OUseful Info

Marc Eisenstadt Moves On...

It's been an expensive week for us for cars: both have been in of attention this week, and I've just got back from giving our local garage several hundred quid...

I also suspect from a tweet from Marc Eisenstadt (Eisenblog) last night that he'll been spending the first day of his retirement at his local garage...

So it goes... Marc's leaving do was today, and whilst I couldn't make it in to MK, I did manage to catch the event via a KMi Stadium webcast.

Anyway, if I had been there, here's a couple of thing's I'd have recollected...

My first memory of Marc was when I was interviewed for a PhD place in HCRL, the OU's Human Cognition Research Lab which predated KMi. I think I got the post because I mentioned I had spent the previous couple of years as a band promoter, with my spare time spent in the York University library reading the AI literature.

Whilst I didn't really know Marc that well in HCRL, I do remember the atmosphere being a friendly one. After one particular summer school, Hank Kahney effectively became my mentor, and some could say, my fashion adviser... ;-)

From what I recall, Hank's last - unfinished - project was looking at standardising assessment marking, where he realised that getting non-subject matter experts to look at a script and just give it a mark based on how good it looked was actually more consistent than getting experienced tutors in the subject to mark the scripts according to an 'agreed upon' marking guide! (Hank also used to do a great summer school talk explaining to students how to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem. One slide showed two poles and one disc, with the hint condition: "move the disc from one pole to the other":-)

In the final year of my PhD, HCRL upped sticks and became part of KMi. Only a couple of us were left behind in that move, and I've spent the 10 years or so since then trying to find a way in ;-)

When I returned to the OU after a couple of years as a postdoc, Marc's was one of the friendly faces to say hi to (I used to go visiting friends there for coffee quite regularly). We also crossed paths in the strangest of places - like a wet summer's day at the Eden Project in Cornwall, for example...

 

In the last two to three years I've chatted to Marc increasingly regularly, first by email, and now more and more via IM. I never really grokked IM, but Marc's persistence in evangelising it - and the presence technology around it - finally paid off!

Marc's openness to ideas is one of the reasons why this OUseful.info blog exists - and why many of the half-baked ideas reported in it appear at all. His 'just do it" attitude is going to be sorely missed in the OU I think?

I'm also going to lose a wonderful internal source of useful info... Marc is one of the great evangelisers of KMi technologies, so with his departure, I don't know who I'm going to have to talk to now to find out what cool stuff is going on over there... (that said, Alex Little's blog is shaping up nicely ;-)

Anyway - here's to you, Marc - sorry I couldn't be there in person to toast your retirement; it's been a privilege bouncing ideas around with you, and I hope you keep in touch. Maybe if you're sailing around the Solent, we could meet up for a coffee or swift half?;-)

PS Marc - does that totally black keyboard of yours have a single key that generates multiple exclamation marks at one press!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Posted by ajh59 at November 30, 2007 03:20 PM