Thursday, June 5

This morning I got up while everyone else was sleeping and caught the 7:35 bus. The weather was hot again, so I was in shorts. According to my phone this is going to be the hottest day of the year so far, and may reach 30 degrees.

I was carrying my rucksack with two laptops, a Sony Walkman as big as a hardback book, and a bag of cables. My arm had almost been amputated by the time I got to the bus stop.

The morning began with a planning session with Jutta. Then we went to a meeting organised by Fred to plan the syllabus for next year’s Introduction to Media Production course, one of the first courses that the first year take. The course got negative reviews from the online media students this year because they felt it was a film course they were supposed to find relevant for reasons nobody had explained. Next year it will be relevant and moreover we will explain why at the beginning of the course.

Immediately after that we went to a meeting that Nathalie had organised to discuss how we move the international MA in Interactive Storytelling forward. My view was that we shouldn’t, but Tommy was clear that we should, because we will learn new skills and it will be good for us. The meeting was almost two hours and at no time was it clear how we would learn new skills and why it would be good for us. My impatience with this grew extremely visible when it became clear that it would be me in charge of making sure we learned these new skills and got wehatever was good for us out of the project.

By the end I had agreed to have a Skype call with the German organisers if they had previously agreed that we wanted to create the concept and development courses and that their desire that we run the business courses was simply not possible. This is not a Skype call I am expecting to have.

At 13:00 I met Alain Ambrosi, who had arrived from Canada to give one of the keynote speeches at Camp Pixelache tomorrow. I took him to S-Market and showed him how to buy fruit. We then established that his phone would not work here, but his apartment had working wifi. So we established email contact and I promised him that he could mail me at any time if he had problems or things he needed.

Now I am back at Arcada, watching my laptop finishing an unnecessary restarting procedure. In a minute I will write a draft paper for the e-learning project with Erik, show it to Jutta for comments, and then mail it to Lasse and Erik.

At 16:15 I will begin my role as judge for Fred’s pitching session at the end of the MA in Media Management. I will watch four very different presentations, at least one of which was excellent. Then at 20:20 I will leave for home in the now-cloudy evening warmth.