I am now at roughly the half-way point of my sabbatical. I have visited five university campuses and one senior high school, and also one exhibition. I am due to visit Celoxica on Tuesday, but several other potential visits to universities that were in the pipeline haven't (as yet) materialised. If I stick to my original plan as outlined in my sabbatical application I ought to arrange some more university visits. However, I feel that I already have answers to most of the questions (relating to computer science within Japanese universities) which I had in mind at the start of my sabbatical.
During my web trawl I found quite a few academic papers relating to the higher education system within Japan generally, and to computer science in particular - these gave me a reasonably clear picture of what to expect, and the visits I have undertaken so far have given me more insight and some valuable first-hand impressions. I have found organising and undertaking the visits, and subsequently writing up the visit reports, to be quite time-consuming. At the moment I am contemplating whether to go ahead and organise more visits or to turn my attention to other things.
While reading the literature and conducting the visits I have been compiling information for inclusion in a Technical Report on "Computer Science Education within Japanese Universities". I have now completed a draft of this report. I would like to eventually submit it to a journal, and have been wondering which one to target. I think I will submit it to Communications of the ACM, which is about as prestigious as it gets. I saw a paper published in 1988 in this journal entitled "Computer Science Education in the People's Republic of China in the Late 1980's", so I guess they should be willing to at least consider my paper. If it is rejected I can always re-submit it to a less prestigious journal, and any feedback I get from the ACM's referees will be useful.
In my sabbatical application I said that I also hoped to pay an extended visit to at least one university in order to engage in some joint research. However now that I have visited a few universities I can see that they are really not geared up to accept foreign researchers. While I would be delighted to consider any offers of research collaboration, I have decided not to try to instigate this myself. Instead I think I can be more productive working on my own, and as soon as I have finished writing this I intend to start working on something that I began (but didn't get very far with) a couple of years ago - namely the problem of identifying degrees of synchrony within concurrent systems. I will try to visit a couple more universities, at least, but will not attempt to maintain my previous pace of more than one visit per week on average.
When I visited Prof Azuma at Waseda University he asked me whether I would be prepared to give a lecture to a combined group of final year undergraduate and Masters students. I said yes, and suggested two or three subjects that I could give a talk on. We settled on "Website Development - A UK Academic Viewpoint"; I am due to give this (90 minute!) lecture on Wednesday, November 14th. I have spent a lot of time on this - more than I should have - but it's now almost ready and I can turn my attention to other things.