7.3 What is poetry? Have you always wanted to try to write poetry but never quite managed to start? This unit is designed to illustrate the techniques behind both the traditional forms of poetry and free verse. You will learn how you can use your own experiences to develop ideas and how to harness your imagination. The unit introduces common techniques underlying free verse and traditional forms of poetry, and how it is necessary to use these techniques in order to harness what T.S. Eliot called the ‘log
4.2 John Napier For many years, John Napier (1550–1617) spent his leisure time devising means for making arithmetical calculations easier. Just why a Scots laird at the turn of the seventeenth century should have thus devoted the energies left over from the management of his estates remains a puzzle. Up to the publication of his description of logarithms in 1614, three years before his death, Napier was best known to the world for his Protestant religious treatise A plaine discovery of the whole Revelat
4.1 Overview For a small country whose population has never been much in excess of five million, Scotland seems to have more than its fair share of famous men and women. Native Scots or those descended directly from them have been the recipients of some 11 per cent of all the Nobel Prizes that have been awarded. In this section of the OpenLearn Scotland collection, we look in detail at the lives and work of four great Scots: John Napier, James Clerk Maxwell, Robert Owen and David Hume.
3.7 Finding information in science and nature This unit will help you to identify and use information in Science and Nature, whether for your work, study or personal purposes. Experiment with some of the key resources in this subject area, and learn about the skills which will enable you to plan searches for information, so you can find what you are looking for more easily. Discover the meaning of information quality, and learn how to evaluate the information you come across. You will also be introduced to the many different ways of orga
3.6 Oil industry in Scotland Photographs can solicit powerful emotional responses and are often used to draw people's attention to issues or to raise awareness of demands. This unit takes a look at how one set of photographs, used as part of a particular demand, was created. It looks at the process of producing images by exploring a series of photographs made with the intention of affecting the way a globalised industry is seen and understood. The industry in question is the oil industry based in Aberdeen, on Scotland's
3.3 The Tay Bridge disaster This unit will analyse a particular historical event, the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. The disaster came towards the end of a period of intense development of the railway system in the UK. The bridge had materials that were well known: cast iron was used for the columns and wrought iron for the trussed girders. The construction of the bridge was, at the time, the largest single engineering project in Britain, the Tay estuary being about two miles wide near Dundee, and the bridge was the longe
3.4 Audio activity Using audio is a very idiosyncratic practice amongst Open University students. Some listen to them in the car, others on a personal stereo on the train, some while washing up, others at their desk. Flexibility of use is certainly one of their virtues. However you use them, some of the following may be useful guidelines. Read the notes for the activity before you listen. At the very least try and fix in your head or note down the main purpose of the a
1.2.1 Summary The passport example illustrates the tension between how I see myself and how I am seen by others, between the personal and the social. Institutions such as the state play an important role in constructing identities. Difference is very clearly marked in relation to national identity. Such official categories contain omissions and cannot fully accommodate the personal investment we have in our identities, n
References 3.3 Bringing it all back home: the ‘problem estate’ It would be mistaken to deduce from the discussion thus far that problem populations and problem places only occur elsewhere. The focus of this section is to consider how such understandings also emerge in the UK. Our case study here is formed around a specific type of place which in recent decades has increasingly come to be perceived as a ‘problem’ – the deprived council estate. 1 Aims of the unit The aims of this unit are to: Explore some of the many complex and different ways in which questions of social justice and of inequality come to be seen in terms of the deficient behaviour of different problem populations. In particular, it explores how particular groups of people and particular places come to be identified as ‘problem populations’ and how social welfare and crime concerns intersect in the management of these populations. 4.1 Learning from video clips This video clip is a short feature that provides you with guidance on how to learn from video materials.