Thursday, March 2

 

 

I began the morning by remaking the Powerpoint slides for the first two presentations for the Digital Mediascapes. I could have done this last week but I “wasted” my time doing other research tasks, all of which have borne fruit and served to make this final stage much easier.

I have now integrated autoethnography into the course, as both a method that the students will use for assignments, and as an approach that colours the theoretical elements in the course. It ties into McLuhan’s hermeneutical approach ot studying media. In additiona I have a BA student who will use this as her methodology for her thesis, so I might manage to turn this into a recognised technique to complement the more traditional methods.

At 11:00 I had an MA tutorial which turned on the analysis of Big Data from a practical perspective. The student involved has gone out of his way to attend advanced classes on machine learning in order to amass the skills he thinks he needs to write the thesis he wants to write.

Now I have taken a tram and a metro to Ruohalahti for my second MA tutorial. I wait for five minutes outside Yeti, the restaurant we have agreed to have lunch in, before I get a text message from Mark saying that I should go in and find him. I go in and immediately understand why. People sit cramped at twice as many tables as should physically fit in the space, while Mark waves at me from a corner of the room. The restaurant serves Nepalese food. We both order chicken, and it comes with the best naan bread I have had for ages (including the naan bread in Kerala).

I will return to Arcada to act as the opponent for Sandra Läppanen’s MA thesis and I will tell her, and the audience, that I have never read a better thesis in my time at Arcada. It contains everything a thesis should contain in exactly the right amounts and organised in exactly the right structure. It also answers the research question it poses very clearly and convincingly.

At 16:30 I will begin the MA Digital Mediascapes course, or rather Nathalie will begin it. I agreed to lend the students to her for an hour in order that one of the MA students could use them to conduct a focus group for her own research. While this continues I will set up a Skype for Business link for Inram, sitting in Rovaniemi, in order that he can attend virtually.

At 17:30 we will begin. I will give a presentation on McLuhan’s ideas of media ecology and we will end with the group dividing into pairs and trying to create tetrads to investigate cloud storage. Some will miss the point and nobody will really get to grips with what cloud storage might reverse into.

The class will leave at 20:30, I will tidy the room, and carry things back to my desk at the other end of the building, and then at 20:50 I will leave.

On the way home I will stop at R-Kioski for a hodari, and discover that the price has leapt from 2€ to 2.50. I will feel so shocked that I will demand extra mustard.