I’ve been back at work after my summer vacation for about a month now, so I guess it’s about time I got back into blogging as well. Not that there’s a whole lot of news – I’m still doing the vast majority of my work in my living room and only visiting the campus sporadically. Frankly, I would have expected things to be closer to normal by now, but perhaps we first need to figure out what is normal anyway (hat tip to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). The university’s playing it safe and recommending not just working remotely but also wearing a mask now, if you’re going to come to the campus and do anything other than sit in your office. My closest colleagues and I are doing our best to keep the social group tight: constant WhatsApp chatter, weekly lunches and virtual coffee mornings, the occasional face-to-face meeting. 

Naturally working remotely means that we’ll also be teaching remotely, which affects me since we’re running our Towards Data Mining course in period 1. While I was in Ireland, my lecture – a hodgepodge of ethics, data security and data management topics – was handled by a colleague, but when I came back this year I took over from her again. The aforementioned colleague also recorded my part of the series of lecture videos used in lieu of live lectures when we ran the course in the spring term, so I was there basically just to mark exercise reports and exam answers. In the autumn term we were planning to lecture the course the traditional way, but now that that’s not an option, we’re going to present the lectures on Zoom instead. 

I’ve said before that I’m not overly keen on lecturing, and I’m not at all sure if doing it online will make things better or worse. On the one hand, I suppose it should be easier to stay relaxed when I can do the lecture from the comfort of my home, but on the other hand, I think it may feel somewhat unnatural to be addressing an audience while essentially talking to myself, unable to gauge if the students are paying any attention to what I’m saying. Online meetings I’ve grown used to, but those are much more interactive and therefore not really the same thing. It doesn’t exactly help that I haven’t given that lecture in three years, so that would add to my nervousness even if nothing had changed in the meantime. 

The new AI ethics course has taken a step forward, a formal proposal for a pilot run next spring has been prepared and submitted to the Faculty. With the two courses plus a bunch of Master’s theses to supervise, I feel like my job has recently been more about teaching than about research. Not that I mind, really – it’s all meaningful work, and all part of why I’ve always held universities in very high esteem as places devoted to the creation, curation and distribution of the best of human knowledge. Obviously teaching and research require substantially different skill sets and therefore being good at one does not imply being good at the other, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to treat these core functions of a university as if they are two completely separate domains rather than two sides of the same coin. 

When I started this blog, I said its theme would be knowledge, and I seem to have circled back to that even though I wasn’t really planning to. I’m a firm believer in the intrinsic value of knowledge, and passing on the knowledge you have is an essential part of maximising that value, just as important as creating new knowledge. On a more personal and subjective level, I’ve always found great joy in learning or figuring out things I didn’t know before, and if I can help others feel that same joy, so much the better. I still doubt that I’d be very happy in an all-teaching role, but I’ve come to view teaching as a natural part of the job, something I can find satisfaction in and also something I can make a steady contribution in while research has its ups and downs. It’s not that many years ago that I saw teaching mainly as a nuisance to be avoided, so I guess it’s fair to say I’ve changed!