Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

One of the greatest strengths of the BBC/Open University link up from years back was that you got what would today be called deep links between the two. Thus you got co-productions that could just as easily have been normal BBC documentaries or OU programmes.

Sadly, that deep linking is no longer in place thus whilst the almost glossy brochure approach of Ancient Worlds that recently finished its run on BBC2 would have complemented perfectly the global reach of World Archaeology, there are no links in either direction. In days gone by there would have been at least a mention of the World Archaeology course on the Ancient Worlds website as a “if you’d like to have more information” type of link but instead there’s a reference list to a series of books. I’m not complaining about that reference list as it gives people a way to follow up the subject in more detail if they wish but it does seem a shame that the BBC/OU crosslinking is no longer there.

Oddly, the only linking from the OU to the BBC programme is via the OU course forum and that too seems a shame as a set of DVDs of the programme wouldn’t look that out of place were they to be included with the course. In fact, they would bring the subject to life as they have for me. It’s all very well reading about places like Uruk, but actually seeing the present day ruins is quite a different experience.

I find that we don’t really think of when the kids go back to school after Christmas until it’s time for them to get the school bags packed. So it was a nice surprise to find that after we’d them all packed for today that they don’t actually go back to school until tomorrow.

That gives me a little more time to play with too. And I need it too as I’ve only just started the archaeology assignment which is due by noon on Friday. I’ll get an extension of it as the delay is basically down to the combination of food poisoning and some kind of flu-thing that felled me for getting on for three weeks. Somehow I don’t think that I’ll hit Friday but, all being well, I shouldn’t be more than a few days late.

Which leaves the medicine (SK185) ECA to complete. That shouldn’t take more than a day or two at most though. After that there’s the microbes course (S171) but it’s a background course for me so no great rush as the assignment isn’t due ’til the end of April.

That doesn’t count the main course which, for this year, is biology (S204) that has a page count easily twice that of any other course I’ve done. Having said that, the course team writing the thing got completely carried away and these days quite a lot of those pages aren’t included in the course for various reasons. For example, there are three separate strands starting from around the second month and you only need to do two of those (plants/microbes/animals) although I suspect that the choice of which two will need some thought. My theory is that I’ll do animals and microbes at the moment which’ll ease the microbe course and should help in my planned schedule over the next couple of years. That said, I’ll need some of the plants bit for my plants residential in July.

Oh, and not to forget TT281 although I’m hoping that it will fly just as quickly as TT280 did.

I was tootling along quite nicely up to last week.

The web design assignment was coming together nicely with a web site that looked reasonable and only a few hundred words shy of the target for the accompanying report. Another hour or two would complete the medicine course assignment. The reading for the archaeology course was really far ahead of schedule and it was looking like I’d be making a start on the assignment this week. Not only that but I clocked up passes in three courses on the Thursday, particularly welcome in the case of the astronomy course, the exam for which seemed to be a totally dire experience for the majority of people.

Even real life was motoring along quite nicely with all our original set of Christmas cards away getting on for two weeks before Christmas. OK, that might not seem a massive success to you, but believe me, it’s a major achievement for us. We’d managed to see the Christmas play twice and were rolling on downhill towards the kids party, Santa photos, and planned Christmas shopping. Yes, I know, we really should do the Christmas shopping earlier but at least this year we had assembled our shopping list quite early (for us, anyway).

And then I grabbed one of the German hotdogs at the Christmas market which has laid me low with food poisoning for most of the week. And there was the snow and ice which both limited our range and massive increased the time taken to get anywhere. And then there was the flu that one after the other of us managed to pick up.

That lost week has messed up the plan to do “collect at store” for a number of items which is probably no bad thing as one item is available in a thoroughly snowed in area. Supposedly the home delivery is in “two days” which sounds remarkably optimistic but there you go. I think we may need to put off Christmas for a couple of days.

Oh, and there’s the issue that the spot we’ve booked for our Christmas lunch appears to remarkably difficult to get to at the moment.

This is a course that certainly doesn’t hang around to let you admire the view. With a cut-off date of December 3rd, it was marked on the 6th.

Considering that it was my first history course since way before the A-levels I’m quite pleased with the mark. Actually, I’d have been moderately pleased with it even if I’d been doing history classes all along so definitely a decent start to the course.

At the moment, I’m in the midst of doing the TT280 ECA which requires a major change in style from the archaeology. There’s a major difference in the time I’ve been taking to do it too. So far, in the second day of working on it I’ve almost half of it complete vs somewhat longer to so the archaeology TMA.

The plan is that I complete TT280 over the next week or so, closely followed by the final question for SK185 and then it’s on to the second A251 TMA which is on the factors affecting the emergence of cities. It’s more explicit on this one that Internet references are required (which probably lost me getting on for 10% on the first one as I only added one at the last minute). The 1500 words isn’t split into two parts this time though you still need to consider old and new world sites which makes it quite a tight word limit.

Although I’m over half way through the reading for the course I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. The massive amount of reading makes for a feeling of not seeing the wood for the trees a lot of the time and in some sections it felt very much like sites were being listed just for the sake of listing them rather than furthering the argument. That reading volume also means that it’s very hard to keep a handle on the big picture and to keep in mind the sequence of events happening over the course of thousands of years and in any one of a half dozen or so separate regions. On the other hand, it’s been a fascinating journey ranging from the earliest farming in Mesopotamia around 12,000 BC through to, so far, Chinese empires in the first millennium AD.

I suspect that in practice this really needs to be a full credit course as it often feels like you’re just skating over the surface. That seems particularly to be the case with the Chinese empires which are into the historical period and for which there is oodles of documented history. For example, Confucius was only given a page when there have been entire books written on his works.

When you do several courses at a time you sometimes get a bit of a logjam of assignments. On the whole, it’s generally not so bad as you know quite a bit ahead of time when the assignments are coming up but that doesn’t stop it feeling like quite a busy period when you’ve a series of consecutive deadlines as I do now.

Coming up first is the world archaeology assignment (A251) due on December 3rd so I’m aiming to get that one completed this week. Following close behind that is the CMA for the web applications course (TT280) although I nearly completed that before breakfast on the day it arrived so I will probably finish it off and submit it over the weekend. After that it’s the final assignment for that course which I want to start on this week. Finally, it’s the completion of the final assignment for the medicines course (SK185) which shouldn’t take long.

In theory after that it’s the assignment for the microbes course (S171) but the final date for that is in April so I’m just doing that course as and when I get a few minutes. So far, I’m about 1/4 through it which means it must be nearly time to start the assignment (for short courses you can generally do the assignment as you work through the book).