I’ve been in Denmark for about five months now. Ravi is right, it does take about six months in a new country before you feel settled in. Of course, it would have helped to have been able to stay in the same faculty housing the whole time, but we’ve moved twice since we arrived, first to another temporary CBS faculty apartment and then to our current “professionally-appointed” flat owned by a property management firm recommended by our colleague Michelle. Now that we’re not constantly apartment hunting, packing and unpacking, I feel a bit more relaxed and better able to focus on the research at hand.
Still, being an academic, especially an academic parent in a foreign country, is not easy. I’ve been buried under deadlines of various sorts, but managed in the last week or two to…
- send off a co-authored proceeding for the PALE workshop at UMAP to press
- finish edits on a co-authored manuscript for journal submission
- help my MA student hand in the final draft of his thesis project for defense
- collect interview data from Danish teachers participating in the NEXT-TELL project
- run a design workshop introducing repertory grids with the said teachers
- start drafting up the skeleton of the design paper that I’m writing with some colleagues at CBS
- upload my CSCL 2011 Early Career Workshop proposal to the Moodle site to introduce myself to the other participants
- get my Toronto home cleaned, extra keys cut, etc. in preparation for renters (a nice academic family) that we found through Sabbatical Homes
- etc. etc. etc.
Although some aspects of research seem much easier after defending my dissertation, the amount of work and responsibilities have increased dramatically in my postdoc. I enjoy it, though. I’m really engaged with the work that I do, particularly on design in design-based research and the repertory grid technique that we are using to elicit conceptual understandings from teachers about formative assessment and ICT use. More on that in a future post.
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