Tuesday, December 5

 

 

I left the house this morning to find a cold, dry, sunny day. I walked down to Plantagen and caught the 97V, which arrived on time and half empty. I read the Guardian and noticed that the ongoing Brexit negotiations had hit another road-block. Since this one involved the Ulster unionists, I suspected that the wheels might finally start falling off the negotiation cart.

I got a 78 bus and walked from the main road down the path to Arcada. A golden lonkero can catches my eye in a pile of yellow leaves. The leaves have many shades, not all of them visible to the camera on my iPad. The cigarette butt would rather like me to see it as golden too.

I will get to work and have a talk with Jutta about the first year’s progress, because I will have them in Period 4 for a course which will now act as a direct sequel to the course Jutta finishes this week.

Liisa will arrive and open a letter that tells her application to have her pedagogical skills recognised has not succeeded. She will take it very hard and very personally and I will attempt to point out that she has written them a short paper and they have not passed that, which says nothing about her teaching skills. She will show me that letter which says that she has not mentioned taking part in any pedagogical activities, and gives several examples including Open Networked Learning. I have never heard of this and have no idea what the phrase means.

I will look it up and discover that Arcada has helped organise it, although I still have no memory of ever having heard of it. It seems to consist of a consortium that run a five week course in problem based learning. Bingo, I will say: just do that. Liisa will remain unconvinced and upset, which will seem sad but fairly reasonable in the circumstances.

In the afternoon I will run the final session of the CMS course. This will take the form of a surgery in which any students who want help can come and ask for it.

I will also meet with Ben and Buster to look at their progress in moving the Buddyschool website into a multilingual Wordpress site. They have chosen an interesting technique to achieve this and I have become convinced that their approach will work perfectly. They have also replaced a picture with an HTML5 canvas-based image with text, in a way that allows a lot more flexibility for future changes.

I will talk with a fourth year student who wants to write her thesis on the design of game worlds but cannot make her mind up exactly what she means by this. She has a standard problem: she knows the area that interests her, but cannot yet find the precise research questions that will determine her path through the field.

Later I will note that Wordpress has failed to automatically update itself to 4.9.1, and I will do it manually using ftp. I have some kind of files permission problem (or files ownership problem) that I failed to locate the last time I looked. I could do with this fixed before we go to India, so I book a time next week to try to diagnose the problem, and fix it once and for all.