Friday, January 16

The skies were dropping slush when I left this morning, the roads were messy and the bus was late.

I started the day by testing Zoom.us with Jutta who was working from home. She had fixed yesterday’s problem with the video on her Mac and we recorded two short meetings. We got a delightful surprise when we played the videos back. Zoom does not produce a composite video showing all the speakers in little boxes; it does something much better. It shows the speaker full-screen and then cuts to the next speaker as soon as they start talking. As Jutta and I talked it cut between us, giving the impression of a two-camera recorded interview.

That opens so many possibilities!

After that I completed part of the first session of a MOOC about Serious Game Design, that I have joined for two reasons: I want to learn whatever the contents turn out to be in order to use them in teaching, and I want to experience more life as a student in a MOOC, for the project that Erik and I are developing.

Now it is 11:30 and I am outside the bar and restaurant Piano, having got off the metro at Kaisaniemi, newly renamed Helsingin Yliopisto. I am about to have a meeting about this year’s Omtänk. It will turn out to be a small meeting with only four of us but we will complete the planning of the website and the preliminary trip to Stockhom. Good ideas will be proposed and developed and the lunch will be very nice.

At 14:00 I will have a debriefing with Julia, a student who did one of my courses entirely online from Vasa, using Lynda.com and weekly Skype tutorials with me. She did it very well; completed all her assignments; did better than several students who had been in class with me; and will tell me that she has learned more than she would have done in class.

Finally I will send out emails to the Nobanet working party about our next meeting and have a flurry of email exchanges with Erik and Tomas about forthcoming events. The best news to come out of that will be the fact that Erik is now definitely coming in Week 7, which fits perfectly into the plans Jutta and I have been developing.

At 16:10 I will leave to start the weekend, suspecting that this will begin with an hour or so of snow-work.