “take-down” policy, for the case where any outsider complains of copyright or IPR infringement, should keep us out of any serious trouble.

But perhaps surprisingly, it is the academics themselves who are often the most reluctant to share openly. While they are happy that other people share with them, when it comes to sharing their own materials we see all sorts of excuses:

• “It isn’t finished yet”. Well how come they have been using it with their class for the last three years? If it’s good enough for them why would it not be good enough for me?
• “Its my IPR”. Yes – that’s fine – they can use creative commons – and they can still publish it in a book if they want.
• If someone re-used my material in an inappropriate way it would make me look foolish”. Yes. So what? Never publish anything?

Actually I think a lot of these excuses are a cover for insecurity about the content. Is the material original or derivative? Does it contain diagrams scanned from a text book? Will my peers in other universities sneer at my offerings?

Developing a culture of sharing of educational resources is going to be hard. There are two things I want from Santa this Christmas.

1. A clear and simple policy on the legitimate re-use of teaching materials in not-for-profit on-line learning materials, which would be the equivalent of the Copyright Licensing Agency Higher Education licence.
   
2. I want some reward to give to staff who do share. I’m not quite sure what form this reward should take? Direct financial reward is of course always welcome, but often academic motivation comes from other drivers such as increased esteem. Perhaps we should consider the teaching equivalent of research metrics, where a lecturer might point at the external downloads and comments on their teaching resources as one measure of the quality of their teaching.