Monday, October 22

 

 

This morning the light seemed so reluctant to emerge that I cycled to the metro with both lights on my bike. I passed other cyclists with their lights on.

I spent most of the morning going through Arcada’s website to pull together all the information that I could find about the range of acceptable theses. I found seven sorts, including at least one that allowed a student to obtain a thesis with no writing whatsoever.

I compiled all of this into a Powerpoint show and presented it to the kulturmöte at 13:15, after the new rector had done the opening Q&A session. During that I asked her what had happened to the summer courses and she explained that the government had not yet made up its mind whether universities would receive money this year for running them. When they have decided then Arcada will decide if I should run my summer course or not.

She asked me to ask her again at the start of December.

The discussion about my slide show proved interesting. Some people said they already knew about the seven types of thesis. Some people said they had never heard of five or six of them. Mats said he wrote the list with Peter Milden in 2014.

At 15:00 I went to A303 to run a revision session for some students who had told me they felt lost in the CMS course. It turned out, as I expected, that they had failed to understand some basic concepts, so we spent two hours going through questions such as “What is Wordpress and what is it for?”, “How does Wordpress make web pages from the database?”, and “Where is Wordpress?”

The last question proved difficult to answer since I had to backtrack and explain how servers delivered web pages to browsers, before I could explain how Wordpress complicated this process.

They told me that felt much happier at the end of the session and I believed them.

I get to Puotila at about 17:45 and my bike stands there among a very small number of other bikes. I think all of them stood there when I arrived this morning. In summer the stand gets completely full but now we have four or five bikes left.

I will get home to find Irma planning a trip for next summer, and we will spend most of the evening bringing that into focus. By the time we go to bed we will have two tickets and still need two more ech.