1.1 What are key skills? Key skills underpin our ability to carry out successfully a wide range of tasks in higher education, employment and whenever and wherever we continue to learn. Developing skills is not a one-off task. It takes time, and is an active blend of actually using the skill and then thinking about what you are doing and how you are doing it. Give yourself opportunities to develop and practise your skills in different contexts – at home or at work, in clubs or societies – as well as during
9 Notes to help you complete your portfolio To complete your assessment portfolio you must include a contents page indicating how your reflective commentary in Part A and your evidence in Part B are related. An example of a suitable format for the contents page is shown in Figure 1 (first introduced in Section 4). Figure 1 (PDF, 1 page, 0.1MB) 7.1 Evidence required This part is about showing you can develop a strategy for using and improving your skills in working with others, that you can monitor your progress and can evaluate your overall performance and strategy. The evidence you present must show what you have done as you worked through the processes of planning strategically, monitoring, evaluating and presenting your work. Part A must relate directly to the work you have selected for Part B. You must present evidence to show you can:< 6 What you should present This assessment unit has two parts. Part A requires you to show what you did to plan, monitor, evaluate and reflect upon your skills. Part B requires you to select examples of your work that demonstrate you can use and improve your skills in working with others. Together the two parts form a portfolio of your achievements. You can use the guidance, bookmarks and skills sheets included in the OpenLearn Unit Author(s): 3 Key skills assessment units This section gives advice and guidance to help you compile and present a portfolio of selected work. You are strongly advised to read through this section so that you have an idea of what is expected. The key skills assessment units provide an opportunity for you to integrate your development of key skills with your work or study. You may choose to concentrate on skills that you need to develop and improve for your job, for a new course, or personally to help you keep abreast of new dev 1 About working with others Very few people study or work in complete isolation. Some courses now set projects and assignments that need to be completed in pairs or groups, either face-to-face or using econferencing. Even if your course does not formally require you to do this, working with others is an important part of your skills portfolio. Most jobs require you to work as part of a team, and employers value individuals who can demonstrate this. In working on a work project or an assignment with others – in p 5 Effective communication The purpose of this assessment unit is for you to create a portfolio of your work to represent you as an effective communicator within your study or work activities. This will involve using criteria to help you select examples of your work that clearly show you can use and improve your communication skills. However, by far the most important aim is that you can use this assessment process to support your learning and improve your performance overall. Communicating effectively involves a Learning outcomes After finishing this unit you should be able to: use the Windows calculator to carry out basic operations and calculate percentages; interpret and use information presented in tables and charts; be able to round numbers appropriately. Introduction Your course might not include any maths or technical content but, at some point during your course, it's likely that you'll come across information represented in charts, graphs and tables. You'll be expected to know how to interpret this information. This unit will help you to develop the skills you need to do this. This unit can be used in conjunction with openlearn unit LDT_4 More working with charts, graphs and tables, which looks into more ways to present statistical inform Open University Courses The Open University (OU) has a number of short courses that introduce you to computing, online learning and the internet. You can check out these OU course options on the Courses and Qualifications website at (accessed 8 November 2006). Among them are: TU120: Beyond Google: Working with information online 6.1 Introduction As a student, you're likely to engage in a variety of writing tasks. You'll almost certainly handle significant amounts of text and, depending on your course, perhaps also numbers or diagrams. This section looks at the different way that you write using a computer, and also provides some referencing advice. 3.2.1 How might you use it? Chat has its limitations for serious discussion, but you may find it helpful to keep in touch with other students. You might ‘meet’ with other students in your group by arranging a time once a week when you can all be online. It can really help to know that there are others out there with problems similar to your own. 2.4 See what you can do on the web The web is immense, made up of information held on computers across the world. You can find out things about any subject or topic you care to name, however obscure it might be. The section entitled Searching later in this unit provides advice and tips on searching the web and finding what you want. 2.2.4 Reading graphs and charts: extracting information When you are sure that you know what a chart or graph is all about, start to look for any main trends. Jot down for yourself a few conclusions that you think can be drawn. It often takes a little time before you can interpret the chart or graph properly. It is worth the effort, however, because information held in the form of a graph is highly patterned; and as our memories work by finding patterns in information and storing them, the information in graphs is easier to remember than informati 2.2.2 Reading graphs and charts: manipulating numbers Text is just one way of communicating information. Numbers are another way, but whether presented singly, in groups or even as tables , numbers often require a lot of work from the reader to uncover the message. A much more immediate and powerful way to present numerical information is to use graphs and charts. When you use single numbers or tables, the reader has to visualise the meaning of the numbers. Graphs and charts allow the reader to do this at a glance. To show how powerful these rep 2.1 How do we use maps? Reading about maps, I have been struck by the number of times that the idea of ‘maps as part of our everyday experience’ has been mentioned. In fact, I was thinking about it recently, when I was preparing to travel from Belfast to London. I left home with a mental map of my journey to the airport – but on the way I found that the road was blocked by a burst water main. ‘Plan B’ was to consult my local road map for the quickest alternative and, in doing so, I wondered i 3.1 Lived experience Phenomenologists seek to describe people's lived experience, meanings and consciousness (i.e. the way we perceive, think and feel). They focus on how bodies are experienced at a subjective and intersubjective (relational) level. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), an early existential philosopher, insisted on the primacy of the body, and resisted mind–body dualism, arguing for the unity of mind (or soul) and body: 1.1 Introduction To cover some of the concept of attention (we have only a unit, and there are whole books on the subject) I shall follow an approximately historical sequence, showing how generations of psychologists have tackled the issues and gradually refined and developed their theories. You will discover that initially there seemed to them to be only one role for attention, but that gradually it has been implicated in an ever-widening range of mental processes. As we work through the subject, two basic i Introduction How does the board of governors of a school work? This unit looks at the roles of Chair of Governors, Vice-chair and Clerk to the board and examines how the workload can be shared between the members. The governing body should focus on the quality and delivery of education provided by the school, not on daily management. Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. All materials included in this unit are derived from content originated at the Open University.
