3 How to reflect on your learning It is important to get into the habit of actively reflecting on your learning. This is an important skill in its own right, and will help you get the most from your study time. So, as you work though each video, we suggest that when you are writing your notes you focus your thoughts and structure your observations around three areas: 1 The process of learning from the video For example, you might ask yourself: How do I feel about le
4.1 Family and meanings? We have considered the difficulties of pinning down family definitions and meanings. We now ask whether it is indeed important to explore and unravel these complexities. Do the varieties of family meanings – or the meaning of ‘family’ itself – matter, or do they just provide a minor intellectual diversion? You may like to pause here for a moment to consider how you would answer this question for yourself. Do you think they matter, and if so, in what ways? We consider this questi
Introduction This unit explores questions about New Labour's approach to welfare reconstruction. This is linked to the unsettling and remaking of the old Welfare State by the New Right. The material is primarily an audio file, originally 27 minutes in length, and recorded in 1999. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Social Policy: Welfare, Power and Diversity (D218) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wi
Introduction This unit looks at developing reading skills in the context of using Social Science materials. This material is primarily an audio file, originally 11 minutes in length and recorded in 1988. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Social policy: welfare, power and diversity (D218) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore other courses we offer in this
2.4 The message passing idea Figure 1 shows the central idea behind the message passing paradigm. It involves an architecture in which clients and servers communicate using communication lines. In this model, in contrast with the others that are to be presented in this unit, the underlying structure of the network is visible via the communication media used to connect servers and clients and devices such as sockets, ports and server sockets which are involved in the transfer of a message from one computer to another.
4.4 Summary This section described how computers can be used in geographical applications (and in doing so it discussed maps and showed how modern maps are composed of layers of different data). It discussed the GPS to demonstrate how computers can communicate in order to solve a problem, such as navigation. It also showed how the geographical data that supports both map-making and the GPS navigation system can be presented in different forms such as a map, a list of directions, a moving grap
3 Indices In mathematics, we often need to find a shorthand way of representing information or data. Nowhere is this need more obvious than when we wish to represent something like the product of 2 multiplied by itself 2, 6, 10, 15 or even 20 times. Instead of writing 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2, we write 26. This is read (and said) as ‘2 to the power 6’; 6 is the index of the power. In general, this means that 1 Revision and exams Most likely, you are reading this unit because you feel unsure about your ability to do yourself justice in exams. You may never have taken an exam and are wondering how to prepare yourself. It may have been a long time since you took an exam, and you feel a need to refresh your technique. You may be looking for reassurance and advice because you may have had a bad exam experience in the past. Whatever your reason, we hope that this unit will help. This unit is a practical one, and we w 8.3 Exploring Although this sounds as though it may not seem very appropriate in the context of revision and exams, it is critically important that you re-explore the course as you do your revision or prepare your end-of-course assessment. Studying the materials is important as many exams and end-of-course assessments require you to step back and review the course as a whole as well as consider the component parts. This is where you may need different skills and strategies; so, try different ways of record 2.1.1 Should you stop reading to look words up? It depends. Looking up words slows you down, and you may be able to make reasonable sense of their context without having to. For example, I found it fairly easy to guess the meaning of ‘habituation’ in paragraph 8, from the way it was discussed. However, I looked it up on the internet anyway, as I happened to have my computer on. I also looked up ‘real income’ and ‘marginal tax’ and found useful clarification of their meanings. You have to decide how important a word seems 2.6 Academic skills This section has encouraged you to gather evidence about yourself. This process of learning about yourself is put forward as being a useful first step in achieving personal change. It is also a process that has used skills that are useful in becoming a successful student. You will remember from our previous discussion that these skills can be described as ‘academic skills’. The mind mapping activity above asked you to go back over what you have done in this section and produce a min 2.4.7 Problem-solving and decision-making skills Although they are closely related, problem-solving and decision-making skills are different. Problem-solving skills help you to solve problems by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Decision-making skills, on the other hand: … help you to make the best decisions possible with the information you have available. They help you map out the likely consequences of decisions, work out the importance of individual 7.3.1 Identify opportunities for using number skills Where and how will you use numerical and mathematical skills over the next 3–4 months? You may need to gather numerical information from different sources, form hypotheses about the information carried by the data, carry out statistical tests to check your hypotheses and then present your results and interpretations. Or you may be working with mathematical models (for example in engineering, environmental or financial applications) and need to understand and use formulas expressing relation 6.5 Monitoring progress This stage of the framework is about keeping track of your progress. Are you using your information literacy skills effectively for your purposes? How do you know? Could you have done things differently: made use of different facilities and expertise, taken more advantage of tutorials, training sessions or local expertise, or recognised that such support would have helped you? Monitoring your own performance and progress needs practice; try to stand back and look at what you are doing as if y 5.5 Evaluating strategy and presenting outcomes This stage of the framework focuses on identifying what you have achieved and how well you have achieved it. It involves you in evaluating your overall strategy and presenting the outcomes of your work. As you evaluate and assess your strategy, identify aspects of your IT skills that you want to develop further. At the end of this stage, use the records in your Skills File to complete the activity ‘Evaluating your use of IT strategy and presenting outcomes’ and pull together this final st 4.4.3 Identify ways of further developing your communication skills Think about your overall level of communication skills and suggest areas where you feel you need to improve, based on the experience you have gained. You might find it useful to discuss with your tutor or another student or work colleague how you might do this. There may be changes you feel you need to make so that you can move forward, such as trying to extend the facilities and resources available to you, changing the way you study to make best use of the time you have, or focusing on impro 3.8 Evaluating strategy and presenting outcomes By now you will have found out about and sampled different resources for learning and used different ways to learn. But the structured approach used in this section is one of the main resources for developing and improving your other key skills. So how do you know if you have learned? How do you know if you have improved? How do you know if you are meeting the standard for improving your own learning and performance expected of someone doing a course in higher education or using higher 3.1 Introduction to improving own learning and performance This key skill is about helping you understand how you learn; think about how you can improve your own learning and performance, and consider how you might generalise the principles and processes for future learning. You saw in our discussion of ‘A framework for learning’, improving your learning and performance could be considered to be a ‘meta-skill’, that is the skill of learning how to learn. This section, then, is a little different from the other skills sections because im 2.4.1 Keeping a Skills File As you work on your skills development, you are likely to find that you'll need several skill files so that you can keep a helpful frequent record or log of your learning. In this unit such a record is called a Skills File. Building up a Skills File as you go along will help you identify the skills you are using and how you are applying them to different tasks. You can also include your own reflective comments on how you think your work is progressing. The activities associated with each key Introduction This unit focuses on higher level skills. Skills development is complementary to other learning – it cannot be done in isolation. The higher level skills in this material aim to raise your awareness of the processes of learning and development – other subject-based material must supply the context and motivation for this. Key skills underpin the ability to carry out successfully, and improve on, a wide range of tasks in higher education, employment and wherever there is a continua
