Friday, May 13

In the morning I had two lengthy calls on Skype. The first was with Luke, who is in London temporarily before flying to Spain next week for a team meeting. He has been working on a major project with a distributed team for nearly a year, and the team are finally all going to meet for a meet of brainstorming and planning. He was extolling the virtues of Sketch, and I made a note to talk with Jutta about it.

He will return to London and then fly to Australia on May 31 with Alice.

Next I spoke with Jutta about the need to rearrange our teaching hours, and the opportunity that this gives us to finish something we started several years ago. We agreed to spend one whole day in two weeks time creating a single narrative for the course, and to describe every course the students do in terms of learning outcomes. We already do this, but we don’t do it consistently. Now we will.

Finally, before lunch, I booked a flight from Vilnius to Gatwick because it felt like something I should do.

In the afternoon I took up a thread that Samir had left for me, and applied for us to make a presentation to a conference in September. I tweaked his abstract and added some context that he had suggested it lacked and submitted it. The areas of interest for the conference were pretty vague, so I have no idea if we will turn out to be what they want or not.

We will wait and see.

At 16:00 I arrived at Soc & Kom for the finale of Omtänk. I met Sanna and Robert and then sat through the two hours of presentations, tweeting visual tweets from the hall every ten minutes or so. The presentations were more sensible or prim that last year, but Sanna will explain later that this is probably due to the phrasing of the task they were given.

The students have finished and the judges are deliberating. Rasmus and Malin are watching me with either interest or suspicion. Everyone is in the main area working their collective way through a buffet of Mexican street food. And very nice it is too. There are some particularly delicious meaty things in folded bread. The vegetarian chilli is good too.

I will be home by 22:00 in time to sit and chat over a glass of wine.