Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

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.

I have to confess to being one of those addicted to browsing prospectuses. Long ago it wasn’t really a problem as there really wasn’t much chance of me upping sticks to move somewhere or other just to do a course but these days it’s different as there are dozens of universities around the world collectively offering thousands of different courses in a distance learning format ie you can do them from pretty much anywhere.

The selection of courses available in this kind of format has grown dramatically over the years with, apparently, the only frontier remaining being medicine although even there you can pick up nursing level qualification; it’s just that you can’t get to be a doctor that way. You can actually pick up doctorates by distance learning (real ones that is, not the “send us $250 and we’ll send you your qualification” variety) but seemingly in just about every field apart from medicine.

Just recently I came across the arts equivalent of the Open University which is the Open College of the Arts which offers a creative arts degree with specialisms ranging from art history to painting. Now, I would have expected the art history and writing specialisms (also offered by the OU) in that they’re clearly doable at a distance. However, it was surprising to see that you can also so painting and sculpture this way too and from the beginner level too. Even more surprising was the geographic spread of people doing courses with them with people from seemingly every corner of the globe if a scan of their forum is any guide (yes, I know, distance learning places should be global, but usually they aren’t). Price-wise it seems broadly similar to the OU but the tutorials operate rather differently with one to one tuition being the norm although groups do form to extend the tuition time when in-person tution is offered (overall it works out around £4000 for the degree). It also seems to operate a much freer approach to the courses with up to two years in principle to do each module vs the very fixed timetable of the OU and there don’t seem to be fixed start dates either.

Interestingly, it was Baron Young who was behind both these organisations and got the OCA going when the OU figured that teaching degree level creative arts wasn’t possible. On a separate note he was also the guy behind the Consumers’ Association… ’tis quite an achievement to be behind three organisations of that calibre but they’re merely three from quite a long list of rather significant outfits that he had a hand in forming.

I’m very tempted by the writing and painting specialisms. Still, it’s the first time I’ve had a leaf through their offerings so it might be a while before I get around to signing up (it was 16 years between first read of an OU prospectus and doing the first course for me!).

One of the things that you notice when you’ve done a few courses with the Open University is that over the years successive courses tend to get better and the rough edges disappear.

So, it’s a bit of a surprise to find that the workload for the Child Development course is far from even week to week. Within the current book some chapters have taken nearly twice as long to do as others which is a really major change week on week. Now, you’d expect that there could be, say, 10% or so of a difference between weeks or that there could well be a somewhat more substantial difference over the course of a month or two. But doubling from one week to the next and then back to the normal level the following week seems very unusual.

Even more puzzling perhaps is that one would have thought that the educational psychologists would have had some input to the course design. Or perhaps, that lumpiness is a required feature for effective learning? I guess I’ll have to wait ’til I do an educational psychology course to find out!

Now that we’ve really started to ramp up the exercise aspect of our weight-loss programme we’re at the point where we’re hitting the buffers on the actual weight loss since the muscle that we’re building is heavier than the fat that we’re losing.

Now you might think that there can’t be a whole lot of difference in the density of muscle and the density of fat but in fact the difference is around 18% which is pretty substantial obviously. In reality though it’s probably going to hit us most in the early stages of our more intensive exercise programme, the thinking being that presumably there’ll be a much higher percentage gain in muscle in those early stages than later on. Thus whilst my weight seems to have stopped dropping over the last week or so, there is definitely less of me hanging out than there was a week earlier.

Later on it should be different in that maintaining the diet plan whilst simultaneously upping the ante with the exercise programme should eventually (within a week or two given the programme we’re following) reach the point where the gain in muscle levels off whilst the fat continues to disappear. I suspect that the weight would go down relatively quickly at that point but we’ll see in a few weeks time.

One wonders how many people who’d like to “lose weight” pack in their exercise programmes in the early stages due to their gaining weight from all that extra muscle that they’re building?

Incidently, one other trend that we’ve noticed in the gym this time around compared to our experience five years back is that there seems to be a massive growth in the use of personal trainers. Previously you’d have seen one every couple of days but now there are three or four going round with people every day. We’re starting to feel left out as we don’t have one but Wendy says I can’t have the blonde one that promises “great one on one fun” 🙂

Somehow or other I managed to pick up 78% on the latest assignment which is pretty good going as initially I hadn’t a clue as to how to properly approach the semi-essay part of it.

It was quite a strange kind of assignment as it was largely based on the methodology book rather than the main course text. That dictated quite a different structure than the typical essay response ending up in the question being split between five short definitions and a longer piece on experimental ethics.

As always at degree level, the “definitions” required are quite complete ones with a full definition of each term in the question and examples to show that you actually understand it which, of course, wouldn’t be shown were you just to write out a straight dictionary style definition.

The ethics part was based around an experiment first carried out in the 1960s and replicated for the BBC/Open University series Child of Our Time a few years ago. Basically it involved kids looking at a video of an adult attacking a doll with three different endings to the video: the adult getting told off for his actions, getting rewarded for them and finally nothing happening to him. There are loads of ethical problems in reproducing an experiment like this, most obviously being that you already know that the kids will become more violent after watching the video (yes, folks, watching violent programming does affect them) you know ahead of time that you will be harming in this way.

Psychological experiments on children seem to be quite a minefield in terms of ethics. For instance, it would be really handy to be able to experiment on the effect of removing, say, the father from the family unit but clearly that’s not a runner ethically or morally and many other potential experiments are just as problematical. In these cases you can use what are called “natural experiments” where the conditions you’d liked to have had in your experiment have happened naturally. For example, if the father leaves naturally. However, even there you’ve problems as one assumes that how the family functioned prior to the divorce would be different than if the divorce hadn’t happened ie the “experiment” isn’t running entirely as one would ideally need it to run.

Still, a pleasing mark. Let’s hope that I can keep it up for the next assignment which I gotta get going on soon…