STARs certificate presentation

Today, Muireann O'Brien, the secondary school teacher who joined our group for the summer, received her STARs certificate from the Minister of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, Michael Martin at a ceremony that took place in Cork, at the Rochestown Park Hotel.

12 other teachers received their certificates of participation today. The official news can be read on the SFI website.
Unfortunately, none of us could go there, so we asked Clare McInerney, the Lero Knowledge Transfer and Outreach Officer, to be our messenger congratulating Muireann on this occasion!

Muireann promised to visit the IDC soon, together with a group of transition year students from the Carrigaline Community School. We're looking forward to their visit!

Muireann's time with the socGSD team coming to an end...

Today was Muireann's last day with us. We enjoyed a lot having her around this summer as a STARs teacher, and in a short time she has become part of our team.

She sat in most our team meetings during this period, joined us in attending talks and presentations, gave her moral support to our OSS conference presentation and participated as an observer in our recent meeting with the advisory group. She spent time with each of us, getting acquainted with our specific research interests, career trajectories and work.

She was also given the chance to meet with some of our colleagues in Lero: Ita Richardson, Brian Fitzgerald, Irene Caulfield, Val Casey, Sadhana Deshpande.

Pamela O'Shea gave her a Linux crash course. Gabriela tried to pass her the social software bug;-)

Our colleagues in the IDC adopted her as well, and she had the chance to find out about the other ongoing projects.
We were more than happy to have Muireann here with us for the summer, and she's more than welcome to visit the IDC in the future! We hope to keep in touch with her and her school in Carrigaline in the future...

Goodbye, Muireann, and thank you!

STARs participant joined our project team...

Muireann O'Brien, teacher at the Carrigaline Community School, joined our project team for the following 8 weeks.

She is funded through the SFI STARs programme:

The STARS programme is an initiative through which teachers can receive support to conduct research within an SFI-funded research team during school holiday periods for a period of between 6 to 8 weeks. Teachers receive a stipend equivalent of up to 8 weeks salary for their participation in the programme. The goal is to help teachers renew their interest in science as researchers, connect them with faculty in the universities and institutes of technology and enhance the teaching of science across the educational system. The primary aim of the programme is to disseminate new skills and knowledge to teachers which can then be passed on to their students.

Muireann will be involved in all our project activities during her stay with us. After an induction period that will give her the chance to become familiar both with the Global Software Development literature and with the particular approach of our project, we are going to involve her in most of our activities. She will also be given the chance to participate in workshops and meetings with other research groups studying Global Software Development from different perspectives, in order to get a more complete picture of research being under way in this area.

Having Muireann on board this summer will allow us to get a better image of the students' level of understanding and enable her to explain our research to her peers and students.