Foreign Perspectives

The package for this arrived the other day though it’s another couple of weeks before the website opens.

As well as the book (200 pages!) and assignment guide (but not the actual assignments) there’s a DVD which seems to have loads of videos on it and the digital microscope program. Sadly they don’t send out proper digital microscopes any more so this is just a simulation by way of the DVD although I imagine that they’d have some health and safety issues around sending out slides with some of the microbes these days.

The plan is that I set this course aside for a couple of months ’til I get SK185 finished off (the ECA needs more thought than expected), TT280 finished and the first A251 TMA out of the way. Essentially I’m thinking of this as a warm-up for S204 which should be turning up after Christmas so there’s no rush to get moving on it and I’m aiming for the second ECA submission date which is in late April.

You’d think that the free creche within IKEA was aimed at those shopping there who don’t want to drag the kids around the shop with them but it isn’t really.

Although I’m sure that they originally intended that, what’s happened since is that it has become too popular, at least in the afternoons. Thus when you turn up at the shop your creche slot (it’s for up to 10 year olds) is generally a couple of hours later so you either drag the kids around and then plop them in the creche or you go to it specially.

Our little guys thought it was better than Indiana Land so have added that to one of the play areas that they’ll be asking to be taken back to. What I think we’ll do next time is to book a slot in the morning and drop them in for the 45 minutes after school.

I wonder how long IKEA will continue to fork out for it now that it’s effectively become separated from the shop?

ED209 is a really big course to revise from and to pass so any help in condensing that revision is always useful as there’s an awful lot of pages in the course books. To that end, I’ve collected together all the various posts and resources relating to it right here.

Before you start there’s the matter of choosing the seen question topic. If you want a head start on this, it’s basically the same question every year and is something along the lines of “how does the theory support your chosen area”. It’s best to treat this as TMA7. In case you were wondering, yes, the question on the exam is exactly the same as the one that they give you in April/May.

Since it is such a large course, it’s best sitting back and deciding on what to revise before starting the revision. Although it’s based around the 2009 exam, that article goes over how to select what you should revise.

In 2009, those revision topics were Early cognitive development, Temperament and development, and First relationships from book 1, Gender identity, National identity, and Young consumers from book 2, Early category representation, First words, Development of children’s understanding of grammar, Executive functions, and Theory of mind from book 3.  All of these are collected in the PDF file. If that’s not enough for you, Tim has an excellent series of notes covering every chapter in book 1 to book 3; not quite so organised but with some useful gems is the information here. For book 4 you’ll need to get the notes from Erica Cox as Tim and myself thought that it would be asking for trouble to publish notes on our own topic.

Once you’ve all that done, there’s some exam preparation to be done right down to the final 24 hours when you should definitely look over your TMAs as they can come up in the exam (and did in 2009). There is a LOT of writing to be done during the exam so get yourself a decent pen.

There are two different revision weekends run for the course. These are by Erica Cox and the OU Psychological Society. I gather that Erica’s are more inspirational, the OUPS ones are more hard work. I didn’t go to either on the basis that the time would be better spent actually doing the revision rather than going to a course about doing it but if I were choosing I think I’d get Erica’s notes and go to the OUPS weekend on the basis that this would get the best of both.

Finally, for your perusal there’s the post-mortem. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the analysis of the 2009 results is that seven people didn’t answer the seen question. Worth noting too is that the large number of people leaving in the first hour or so almost certainly represent the 10% who fail the exam ie if you’re still sitting there at the end of the three hours, chances are that you’ve passed.

I was going to say “good luck” at this point but you shouldn’t need it if you use all the resources above. If you come across anything else that’s useful, let me know and I’ll mention it here.

Of the 481 students on this run of the course, all but 2 passed it with 83% getting 85% or above.

Somehow I suspect the figures for the next CMA will be rather different as it required a good deal more thinking about in comparison to the relatively easy CMA1.

As is customary with the TT CMAs, one of the questions was cancelled. There’s no official reason for that but I suspect that it’s down to the rather iffy statement in the book that smaller web designers most commonly use hierarchical structure for their sites. Whilst that may well be the “answer according to Sklar”, I’m not convinced that it’s the correct answer.

I submitted my answers for CMA2 this morning so next up is completion of SK185 before I get on to the first TMA for A251.

We were meaning to take a Halloween weekend break and had spent ages tracking down somewhere that had lots of stuff going on locally and even more time finding accommodation.

And then we looked out the window and looked up the weather forecast.

One of the roads we’d have been going along is already impassable due to the flooding and the weather for the whole weekend looks pretty dire. Somehow I suspect that we’d have ended up baling out the cottage by the lake that we were aiming for rather than going round the Halloween events that we’d picked out.

Oh well. I guess we’ll have to keep the money aside for the Christmas break instead.