Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

The site went live yesterday with the chapters of the Human Past that we’ll be reading loaded onto it.

Fortunately they’re proper PDFs so I can resize the fonts for the reader but unfortunately they’re landscape 2-up with ain’t readable in full-screen PDF even on the netbook never mind on the reader. However, it’s possible to split these and there’s even a script to do this.

Unfortunately the OU haven’t bothered to title the PDFs properly so they’re all listed as “A251 The Human Past” with no chapter title; I’ll have to change that at some point as it’s a pain finding the right chapter to read.

Aside from the book and assignment booklet there’s not a whole lot to download from the website as the majority of the various resources referred to are online. Going by the number of them I’d say that the online reading will add up to 50% to the book reading but it seems to vary a good deal between the weeks.

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.

I’m nearly through the first week of the course now which hasn’t taken quite so long as the 16 hours it suggests. It looks like about two to three hours will be enough to complete although the course hasn’t really quite started in the first unit of the course so that could change.

The first week is basically introducing the course although it doesn’t go overboard as there aren’t massive numbers of different booklets as some courses have these days. Some hand-holding is there too as this is billed as a potential first OU course but it’s not too onerous eg it tells you to read the book organisation section in the course book.

The first bits that you do are mainly introducing archaeology as a subject so there’s a few exercises on that interspersed with readings from the course text (hereinafter known as the doorstop) and listening to the first track from the CD. So it moves on from the “digging things up” aspect to introduce a few terms covering things like experimental archaeology and distinguishing it from history (anything relying on written records). It gives the impression that there’s a bit of fighting going on between the archaeologists and the historians over ownership of some parts of the past. Actual archaeology doesn’t start ’til the last reading of the week where it begins to introduce the development of agriculture or at least it seems to as I’ve not read that bit yet.

Going by the course guide, the course motors on at a fair rate. Work on the first TMA begins after three weeks of reading so I don’t think much is expected from the first one as there will only be about 2 1/2 weeks of reading for it. Thus far the reading is quite heavy going at the moment as it’s a totally new subject for me so there’s lots of new terminology.

I see from the website that I’ve just acquired a tutor. Rumour has it that the tutors are supposed to call in the week before the course officially starts although I don’t think there are any in-person tutorials with this course.

The package for this arrived the same day as the astronomy exam which gave me a chance to have a first look in that brain dead period following exams.

I wasn’t planning on having a look at it quite so soon but a look at the calendar changed that plan pretty sharpish. The first assignment is due in the first week of December, only four weeks after the course starts with the next ones due at the start of January and February with the ECA due on March 18th. The March 18th date suits me in some ways as it means this course will be finished before S204 gets fully under way and may get it completed earlier. Downside of that is that it’s a fairly hectic schedule for the archaeology course.

Anyway, what I’m going to try and do is to make a proper start on A251 this week and, perhaps, build on that two week lead time if I can. Slightly messing that up is that I also want to get the medicine course completed over the next couple of weeks too although I should be able to do that in my new “Kip McGrath” slot.

So what’s in the box? There’s the absolutely massive (784 pages) and heavy The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, the course guide, letter from the course team and the assignment booklet (unusual in these “everything online” days) plus a CD. Going by the course guide, the book is available in PDF on the website but that doesn’t open ’til the 28th so I’ll have to lug the doorstop round ’til then. Going by my brief flick through the early parts of the course guide, it requires access to online reference texts quite a lot.

The course guide seems to weave in the content of the course text in almost as though it were an OU written text which is good in the sense that it comes across almost as though a real-life tutor were sitting with you but not so good in that you need to cart both books around all the time (roll on the arrival of the PDF!). Actually, for a change they seem to have gone out of their way to write it as though you had the tutor beside you rather than the more formal OU style.