It has already been nearly two weeks since 2018 began, but Happy New Year. I look forward to working with you all again this year. Things have been quite busy right from the start of the year. In my last entry, I wrote that I want to work hard on my research this year to increase my number of Research Achievements, which were barely enough last year. I intend to do my best in that regard. Right at the start of the new year, I have two international conference presentations, albeit as a co-author.

One research grant application I challenged myself with seems to have been unsuccessful, so I need to think about what to do next. To promote Learning Analytics research at the university, I would also like to consider developing learning support tools that can broadly capture learning activity logs. I want to design and develop things that are effective for learning behavior and, by analyzing the logs, lead to effective learning support and class management. I am looking forward to the prototype of a learning support system that utilizes logs from the eBook viewer BookRoll, which will be ready in February. I must also produce Research Achievements associated with that.

I definitely want to publish papers as a first author this year as well. Also, the JST Mirai project will go into full swing this year. Although I have conducted research in Educational Technology and the Learning Sciences, I have never worked with the elderly as a target group, so I will have to start from scratch, study various things, and hope to connect this to good research. I expect that my doctoral students will also conduct full-scale data collection in March and move toward publishing papers. This will also be a new area of research. It is good that things are expanding in various directions, but it is also necessary to converge them at some point, so I would like to proceed while keeping that in mind.

I look forward to your continued support this year.