Thursday, October 16

This morning, as I stepped off the bus at Itäkeskus, it started snowing quite heavily. It was not what native-born Finns would usually called snow – it was not full-on lumi – because it stood no chance of remaining on the ground for more than thirty minutes. Nonetheless, for the first time since summer, I was briefly standing in cartoon snow.

When I got to work Nicke arrived and said, “did you see the snow this morning?”. He is a native-born Finn, and he noticed it too.

Now, after a morning spent partly on finalising the Nobanet questionnaire and partly on jQuery questions, I am sitting with the Advanced Web Apps group who are using today’s workshop to finalise their html and css mockups. I have this site open on my laptop because I am using it as an example. I have a bottle of water next to the laptop so that I can drink water dangerously. The Lucozade the bottle used to contain is sadly not available in Finland. We bought it in Liverpool.

Almost everyone has almost finished, and everyone is well ahead of where the curriculum suggests they should be. Jutta and I have a meeting planned to discuss how we will deal with this. In part this depends on the current first year group. If they are this fast then we will adjust the curriculum to make it cover much more much faster. If this group are an anomaly then we will just adjust their classes informally.

During the course of the afternoon somebody will ask if their site really has to be fully responsive, and I will answer that I am surprised that people have made the decision to make responsive sites for this course, since I never asked for, or expected them. Pamdemonium will ensue as I explain that the idea of the sites being responsive started with one students and spread without me ever encouraging it. It will finally turn out that the women in the group began making responsive sites because they wanted to, and the men started making them because they looked at what the women were doing and thought that that was what they were supposed to be doing too.

A number of the class will then discover that they have already fulfilled more than the requirements for this part of the course and leave early relieved.