Thursday, February 5

 
 
YEAR:  2015 | Tags:  | | |
 
 
 
 
 

Hameentie, 11:30

 
 

This morning Naa and I got up at 6:45, had breakfast and left. Naa took a packed lunch with her, because she has her Finnish language A Level today from 9:00 till 15:00 with no break. She had to take her drinks in bottles with no labels in case the labels contained hidden notes to be used during the exam.

I had a tutorial with a student at 8:30. She had been offered a big WordPress job by a company in Japan and she was concerned about whether to take it or not. I refused to answer this directly and instead asked her questions about what she knew and what she thought she would have to learn to complete the job. In the end she decided not to take it (which was, in my view, the correct decision). Instead she will keep the assignment and do it as a student project. She will begin by writing out an offer, with a timetable, and then she will try to do the job to a professional standard in the time she estimated.

In that way she will test herself without any dire repercussions, and next time she is offered a similar job she will approach it with more confidence. That at least is the theory.

At 10:00 I had a long Skype meeting with Jutta to report back on this, and to talk about next week, when Erik arrives from Denmark. Jutta had also received a letter from Mary at ITT in Dublin asking us to please come and visit them this year. Apparently they missed us last year! We both agreed that adding ITT to the Helsinki-Odense mix would strengthen it considerably, in terms of moving it from a meeting to a network, which is what Arcada’s management say we should be developing. Mary told Jutta that she would like to come to Helsinki, so we will start by trying to get her here.

At 11:30 I looked out of the window to find that it is snowing very heavily indeed. The sky is filled with big flakes floating past the window. Shortly after this I will have lunch in the restaurant downstairs for the first time in ages, to carry on a conversation about the forthcoming MA in Media Production.

In the afternoon Andrej and I will continue the Social Gaming course. We will divide everyone into teams, introduce them to arilyn and IFTTT, and give them their first assignment. The students will neither be impressed nor unimpressed with arilyn.

Naa will spend the evening at Kamppi, after phoning to say that she thinks that he exam went well, or at least not disastrously. We will eat chocolate.