Tuesday, May 8

 

 

I started the day by checking Its Learning, to discover that absolutely nobody has yet posted anything for the second assignment in the Interactive Storytelling course. What, I asked myself, has happened to the online part of the course? I decided not to post Block 3 but instead to create a three-question quiz in order to ask the students to tell me if they needed more time, more help, or not. I also worked out two plans: one for fine-tuning the current timetable, and another for moving to another end-point of the students feel they do not have enough time to complete the original plan.

Once I had done this I burst out laughing. I explained to Maria, who noticed, that I had just realised that the structure of the course had irself begun to adopt the characteristics of an interactive story.

At 11:00 I began a ninety minute call with Oliver on Skype. We worked through our ideas for the September mini-festival and looked at how we could make them mesh. I think we found a very good structure that unifies our goals and sets us up for a series of future events.

I then made a note and sent an email to Sophie Hope and Nick Mahony to bring them up to date. In part I said that

We will organise a two-day event. The overall topic will be around decentralising culture and cultural decision-making in a networked world. Ideas of cultural democracy are central to this, as are practical tools and strategies the decentralised decision-making that cultural democracy will require.

Nathalie gave me a bag with Naa’s stuff in: more specifically the scarf and lipstick that she had forgotten after she stayed with Nathalie’s twins for two nights while Nathalie was in Copenhagen last week meeting Harald to discuss the EU project we have applied for.

I went upstairs to see David, Controller of the University Credit Card, to get him to help me to register for EdMedia. It costs too much to attend for me to willingly pay with my credit card and then claim the money back at the end of August when we return to Arcada. After five minutes of joking around while David takes part in a webinar, I had my attendance at EdMedia formally confirmed, and David had the invoice he needs.

I cycled home and let Sunshine in. He liked the hot weather so much this morning that he switched to summer mode and left the house to go somewhere else for the day. He heard me arrive and appeared from somewhere in the bushes, eager to have some food. He then left again to roll around on the grass and later to fall asleep on a cushion in the terrace.

Irma had an evening meeting and so arrives home late. When she has settled down, made some phone calls, and got changed we take the unnecessary old mattress from Sunday’s Adventure in Sleeping Arrangements to the refuse dump at Kivikko. We pay 8€ to throw it into a big recycling skip. I photograph the process, since we have not come here for several years and might not return for awhile.