This afternoon Hiroyuki Kumai and Yaemi Teramoto of Hitachi Central Research Laboratory visited my office. I took part in some joint research with Kumai-san when I was working at Tokyo University with Toru Nishigaki. Kumai-san attended the public lectures myself and some colleagues gave at Hitotsubashi in October. We're now starting to explore the possibilities of joint research, integrating social science and information science perspectives on networks. In the meantime, I'd like to have my students—many of whom seem to be rather sceptical of the benefits of IT and even of the science and engineering view of the world—discuss the social impact of IT with Hitachi researchers. One possibility would be to discuss a chapter or two of The Media Equation.

Today I attended a meeting explaining the new English listening comprehension test at next January's nationwide university entrance examination. Instead of having everyone in the class listening to one tape recorder, or to a broadcast over the university PA system, each student gets a solid-state audio player with earphones. Judging from the fact that they use Memory Sticks it's very possible the machines are manufactured by Sony.

Each machine has three buttons: Power on, Test, and Play. The software is designed so that each button only operates once, and only if it is pressed in the correct order. This is to prevent people from listening to the test again and again. The problem is that if the student presses Play by mistake after having pressed Power on and Test then the test plays, and can't be repeated. The set can be reset by taking out the battery, but the battery compartment can't be opened. Taking the Memory Stick out in mid-play and reinserting it causes an error, and playback stops.

The main concern for the invigilators is students pressing the Play button by mistake. Given that many people who pick up a gadget for the first time press all the buttons at random to see what happens, and the sheer numbers of examinees, it seems optimistic to expect that no students will experience problems. On the other hand, there are also problems with tape recorders, such as their being too loud for those sitting nearby and too quiet for those sitting far away. It could be that the invigilators are more worried than they need to be.

Congratulations to Dr. Francesco Vitucci, who received his PhD on Tuesday afternoon. My first ever PhD student! He got his degree in three years thanks to admirable concentration and self-discipline. Best wishes to him and Yasuko as they start their new life in Bologna.

On Sunday my graduate seminar students and friends came to Odaiba to celebrate Fujisawa-san's graduation. Almost everything we cooked disappeared. Best wishes to Fujisawa-san, and thanks for your great contribution to the seminar over the last two years. Especially your excellent blog, which taught me a lot about the daily life and concerns of Japanese graduate students.

Yesterday was a very full day. I got up at six (jet-lag assisted) and ran out to Goleta beach, ran barefoot in the surf and took some photos that served as backgrounds to my presentation slides later in the day. We left for the UCSB campus at 0830, and all morning the participants in the Global Studies workshop gave presentations on their graduate programs. It was surprising how much the different programs have in common, despite most of them having been unaware of each others' existence until they heard about this workshop.

In the afternoon there was a discussion of theoretical issues, which didn't go very far, and of common actions. Many of the participants were talking about establishing a website with information about all our institutions plus information for network members as a first step, so while they were talking I started building the site. If possible I'd like to have a working version up by the end of today, as I and everyone else will be too busy to do much work on it when we leave here.

We had a reception with the UCSB chancellor and other big cheeses, then went into the centre of town for excellent organic New Zealand steaks at an Argentinian restaurant.

We've been treated to a lot of local red wine here. It turns out that Sideways was filmed in the hills around Santa Barbara, so if the website construction goes well I might reward myself with a wee tour tomorrow afternoon.

Yesterday was the last day of the Global Studies workshop at Santa Barbara. We agreed to start collaborating,  and to think big but start small; in the first year we want to exchange information online, especially on curricula and careers for global studies graduates. For the Institute for the Study of Global Issues both themes are very relevant, as we're rethinking our curriculum and need to market ourselves better to potential applicants.

Now I'm working on setting up a website, for mostly internal use initially.

Victor Faessel did a fantastic job of organizing the workshop - he sorted out a problem with my hotel reservation instantly - and was well assisted by Kirk and Nicole, two very bright UCSB students. Kirk took the photo here.

This morning I had two coffees with Michael Kluth of Roskilde University. The first round of coffees we abandoned undrunk in protest at their complete lack of flavour. The second round, ordered with double espresso shots, did just enough to remind us of what coffee tastes like. Michael lives above a cafe in Copenhagen which brews a cup so good that he doesn't bother making coffee himself.

I'm writing a report on three years of teaching in Second Life. Re-reading the transcripts of the first year's classes is fun. As I know there are so many educators doing a much more professional job in Second Life I'm having to pitch my writing carefully. I know there are so many things I should have done better, but on the other hand there's not much point in telling the reader that I made such a hopeless botch of it that she shouldn't read further. And I don't have time to read up on education theory. Ah well, I'll just write about what I did and what seemed to work and what seemed not to.

Last Thursday I started explaining SVN to my undergraduate students. As you can hear on the weekly podcast, they didn't quite grasp it the first time. However, this week we'll be using it to download, edit and share Python scripts for analyzing Wikipedia. I hope that as they get used to it and see others' work appearing in their own folders they'll see its power.