Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

It’s been almost a month since I started using the ebook reader so I’m really getting settled into using it now.

Although it’s “only” got 1/2 GB of memory that’s proved not to be any kind of restriction at all. Frankly, I doubt that I’ll ever fill it with books that I’m actually going to read. The manual says that it’ll hold 350 books but I suspect that it’ll be more in reality for me (the number depends on the length of the book and if it’s illustrated). Although 1/2GB doesn’t sound like much in computer terms it’s an awful lot of books. To give you some idea of just how many books you’re really talking about, consider that the library in our son’s school has “only” 10,000 (about 14GB) and in terms of footage that 1/2GB is equivalent to roughly 7 shelves of books each 5 foot long.

Actually those stats make for some sad reading in some ways because I suspect that once these readers drop some more in price the day can’t be long off when libraries will cease to exist, at least in their current form. Even now, if you get one of the connected readers you can buy books directly from the reader so in theory you have access to a library of millions of books regardless of how much memory your particular reader has.

What’s it like using it though? Well, one “problem” that I’ve encountered is that I find that I read more with it than when I’m reading the equivalent “real” book. That’s starting to become a slight problem in that I’m moving further ahead of the course schedule for both the human biology and the astronomy courses that I’m doing at the moment than I was planning to. Thus it seems likely that I will complete all of the reading for the biology course around the end of this month rather than the end of the following month as per my schedule. It’s also extremely useful for the astronomy course which has a whole bunch of books amounting to a couple of inches thick in total which I can flick between as necessary, something that I just wouldn’t have done with the paper books.

Although in an ideal world I’d have a screen on the reader about A5 size rather than the A6 size that I currently have, that’s really only because of the diagrams that are in my textbooks. They are readable on the A6 screen but barely. Having said that, with an A5 size reader I wouldn’t be carrying it around all the time so I’d not get as much reading done.

Colour would definitely be nice for the textbooks and that’ll come in a few years time I expect but normal books are in black and white anyway so I suspect that colour isn’t really a big deal for many people using the readers at the moment.

Availability of books hasn’t been an issue for me as yet though there seem to be a lot of ebooks available these days and the number will only increase over time. There are loads of classics available free too although if you’re really keen you can buy these too (they’re the ones sitting at the lower end of the price range usually). In practical terms, you can get a fairly sizeable chunk of ex-copyright (ie older than 75 years) books ranging from Shakespeare to the popular books of the 1930s (and some later ones too) free. That includes such things as the massive Webster dictionary of 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica of the same vintage (though not called that for copyright reasons) and a whole bunch of stuff that sounds really impressive to have on your reader. Included amongst that is the “5 foot bookshelf” of classics which dates from the early 1900s and from whence I did my shelf calculations above.

If you’re flicking through the demo readers in the shop you might think that the slow screen refresh rate is just way too slow. However, it actually seems to work out at close to the speed at which you’d be able to turn a page in a normal book and it’s best to think of it in those terms. You might flick through computer screens fairly quickly but you don’t do that with books, do you? The only downside of that is that video obviously isn’t possible so science-fiction style animated books aren’t a runner with the current generation of readers but wait a few years and they’ll turn up.

One not so obvious point is that people don’t know what you’re reading. So, the OH has the impression that I’m constantly reading the textbooks which is good in some ways, although not so good in that she thinks I’m totally obsessed with the courses.

Definitely a very worthwhile thing to get.

Well, not quite a week as I really only started it on Wednesday but it’s enough to begin to get a feel for it I think.

The first thing that struck me about it was that it’s a course that uses an awful lot of different resources. As well as the course guide and course book there’s a series of booklets on “activities” (which covers a lot of different stuff), several course forums to look at, the course website and a series of practical activities related to the assignments (which aren’t, yet, on the site).

In fact, over the last few days I’ve been looking at the course guide, observing guide, first course book and the first observing activity. If that’s a typical week it’ll be quite a large course. So far I’ve been doing pretty much all the reading on the little Reader which is just as well since that chunk of books weighs a fair bit. Downside of that is that the PDFs don’t come out so well with so many diagrams so I think I’ll be needing to read some on the computer (very few are available as printed texts).

I’d have liked to have a look at the assignments but they’re not on the course website yet. The specimen exam is though and, at the moment, it looks a pretty scary affair but, hopefully, that’ll change over the course of the next nine months.

So far it seems like the interesting course I expected to, albeit with quite a lot more work to do than expected.

Now that I’ve come across the overall results for ED209 I’m finding that they’re quite fascinating reading.

For a start, despite everyone knowing about one of the questions in advance, 7 people didn’t answer it!

As expected, most people did the questions on the first two books as the third was a) perceived as harder than the other two and b) much thicker than them. In fact, over twice the number did the other questions and a mere 15% did the question on categorisation and early language development.

The pass rate on the seen question hit 97% and the marks on it were higher across the board with 16% on distinction compared to 7 to 10% at that level on the other questions.

The overall pass rate was 87% which implies that those that failed were largely confined to those that left the exam early and who hadn’t answered three questions. Although that might sound to some non-OU folk like it’s just a matter of sticking through to the end, the OU system is designed to weed people out as early as possible so you’d expect a fairly high pass rate in exams.

Finally, the big numbers on the psychology courses mean that there will be over 200 people doing the resit in April compared to around 500 for a typical normal exam in other subjects. Since the seen question for April is the same as it was in October, it’s unlikely that there’ll be much discussion as to how to go about answering it in forums or blogs though with the 97% pass rate on it that shouldn’t be an issue.

The exam result wasn’t supposed to be in until Friday but the scary message “course result” was there this evening. Somehow, no matter how confident you are, course results are always something of an unknown quantity and therefore scary.

As it turned out, I did even better than I was expecting to and slightly better than I’d been doing in the assignments which is exactly what’s been happening for the last few years.

Also on the OU front, the course texts for the Astronomy course (S282) arrived this morning. Although I’d really like to get going on that I’m going to need to get at least the cardiology course out of the way first I think.

When you’re trying to run a life in two different countries like we are at the moment there’s something of a nightmare in terms of administration load that can backup really fast.

This morning has been one of the days when I’ve tried to make major inroads with it all. Sadly the piles are still there but at least a number of important things have been sorted out this morning.

For a start there’s a heap of communication that needed done re selling our place in France. The combination of French administration plus time delays courtesy of the post mean that it’s sailing along at a snail’s pace and a month can easily go by with no visible signs of progress. Actually, a whole month did go by whilst we were waiting on a letter (nope, won’t fax, won’t email) from one place which I think was down to it being caught in the strikes in London.

Next up was sorting out some stuff re my OU courses. I’ve the flights booked for the residential now which leaves nothing more needing done with that until after the human biology exam in June. Also done was signing up for the Astronomy (S282) course which starts in February. That’s one that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time now but between one thing and another (well, mainly the modern languages degree), far too many years have gone by. That in turn should ease the path towards the astronomy residential in 2011 and indeed get my physics thinking back up to speed again in preparation for S207 in October.

Finally, there’s our Christmas letter which needed tidying up before we get all the cards away. As usual, the prompt for doing that has been the arrival of the Christmas card from Faye in Canada which has consistently been the first one that we’ve received ever since she started sending them.