2nd International UBI Summer School

I'm back again. There's been a short break in my updates for two reasons: first there was the summer school, which took one entire week, and then there was a tiredness and a short vacation. I actually started geocaching during my short break, but more about that later.

The UBI Summer School was organized again this year, this time with even more hard work (but hey, more credit points). Unfortunately some workshops had to be cancelled and overall there were not as many students participating as last year. This year I was participating in professor Leopoldina Fortunati's workshop "Social and Cultural Aspects of New Media". This year's experience was quite different from last year's relatively programming oriented workshop - I barely touched my laptop and not a single line of code was written. So what did we do then? Discuss. A lot. And then some. So much in fact that I got some serious mental fatigue from all the thinking and talking. Seriously, I've never been so exhausted.

All the tiredness aside, the workshop was really, really good. We discussed how technology relates with our society and culture from five different angles. Topics included how technology affects space, how emotions are linked to technology and so on. In this workshop it was often my task to consider these questions from one specific point of view: games. I won't go into detail in this post for a particular reason: all the insight from the workshop could fill the pages of an average size textbook. However, my next blog posts will be about topics that were most interesting to me in the workshop. Yes, it will mostly be about games but perhaps other matters as well.

So the workshop was really awesome. I would like to thank everyone for the insightful discussion, and especially our instructor for being there and bringing up all those interesting topics. Hopefully we will see the 3rd International UBI Summer School next year. This year certainly set the bar quite high, so let's see if next time will be even better (assuming there is a next time).