Foreign Perspectives

One of the quite noticeable features of the Open University is that they use your information to promote courses in much the same way as Amazon use your previous purchases to promote books to you.

Thus, once you’re entering the sign-up period for your next course you can expect a little email noting a few courses that you might be interested in. Typically if you’re following broadly the normal path towards a degree these will make some kind of sense. Thus whilst I was doing the French sequence in the French Diploma, I’d get an email basically letting me know that it was time to sign up for the next course in the sequence. However, if you’re not following a standard sequence, the suggestions can be just ask wacky as those from Amazon frequently are.

Since we’re in somewhat more difficult financial times than usual, they’re pulling out the stops to promote courses even more than normal at the moment. Thus even small courses like Plants and People (S173) which would normally only get a brief mention as part of a general promotion of short courses was pushed quite heavily during the SXR270 summer school and has just had another push from the course manager yesterday. Oddly, the summer school for next year hasn’t, yet, had any sales pitch although perhaps they’re assuming that we’ll do that anyway.

What they haven’t done, yet, is the more sophisticated joined-up marketing that some places get up to. Thus, although presumably S173 would help with the plants residential (SXR375) there hasn’t been any cross-marketing of the two of them.

Although everyone uses their outdoor space quite a bit in the summer, once the cooler weather kicks in that usage drops very quickly indeed.

It doesn’t need to be like that though. There are an increasing number of ways in which you can extend the period of the year through which you can use all that outdoor space. Conservatories are an obvious addition which can be seen sprouting up at what sometimes seems an alarming rate in some areas. They essentially bring the outdoors inside for you and are usable throughout the year whatever the weather.

It’s also possible to look at the range of outdoor fireplaces which are a little bit more limited in terms of year-round use but let you use the outdoor spaces well into the Autumn months. They’re also different in nature to the conservatories as they’re taking the indoors outside rather than bringing the outdoors inside. Essentially they let you use your garden directly over a much longer time of year.

In the relatively slow summer months the chats on the Open University forums tend to wander well off the topic now and again and sometimes come around to what people are thinking of doing over the coming winter months.

Chats like that can go just about anywhere as people chip in with their own plans with the current “in” topics being multiple degrees and ebook readers.

Surprisingly it can be rather easy to pick up a second degree depending on what your course choices have been. For example, if you do a purely biological degree it’s usually a matter of two more years to pick up a chemistry degree because many of the biology courses are also chemistry courses thus in my own case it looks like about one more year will be enough to do the trick. Similarly the physics people often consider adding just a couple of courses and picking up a maths degree which works because they need to do quite a lot of maths courses to be able to do the physics courses.

As for the ebook readers, well a combination of them being considered a “good thing” and Amazon dropping the price to £109 has led to quite a number of orders being placed. Now, if only they’d waited for a few months and seen the colour version on the horizon. Still, that’s next years Christmas present sorted 🙂

It sounds like a daft question if you’ve got one but isn’t quite so daft if you don’t so I thought a potted guide would be in order.

Although in theory there are loads of them out there, in the UK for practical purposes there are basically two makes with a total of four models.

The Sony ones let you read PDFs and a number of other formats of which epub is the main one that they use. They have two ways of enlarging the text though the pocket edition only does the first one. The first way is through enlarging the text but not the images with the pocket edition offering effectively six sizes (three portrait, three landscape) and the touch edition ten (five portrait, five landscape) ie the six of the pocket plus four larger sizes. How this works with PDFs varies depending on how the PDF was prepared but generally you find that the photographs appear but diagrams generally don’t. The second way is a zoom facility only available on the touch edition which lets you magnify the PDF image. This would be perfect but doesn’t let you move to the next page so you’ve to unzoom the image, move to the next page and zoom it up if you want to do that. In practical terms I use the font enlargement method nearly all the time and it’s rare that I use the PDF zoom facility. You can add notes and highlighting on the touch edition which sounds useful but is very hard on the batteries and in practice I’ve never really used that facility. The pocket edition has a 5″ screen, the touch a 6″ one; it makes quite a difference to the reading with the larger screen but you get used to the smaller one and for some reason I find it easier to get through the reading with less words on the page but that might just be me. Price-wise it’s aroud £140 for the pocket edition, around £220 for the touch version.

I gather that the Amazon versions offer similar facilities using Kindle format as default but they also handle PDFs. Big plus points are that they are a lot cheaper (£109 for the basic 6″ version) and that you can buy books direct from Amazon obviously (with the Sonys you buy on your computer and transfer the books to the reader later). On the book buying front, prices are generally around the hard book price level although there are thousands of free ones (eg www.gutenberg.org has over 30,000). There’s also the Kindle DX which is around £250 and gives you a 10″ screen. They both come with a little keyboard for note-taking though as I say I’ve never really used the facility on the Sony so this isn’t a deciding point.

To transfer documents (which can include your own documents in Word and PDF form) you connect the device to your computer where it comes up as another disk drive; just drag and drop from there. In principle you can also use the supplied software (or Calibre which is free and better) but drag and drop works fine. With the Kindle you can email PDFs to your Kindle (but they charge you for that) or buy using the one-click facility. Both can charge up via the USB link but it’s much faster to plug them into the mains (you need to get a Sony PSP charger [about £20] to do that, the cheap Kindle comes with the charger).

One thing to watch is that effectively all the readers are black and white. Colour is available but at around £800 so in reality it’s probably best to wait a couple of years for that. Most of the time you don’t miss that but, depending on what you read, there are times when colour would be really handy. Due to limitations of the technology you can’t run videos. Page turning usually takes a fraction of a second but can be longer on complex pages. It’s difficult to define “complex” in this context as it depends on how the authors have prepared the page so you couldn’t tell by simply looking at a page in a book if it were “complex”.

The other major limitation if you’re buying books is that there is currently no second hand market. Basically you pay close to the full hardback price and can get nothing back if you’ve finished with a book you’ve bought.

If I were starting again I’d go for the cheap Kindle basically because it’s the cheapest.

However, do you really need one of these things? Certainly if you’re only reading the odd paperback the answer is probably not as not only are you looking at hardback prices, you also need to part with at least £109 to begin with. However, if you’re one of those people who need a few dozen paperbacks on holiday it’s a different matter as it is if you have access to a large library of PDFs like many students.

The results are in a couple of days early as these things usually are.

A year ago I’d have laughed at anyone who’d have said I’d be going down the biology route to my science degree but it turned out that the human biology course was both fascinating and much more doable than I’d ever expected it to be. Fascinating in terms of all aspects of the course really as pretty much all of it was new to me. That newness was something I’d have expected to make the course somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for me to do but in practice, whilst it was certainly hard going at the start, the fascination drove me on.

For a variety of reasons I’m embarking on my first “proper” biology course next February and, going by the extracts of the course texts that I’ve seen already, it looks like it will be a similar mix of fascinating and difficult. I’ll see how that mix pans out by Christmas next year when the results are in.