Friday, November 17

 

 

I left the house slightly later than usual and walked into a torrential downpour. I had a hood and an umbrella but I still arrived at the bus stop wet.

Standing and dripping water onto the platform at Itäkeskus waiting for a metro, I notice that the new maps have arrived. Tomorrow the new metro extension will finally start working, taking the metro into Espoo, thus providing direct links to Aalto University and the Iso Omena shopping mall. I look at it for a bit wondering if that means that the metro will no longer have a single fare that covers everywhere.

By the time I get to Arcada I will have decided to shower, and when I got there I will do just that.

Because of the Alumni Twenty Year party yesterday, hardly anyone will come into work today. Most people will “work from home”. I will spend the morning dealing with more outstanding issues, and writing emails. I will work out how to prevent a student having to repay their grant, due to colliding bureaucracies, with Monica’s help, and we will then attend to a few less important issues.

I will have lunch downstairs where I will enjoy haddock with a variety of people I rarely get a chance to meet.

In the afternoon I will prepare a whole new module for the MA course to replace Nicke’s technology overview. Called Media Memes it will challenge students to take what they have learned so far and apply it to real world situations. It will begin with a look at the Macedonian fake news factories run by teenagers in a small town who had discovered that clicks meant money for them. They manufactured articles against Clinton in the 2016 election with no interest at all in their political effect.

I will then challenge the students to determine whether or not the story of Lewis constitutes a hoax. Do they believed he exists? Do they believe that he made two extraordinarily prescient albums in 1983 and 1985? If not, what do they believe? And on what basis do they believe it?

After an hour of research and thirty minutes discussion, and a coffee break, we will move onto the second exploration: flat earth theory. The students will begin with Mark Sargent’s Contained World site, and move out from there. At the end this will become their assignment.

I will return to my room to write out the assignment, and then race home to start the weekend with Irma and Naa.