Foreign Perspectives

I thought that I’d be well ahead yesterday with the TMA but it turned out that the coding phase of the assignment took a whole lot longer than expected so I’m only getting around to writing up the results section this evening.

You’d think that going through about an hour of video and assigning codes to the various responses that the participants made wouldn’t take a whole lot longer than an hour but it does. The snag is, of course, that you need to start and stop the video almost constantly throughout just to keep up with typing up the coding of it. Thus, instead of taking an hour to watch it you’re looking at something closer to twice that which is a) longer and b) a whole lot more boring. I don’t think I’m cut out for coding psychology experiments.

Anyway, now it’s on to analyse the results and write up something reasonably sensible about them. Hopefully, that won’t take nearly so long as the coding did ‘cos I need to get onto writing up the discussion pretty soon and it’s looking like quite a busy week.

I actually made a small start on this towards the end of July but August just pulls away from me every year so I’m only getting back to it now.

As always the TMAs on this course seem harder than you’d expect for a level 2 course so there’s quite a lot of work to be done between now and Friday. Typically too, the suggested timings for the various parts of this practical are way out: it took ages just to get the coding sheet sorted out yesterday and it’ll probably take getting on for a couple of hours to do the coding of the two videos today.

Having said that, once that phase is done the actual writing of the text doesn’t look like it will take overly long. Of course, I thought that with the last TMA too and sometimes it took a couple of hours just to write a few hundred words on it by the time I’d thought about what to write and looked up all the references. Lots of work for just 72% 🙁

Worryingly the course website for SK277 (my next course) opened up on Friday. That let me do the first part of work on that, namely downloading all the textbooks and whatnot that course teams upload these days. As that course starts in the first week of October and ED209 doesn’t finish ’til October 21st I’m planning on reading over the course text for it starting now thus spreading the October workload over two months.Usually, I’d have started at full speed with it now but I don’t think that’s really a runner with the overlap and I’ll be aiming to build up my preferred one month lead time after the ED209 exam is out of the way.

Anyway, must head off to get going on that coding now…

The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become.

At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale of things. Sounds great to not apply the charge to the whole of Northern Ireland but seeing as we represent about 1/40th of the UK population it’s not such a big deal as it first sounds. That said, I can’t see that exemption staying forever so I was curious about what other exemptions that I might be able to avail of should the need arise in subsequent years.

First up are foundation degrees however the problem with most (all?) of those is that you need your employer to sponsor you and they’re in a fairly limited range of fields at the moment too. That said, several of the courses in my current plan are within foundation degrees. Why then should someone hit by ELQ have to pay, say, double the cost for doing a course when someone else doing the very same course and with the very same prior qualifications be paying half as much? No reason really apart from the crazy nature of the ELQ funding debate.

Although it seems impossible to get a fully definitive list of the exemptions this does include certain medical subjects, youth studies and social work which creates some loopholes for me. Psychology isn’t exempt from ELQ but the majority of psych courses that I’ll be doing over the next couple of years can be allocated against a Diploma in Health Sciences which is presumably exempt and most of them can go towards a youth worker or social work qualification too. Incidently, note that the SIRV (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) subjects aren’t exempt from ELQ.

What the regulations don’t appear to even consider is that students don’t always have to be studying towards a specific degree. That’s much more apparent in the case of the Open University but it also applies in many universities. As far as I know one could allocate courses against an exempt qualification (or series of them if necessary) in most universities right up to the penultimate year; in the case of the OU it would be possible to do this right up to the end of the final course. What happens then if someone “changes” their mind at the last minute and picks up the qualification that they really wanted all along? There’s quite a substantial difference in funding (around £4k for non-ELQ, perhaps £16k for ELQ) so I’d have thought that a lot of people would be looking into this possibility.

Overall, it sounds very much like a Gordon Brown “savings” plan ie saves lots of money on paper but in reality it just adds to administration costs and doesn’t save anything at all.

We were on the go from our afternoon departure from our place in France right through to 4am on Sunday morning which was as tiring as it sounds. Worse actually as thanks to the pretty stormy weather during the crossing I was the only one that wasn’t feeling a bit off.

That wouldn’t have been sooo bad but then James caught his usual Belfast asthma as midnight on Sunday approached so it was off to the hospital with him for another 3am bedtime on Monday morning. As if that wasn’t enough school was starting on Tuesday so we’d heaps to do on Monday.

It was John’s first day in school today which went really well. We’d been expecting awful things from him as he’s been with us every day his entire life up to today. The really big problem was getting him out of bed as school started at 9.30 and he usually doesn’t wake up ’til well after 10. That did show though: he conked out in the car on the way home and had a couple of hours of sleep when we got home.

Surprisingly we managed to get James to his Kumon class. Two months of that over the summer has really brought on his reading and it looks like he’ll be where he should have been by Christmas or so.

Tomorrow should be a relatively normal day though we’ve a heap of things to catch up with and it looks like it’ll be a week or more before we’re back to normal.

When we moved here it took us four years before all the various authorities recognised that we were actually living in France. That started quite a flurry of back-administration obviously and it still isn’t entirely cleared up (eg we still get three separate bills for the TV license).

However, it would appear that it’s going to take quite a substantial amount of time for the authorities to recognise that we have now left France and are no longer French residents. Although we ceased to be French resident in January we are still receiving reminders that we’ve not paid various social security and health charges some eight months on.

It’s not that we have ignored their demands for money though. In fact, we informed them in January that we had left, then again almost every month since using their Internet service, email, fax, letter and even recorded delivery letter. In fact, it would appear that all missives from us are completely ignored. Last week we even resorted to writing to them in English as it would appear that they don’t understand French!

Actually, that last letter from us was in a response to a demand from them that it would actually be illegal for us to pay!

Perhaps another couple of years will see it sorted out…