Foreign Perspectives

Archive for May, 2009

We’ve lived for decades, centuries even, in an era when prices are, on the whole, expected to increase year after year for the vast majority of goods.

The only category of goods where we are familiar with the effects of deflation are electronic goods and in particular computers so it’s helpful to examine how we treat those. For these there is the expectation that each year will see computers that are a little bit better than their predecessors and additionally they’ll be cheaper. What happens therefore in our buying decision is that we wait until we actually need a new computer before buying one. Now in respect of computers “need to buy” is slightly different from normal products in that there is innovation in the software too which forces us into purchases that would otherwise be un-necessary: that would be unlikely to happen with a normal product.

On the other hand, in an inflationary environment we buy a car now rather than next year because we can be confident that the car will be more expensive and so it is with pretty much everything.

You can even see the effect yourself by considering petrol prices. Until a month or two back I filled the car as often as possible on the basis that the price was rising quite sharply and could be expected to continue doing so. Then things changed as prices started going down very sharply indeed. The approach then was to fill the car only when absolutely necessary as that would be likely to get me the lowest price overall.

In fact, deflation might be a good thing to have but the snag is the period of adjustment that would be required would be extremely painful for everyone. The change from a “buy it now” attitude that’s relevant in an inflationary environment to a “buy it later” attitude appropriate for deflationary times means that factories build up stockpiles and therefore need to cut back on production and the jobs associated with it ie unemployment jumps. At a more personal level, house prices drop dramatically both because of the increased unemployment and because people are moving to a “buy it later” mindset.

One side-effect is that innovation is forced upon many industries which is usually a good thing to happen. However, it’s not an option for a considerable number of products: when was the last time that there was a really innovative potato?

On the whole, it probably is a good thing, it’s just that the transition period would probably be far too painful for governments in general to accept that.

Aside from the very first French course that I did with them, I have always went down to the Open University before signing up for a new course and had a look through some of the course books.

I’m sure that lots of people have probably done that at one time or another and there are all kinds of approaches that you can take to looking at the books for a possible course. What I did was to have a look at a book about half-way into the course and see if I could understand the words. You might think that this approach would only apply to language courses but in fact it’s equally applicable to all subjects. Certainly I was happy enough that I could understand the words and concepts at about the half-way mark in my current course.

Why half-way though? Well, the OU books seems to be written in a slightly odd way sometimes either by accident or design. Often I’ve found that the first chapter of a book is particularly difficult to follow and one suspects that’s because they want to knock people out of the course early on or rather they want to knock out people who would probably not be up to doing that particular course. Thus the first chapter or two of a book aren’t worth looking at. By the end of the course presumably you’ll have learned quite a lot so you might not initially understand the concepts being spoken about at that point. Therefore, to my mind, the middle is the best spot to aim for.

Why didn’t I just do the “is this course for me” self-assessment test instead? Well, in the case of the languages I didn’t go on the results on said tests for the simple reason that they don’t work too well for me. I don’t do cross-words in English and wouldn’t expect to be able to do them in French yet the tests had things quite similar to cross-words in them (which I couldn’t do). Therefore, glancing at the course books before the course worked better for me than the tests that are available.

However, aside from the books, you can find an increasing number of blogs being written about various courses by students and tutors. These are extremely variable in quality of course as are blogs everywhere. However, you can find truly excellent ones such as Anne’s on various themes from the A207 history course and you can find tutorial notes, revision notes, even complete assignment answers on various courses if you care to look.

But should you look very hard online? For instance, whilst Anne’s site has a fantastic amount of information it’s so much that it has me thinking that perhaps A207 isn’t the course for me (it’s on my rather long short-list). Similarly, I’ve said that the workload on ED209 is pretty substantial on this blog, so would that put someone off doing it? Is too much information about a course beyond the course materials themselves a good thing when you’re choosing a course to do?

The problem is that there’s no easy answer to that. For instance, if I want to do the psychology degree then I have to do a course on biological psychology which has the reputation of being pretty much impossible to do. Should I go on that reputation and therefore not bother with that course? Probably yes, but then I’m just too stubborn to do that so instead I’m looking into doing a course on the biology side first which apparently makes the other course a lot more doable.

When you initially start on a study programme, it’s usually easy enough to “choose” a course in that the early courses you do are usually compulsory for whatever study programme you’re following.

Sometimes it’s easy enough to choose the next one as you’ll choose the course options that originally attracted you to the study programme. For example, you’re going to need to do Spanish if your original reason for following a languages degree programme was to be able to speak Spanish.

However, eventually most people run off the end of the obvious choices for them and then find that they’re innundated with advice and “obvious” choices that they should take. For example, most language degrees will require you to also take English. When you follow a series of foreign language programmes with one in English, you’ll probably find it fairly simple and your marks will probably reflect that. When you’ve high marks in a subject, everyone will suggest that you continue with it, but that doesn’t mean that you should. If you’re only doing that subject to fulfill a course requirement then you need to consider whether or not you even like that subject irrespective of whatever marks you might be getting in it.

At degree level, you need to concentrate on subjects that you enjoy, not what other people think you should be doing. Running with subjects that you don’t enjoy is a recipe for disaster at this level. Sure, you’ll have to do some compulsory subjects that you’re not necessarily enthusiasic about but you definitely don’t want to add optional subjects that you don’t like.

The third book is largely about childrens’ learning of which a large chunk is about learning to speak in the early years.

Net effect of that is that I should be on more familiar territory courtesy of the English course I did last year where the third book was all about learning English and most of that about children learning English. In theory that should mean that I’ll be able to work through this part of the course somewhat faster than I’ve been going up to now which is just as well since each week seems to have been taking more time to do recently.

However, now that I’m this far through the course there’s the “seen question” to start to think about. This is quite a peculiar type of thing in many ways and something that the vast majority of people haven’t come up against before. What it is, is quite literally a “seen question” ie they give you the exact question that will be on the exam paper. At first thought that might seem to make this an incredibly easy question to answer but, of course, it isn’t like that because the question is so general to be, on first sight, impossible to answer.

The actual question for this year is “Using evidence from your chosen topic area, critically evaluate the contribution that psychological theory and research have made to improving practice in this field.” which is pretty much the same as it has been ever since they started doing that type of question for this course. The chosen areas are taken from the topics of the final book and are “understanding specific learning difficulties” (dyslexia and dyspraxia), “children and the legal system”, “health psychology: children and development”, “autism and developmental psychology” and “psychology and education: understanding teaching and learning”.

What you have to do is research your chosen topic and find a couple of journal references that you can refer to in your answer. Obviously you can do a lot of work on that answer and in practical terms the question is basically a small research project. What is a problem is that you can’t refer to any notes you’ve made during the exam so you basically need to remember your answer and write it out which seems a little silly to me. One other little problem is that you’ve only about an hour to write the thing out which limits the text to no more than about 1000 words ie a little longer than this post. At the moment, I have sort-of eliminated the “legal system” and “health psychology” as I don’t really like the look of either. My front runner amongst the remaining ones is currently “specific learning difficulties” although I could be talked into the autism or education themes.

However, the biggest problem with this question is an ethical one. Clearly the tutor could provide major league assistance with this one but obviously that’s not the thing that they should be doing since, as always, it should be one’s own work. This is presumably why the OU have sent out one of their missives on the matter. It does leave open the question of study groups and that’s one that I’m not entirely clear on right now so I guess it’ll have to be brought up soonish. Assuming (unlikely I suspect) that our group were all to select the same topic and work on at least the research aspect together, how does that square with the “no collaboration on writing” guidance from the OU? In the past once or twice I’ve been in a group where we needed to rail back on, for example, seeking comments on draft assignments but this seen question seems to have a whole lot more scope for ethical dilemmas like that.

The internet presents us with yet another problem. There are several bloggers talking about the course and that’s created what is, in effect, a sort-of loose study group with, for example, notes very kindly provided by Tim. I gather that a growing number of ED209 students are relying on his notes which will present the first problem for them as presumably he’ll only be doing notes on his chosen topic in the final book. However, what if he were to provide references that he’d researched for that question too? For that matter, others have already put on the full text of their TMAs online and they or others could, in principle, put the full text of their seen question online too. One might think that the university policy on plagiarism would have something to say about that and it does but in general terms their rules are aimed at stopping people selling TMAs (a policy that seems less than effective going by the frequent sales of them on ebay) and don’t really address the issue of people simply publishing them on blogs and whatnot.

I’ve managed to drop another week courtesy of the last assignment but should pick it up again as there’s a week allocated in the schedule for catching up with things so, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be back with my 4 week lead time in about a months time or perhaps a bit less as it didn’t take me nearly so long as I’d expected to get through the material on Sunday as quite a lot of it was covered in the English course last year.

Since online photos are generally only around, say, 300 pixels by 200 ie 60,000 pixels, you might think that it doesn’t really matter what camera you choose for taking photos intended exclusively for online use.

In theory, that might be correct but in reality it’s a theory that doesn’t hold much water.

First off, if you take photos of fast-moving objects such as in a car race you’ll soon find that a compact digital is very hard to use because there’s quite a delay between pressing the button and the photo actually being taken. Try the same thing with a digital SLR and you’ll find that the photo is taken almost instantly. The difference is very noticeable and makes taking images of cars in races and similar very easy vs virtually impossible.

The larger image size lets you crop out parts of the image without reducing the quality as displayed or printed. To be fair, the increasing resolution of even quite cheap cameras these days sometimes overtakes that of low end SLRs so this point is less of an issue than it was even last year and probably by next year both types of camera will have similar resolution.

There’s also the issue of accessories that are available for SLRs which you simply can’t get for compact cameras. The single thing that’ll make the most noticeable difference to your photos is probably the ability to use bounce flash on an SLR which eliminates red-eye but goes way beyond that.

Finally, even if the compact camera has the same resolution as the SLR, the larger lens on the SLR makes a considerable difference. So much so, that it’s quite noticeable even in images shrunk down for the Internet. Consider the two images here. The larger flash has obviously made quite a difference and the flat feel of the photo taken with the compact is replaced with a more 3D quality. However, look at the detail in the two photos: the door on the SLR photo is much clearer.

What about the cost though? Well, these days the increasing sophistication of the compacts is taking their price upwards whilst the SLRs are generally getting cheaper. Net effect is that, at the moment, you’re looking at paying around 50% more for an SLR vs a good compact.

The biggest plus point of the compacts is that they are small and therefore, in some cases, you may find that it’s much more practical for you to take photos on a regular basis with one as you’ll clearly not be carrying around an SLR everywhere.