Thursday, November 2
Arcada, 12:34
I left the house at exactly the right or wrong time, depending on your point of view: too late for the 97 and much too early for the 97V. I walked down to Alepa and caught an almost empty 95. I got to the metro at about the same time as the next 97 would have arrived in Vartiokylä.
When I got to Arcada I added one student’s name to the list of Cloud9 users, and prepared briefly for the catch up session that started at 9:15. I went to check out the classroom computer at 8:50 and found the students all sitting there ready to begin. I went back to get my notes and a bottle of water and then returned t start the session.
We went through most of the important topics in the first 5 blocks of the CMS course, with improvised detours as students explained which particular issues they had, and which parts of the course they had failed to fully understand. By 12:30 everyone felt as though they had learned enough to complete the current assignment, and we packed up for lunch. I left with Jutta to the mall to buy bananas.
I stand in the car park at the rear of Arcada while Jutta crawls around under her old Volkswagen car: not a beetle or a bus, but some a rather more obscure 1992 Polo. She photographs the place where the leak comes from the petrol tank, and checks to see if enough gas remains for her to get home. It appears that it does. While this goes on I look up and realise the sky has turned bright blue. I photograph it until Jutta says we can leave.
We will go to S-Market where we will meet Emilia and Josefin who still seem high from their triumphant presentation at City Hall yesterday.
I will return and go over all the notes and presentations for tonight’s Media Management course, pausing to figure out why a WordPress auto-update has failed. I will reconfigure the file permissions for every file and directory on the site, and continue working while this command executes. It will do no good, and so I will add this to my tasklist for next week.
At 16:15 I will begin the first session of the Digital Mediascapes course, one module of the MA Media Management programme. Two students will contact me at the last moment asking for the Skype address to participate remotely. I will come to see that this has become a standard feature of the MA course, and so I will borrow Mirko’s webcam, and get the url for the regular Skype Business link that Mirko advises people to use.
The session will go reasonably smoothly, and I will give the general impression that I know enough to warrant standing in front of the students. They will say very little until I send them away in groups with paper and pens to think about Facebook and YLE as media, in McLuhan’s expanded sense of the word.
I will arrive home at about 21:45, in time for a quick chat, and a cup of tea.