Some of the nice people who invited me to Ljubljana to do my thing. Whatever the speaker has said, Polona (on the right), Lyn, and the gentleman whose name I can’t remember, certainly think it was funny. So that’s it for my brief time in Slovenia — it looked very pretty, but becomes just another place that I wish I’d had more time to spend in.
My third and last full day at Purdue. With both the previous pictures having been taken indoors I thought it was time to get out into the continuing sunshine. This is an old campus but very few of the buildings on it are particularly old, it seems to have been completely rebuilt: the bell tower looks old but was only constructed in the 1990s. It’s been a good trip to the US in various ways but I am very tired and now it’s time to go home.
Another campus to add to the list — Purdue University in Indiana, the people who were good enough to invite me to the USA in the first place on this trip. This place is especially known for its programmes in aviation and spaceflight — Neil Armstrong studied here (which is a cool alumnus to have) — and engineering, hence the nickname of its football team, the Boilermakers. This mural in the campus’s new learning center, open only a week, reflects this. It was a day where I was too busy to particularly get around to taking many photos, so this was a rush job I know, but there’s one thing I do like about it, which is the apparent anachronism of the guy standing on the left of the big picture: is that a cellphone in his pocket? Sure looks like one. (Actually it’s a slide rule, apparently.)
Had I been doing this blog back in 2005 and 2006 you would have seen a whole bunch of photos of this place. I came at that time for a research trip, and incidentally on 5th July 2005 featured on the sports page of the local daily newspaper (this is true, and I can prove it…). I enjoyed it enough to feel that it was worth coming back for these few days between seeing the eclipse and going to do the work I have actually come to the US to do, which starts on Monday. As with many US university campuses — it’s an impressive place, a real monumental seat of learning. This building is the Foellinger Auditorium, viewed with a zoom down the length of the Main Quad.
I’m sure this picture will simultaneously warm the hearts of traditionalists and chill those who believe in progress in educational technology, but the speaker here was not using the blackboard, I can assure you. Or, indeed, Blackboard. A second monochrome shot in two days but the white balance of the original was blown and this made it look a whole lot better (as is often the case).
Most of the university campuses featured on this blog — and there have been a good many over the last five and a bit years, at least 20 I make it — have plenty of nice, green space. But the one on which I spend the most time, Manchester, has hardly any, it is the most urbanised, built-up campus I can think of. So it’s nice to picture some of its very rare green space on another very pleasant day. Even if this shot isn’t ‘green’ in the slightest. (It looked better in monochrome.)
Seeing as these are places I hang out in professionally it is unsurprising that a lot of university campuses have made it onto the blog in some form or another: over 20 by now. Here’s another one, University College London, to where I travelled today to attend this seminar on digital literacy. With big dice, used for an audience participation game of snakes and ladders, if you really want to know.
It’s day 1,750 of the blog, three-quarters of the way to my second thousand pictures. If I keep going — and I may as well — I’ll hit that milestone on 14th February 2017.
AUB was founded in the 1860s and is probably the most prestigious university in the whole region. It has a spectacularly beautiful campus, perched on a wooded hill with views of the Mediterranean (yesterday’s picture was taken not five minutes’ walk from this one). They have been gracious enough to invite me to spend this short but enjoyable time in Beirut. Here are some of the delegates from the MDLAB conference which I’ve been speaking at, waiting for our tour of the campus. We are standing under College Hall, which was bombed in the Lebanese civil war, but restored in around 2001.
Feel like I should feature on here some of the nice people at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) who have set up this academic visit of mine and are doing their best to make me feel at home. This is Christine, speaking at today’s launch of the HERN (Higher Education Research Network), in the atrium of one of their impressive new buildings (in fact, on the floor above the Digital Barrier Reef which featured back in early February). There are actually a couple of hundred people in this room at this point, but I like the sense of emptiness in the shot.
Incidentally, I think the following universities have featured on this blog at some point, in no particular order: Manchester, QUT, Charles Sturt, Helsinki, Otago, Alabama, Leeds, Birmingham City, Bergen, Bergen University College (these are two different institutions) and the Academy of National Economy in Moscow. The nicest campus? Er…. probably Alabama.
All the students arrive all at once, and it’s both the most hectic time of the year as well as the most optimistic, in some ways. Everyone’s fresh, we meet people for the first time and learn about their hopes and aspirations. Scary time too, for them at least. Hence the ‘Purple People’ who have dotted themselves around the campus, and they’re being used, as you see here.
Significant academic year for me too. I am on sabbatical in the second semester and from mid-December to late August will not be in Manchester at all. January – June I will be in Australia. Looking forward to it…
