Long day's journey into night

Today I ended up teaching two different seminar sessions, three hours on in depth inter- viewing and another two hours on participant observation about new media users. They both went well.

The students are from a new inter-disciplinary MA here in multimedia production and study. They come from engineering, fine arts, education and media studies, pretty disparate backgrounds with very different ideas about how you learn about the world in research, so I was not quite sure how it would go. But the differences were actually pretty stimulating and they were surprisingly interested in the topic, since they mostly plan on doing professional not academic work. I worked at making the ideas applicable to the real world and it seems to have worked well so far.

It made for a pretty intense day. My reward was a quite lovely sunset out the hotel window, just as I got home. I plan to go in search of interesting food down by the Rio Douro shortly.

Plus, I am thrilled that our daughter Julia has just managed to land a good job as a librarian at a public library in northern Austin and is about to graduate from the UT library school with an MA.

Life is good.