Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Quite surprisingly to me, despite dropping three weeks thanks to that swine flu thing, I seem to be pretty much on schedule once again.

Most amazing to me was that I managed to get the archaeology assignment completed and in on time. Whilst the text is hard enough to keep a handle on due to the sheer volume of reading that’s required, it turns out that the second assignment was relatively easy to do (says he not having the mark back yet). The third one looks like it will be more complicated but then assignments can look impossible to do sometimes before you sit down and make a start on them.

I’ve made another burst of progress with the medicine course (SK185) but really need to sit down and get it finished and away this week.

As far as the reading goes, A251 is on schedule though I need to start the third assignment sometime in the next week or so. I’m on the final couple of chapters of the microbes course which is really interesting and is already helping with the initial stages of the S204 reading which I should be finishing the first chapter of this week (around a month ahead of schedule). I’m planning on pulling out the chapter summaries from the S204 books to use as the basis of my own notes; given the page count involved notes are definitely required for this one.

The TT281 DVD arrived a couple of weeks ago but as the course text is online I can’t start that for another couple of weeks. The added nuisance for it is that the ebook reader only works in Windows which means that I’m going to have to reinstall Ubuntu 10.04 to get VirtualBox operational if I can’t get a PDF copy of it.

Upcoming assignments and whatnot include medicine for the end of January, archaeology for early in February and, I think, S204 towards the end of February  by which time I think the first TT281 CMA should be due and I’ll be needing to have made a start on the archaeology ECA too. The final log-jam is basically in the February to mid-March period after which it’s back to a more sensible workload with just S204 and TT281 with the possibility of S171 continuing in the background up to April (I’m hoping to do it before the end of February).

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.

In the end I managed to get 1930 words for the second part though it doesn’t seem to be an overly lax word count for that part. That leaves a bit of a break before the client side (TT281) course starts at the end of January.

I’m expecting to do rather more work for TT281 as I’ve much less of a background in client side stuff and, of course, there’s the small matter of the overlap with both the tail end of A251 and the start of S204.

The most annoying part of TT280 (and the rest of the TT courses) is that the course material is drip-fed week by week so you couldn’t get any more than a few weeks ahead. Whilst I generally don’t run massively ahead of the course schedule, it was annoying to have to go to the website to download the course guide for each week: normally I get that done in the first week of the course. The forums were a bit hyperactive at the start and it was several weeks into the course before they calmed down enough to keep any kind of handle on what was being talked about. It would be very easy to sink below the tide of messages and some people appeared to do just that.

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.