Quiet day at Handelshøjscholen

After spending half of each day Friday and Saturday doing a little cultural exploration in Århus, I set today aside to put in a full work day before heading back to the apartment to make a nice hearty Sunday dinner. It was pretty quiet at ASB, not unlike Olds Hall on a typical Sunday.



I managed to revisit my presentation for Thursday's talk at the 360 Conference and tighten it up a bit. I had the structure in place before I left the States, but I wanted to incorporate some cool local examples once I had arrived. Among other things, I am talking about the way the mediational function of instructional texts can introduce interesting extra-textual issues that are impossible to see unless you encounter these texts in their natural habitat, so to speak. Sometimes, seeing them this way means you can understand them even if you can't read, say, Danish:



Here's some info about the sign above: it hangs on the door to a shared office or common room for instructors here at ASB. It's exam week and time for students to turn in final assignments. The sign's crumpled (oft re-posted. Have a guess what it says? You might look at a faculty mail room or adjunct or TA group office near you. The gist: students shouldn't try to turn in papers here, there's a spot for that down the hall. The hope: that the room doesn't pile up with papers and that students don't keep knocking on the door asking where to turn their papers in. :)

Cool eh? Sure we could have surmised the same thing if we could read Danish, but it's pretty neat that the circumstances can communicate the sign's function without reading the words.

I could go on...and I will (though not about that example) in the paper I am doing for Peter on the communicative and mediational functions of textual artifacts.

Tomorrow is Monday, and I have a meeting with ASB faculty member Birthe Mousten for lunch, then a sponsored drink at the ASB student watering hole "Klubben" after work. In the morning I am writing this, and pushing ahead on two other writing projects I would like to be finished with before I leave next Sunday: the mediation paper I mentioned and my contribution to the SIGDOC panel that Clay, Mark, and I are proposing for which I am writing about the challenges of visualizing writing practices in such a way as to productively inform the writing process for actual writers (not just for researchers).