Hi guys,
using the advice given here (thanks!) I have managed to apply the techniques discussed in lesson 1 on MNIST data directly via Kaggle notebooks using ImageClassifierData.from_arrays(): https://www.kaggle.com/stefanbuenten/mnist-test-with-fastai-library
It was quite some hassle, as I was new to Kaggle and had to deal with file system permissions and other stuff before I learned I could turn on internet access 
Regarding the results: Note that I just naively applied the techniques without giving it too much
thought - use at your own risk 