Foreign Perspectives

Since I finished reading the week 2 material so early in the week, I’m making a small start on week 3.

This moves on from consideration of the invention of agriculture in south west Asia to look at how it developed in south-east Asia. For the first time this highlights some differences in how things are spelled in the American spelling used in the course text compared to how they’re spelled in the British English of the course guide. Nothing major so far but it’s odd to see the Yangtze River appearing as the Yangtzi River.

On other fronts, I’ve started on my course summary rather early based on the chapter summaries on the website. As summaries go, they’re a bit too complete as they weigh in at 250 pages. In practice, it’s not so bad as that sounds as quite a lot of the page count is taken up by long lists of key terms and the like from each chapter. Stripping those out seems to leave around 7 pages per chapter which should mean something like 70-odd pages worth of summary for the chunks of the book that are used during this course which would be rather a lot of reading for exam but should be manageable in the smaller chunks required for the TMAs and ECA.

I see that the book is available as an ebook so all being well the OU will provide the searchable PDF version rather than what seemed to be a scanned version going by a student who’d done the course a few years ago.