Dear reader,

First steps are baby steps – right?

The ONL course has started, and I suppose I should try to learn how to use WordPress before we actually “have” to produce text and publish something on our new blogs. So, what better way than to start doing the doing, as my dear thesis supervisor always told me. I wanted to customize the blog a little, so I tried to change the cover image, but then decided that the default one would be good enough, for now, as the pictures that I have taken myself and had in mind may in fact look too blurry when enlarged and thus not pleasant to watch from a larger screen. Note to self: become rich&buy a new camera (a proper one, not just the one in my mobile!), and actually learn how to use such a camera. I did, however, find the settings for changing the cover image; so, dear reader, learning has taken place already!

I have already briefly introduced myself on the ONL community page, but here goes again: my name is Heli and I teach English at Aalto University. This course is the first online course that I have participated in, so I am really excited and also a bit lost. I thought that I would have to, in a way, re-calibrate my mind to become an active and motivated student once more, but actually, so far, this has not been a problem at all. I realised that I have missed being that curious and clueless new student who is, in a way, allowed to fumble in the dark and just try out new things as they come, without being responsible for the timing or the rationale behind the act of learning that particular thing, for a particular purpose or a set goal. Just learning, full-stop, without an agenda as such.

In my role as teacher, I have often felt in the past that I have to stay on top of things all the time. I try to tell myself and remind myself that things usually work out anyway, and that students are generally both understanding and helpful if problems do occur, but nonetheless, a thoroughly relaxed attitude is not easy for me as we have very small (read truly non-existing) margins in our workloads for managing anything unexpected. Thus, I try to solve problems before they even occur, and I think and plan ahead as much as possible to save time in the end.

We have now had our first online meetings with our own ONL PBL-group, and yes, you guessed it, I had technical difficulties. Zoom acted out this time for some reason, although it worked beautifully during the first mass webinar on Monday. I could not get the audio to work at all at first. It took several reloads, attempts, chat messages and frustrated gestures through the screen before I could solve the problem. Hooray! There was much rejoicing all over the world when I was finally able to fully participate in our meeting. I do not know what went on in the facilitators’ minds at the time, but we were all happy and relieved in the end and I am happy to reflect and report that some extra curricular learning took place in my end during the technical difficulties that I had.

A final note: Here is a picture of one of my favourite flowers: lavender. Did I mention that I love everything that grows?

Please protect our planet. Thank you for reading this post!