Evaluating materials It's easy enough to find information, but it's sometimes a bit more difficult to assess whether your information is reliable, current or correct. Have a look at the Web Guide section on assessing the quality of websites (accessed 8 November 2006) to find out more about how to assess the information you've found. The Open University library also offers a helpsheet on finding quality information (accessed 8 November 2006).
Introduction As a student, you may have access to online conferencing. What can you do to help conferencing work well? This section discusses the reasons why online conferencing is useful, its benefits, how to make online conferencing work for you, and some of the typical problems and solutions relating to it. “Conferencing gives me the chance to think about what I'm going to say – so I find it much easier to make a w 3.4 Managing your time online One of the greatest challenges of using your computer for study is fitting in your online activities around the rest of your life. Online time isn't timetabled or contained in the way classroom learning is. So it can sometimes be difficult to avoid being interrupted by what is happening around you. Below are some suggestions for managing your time online. There is more detailed information about online conferencing in the next section. Log on to 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. 2.5 Find out how computers work The BBC offers an Absolute Beginners' Guide to Using Your Computer (accessed 8 November 2006). This guide is ideal for anyone really new to computers. If you're interested in the more technical aspects of how computers work and how they've developed over time, have a look at the BBC/Open University Information Communication Technology portal (accessed 8 November 2006). 3.1.1 Option 1: Don't use the diagram at all It is quite possible to write a good answer to the question without using the diagram. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of not using the diagram? 2.2.3 Reading graphs and charts: getting started Graphs and charts ought to be easy to read, since the main point of turning numbers into diagrams is to bring out their meaning more clearly. However, they are abstract representations that attempt to summarise certain aspects of the world in a condensed form. Consequently, they require a degree of mental effort on your part to bridge the gap between the formal pictures on the page and the aspects of ‘reality’ they represent. It is important to approach graphs and diagrams caref 2.6.3 Re-working Hansa's essay Now we have looked at Philip's and Hansa's essays in such detail, what have we learned? Perhaps the best way to answer that is to write another version of the essay, building on all the things we have discussed. In fact, I have taken the basic content of Hansa's essay, tidied it up and shuffled it about a little to bring out her argument more strongly. (However this is not the only possible way of structuring an argument in answer to this question.) I have also woven in some of Ellis's terms, 2.5.1 Sentences We can see that Philip knows what a sentence is because he writes some perfectly good ones. For example: In many ways going into urban life from the countryside was beneficial to woman of the upperclass. This sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop. It has a subject (urban life) and a main verb (was). As any sentence is, it is a self-contained ‘unit of meaning’. It m 2.1 A lack of insight? One of the curious things about learning to write essays is that you are seldom offered much insight into what you might be setting out to produce. You know only too well what your essays look like and what your tutor says about them, but you don't know what else you might have done. For instance, you have very little idea what other people's essays are like and what comments they get back. Perhaps you are told your essay ought to be ‘more structured’ or ‘less subjective†References 3.3 A body–world interconnection Our consciousness of our bodies remains fundamentally tied up with our everyday embodied activities and relationships. The body thus represents both our particular view of the world as well as our Being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]). Martin Heidegger (2001) draws a distinction between corporeal things and the body, questioning whether the sense of embodied selfhood that we all possess needs to coincide with the limits of a corporeal body. The corporeal thing stops 2 Identity and the body In this section of the course you will look at the idea of a body–mind–social split in relation to the theme of identity and the body. You will then use the case study of pop singer Michael Jackson to explore the ideas of the body as an ‘identity project’. 3.6 Reflecting on dyslexia Throughout this course, dyslexia has been evaluated as an example of ‘abnormality’, a difficulty, a problem in need of an intervention. However, research has shown that some adults with dyslexia are distinctive, not just in their difficulties, but also in their increased levels of creative reasoning compared to ‘normal’ people (Everatt 1997). West (1997) reports that Nicholas Negroponte, the founding member of the Media Lab at the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technolog 3.1 Thinking about intervention So far we have looked at issues relating to how we define ‘abnormal’ behaviour, and how we think about explanations. Now we will consider the more practical issue of how to approach the treatment of such difficulties. As in the previous section, we will discuss behavioural, cognitive and biological perspectives on treatment and consider specific techniques from each perspective that are applicable to the management of dyslexia. 2.3 Biological explanations of dyslexia Some physical characteristics appear to be ‘typical’ of people with reading difficulties, although their relevance is debated. These include being male, tendencies towards left-handedness or mixed-handedness (i.e. inconsistency of hand preference across different tasks), and a variety of neurological 'soft’ signs and minor physical anomalies. We will consider each of these in detail in the sections that follow. There is also some evidence that people with dyslexia (and the 3. What does visualisation mean? ‘Imagery is a powerful force for perception and understanding. Being able to “see†something mentally is a common metaphor for understanding it. An image may be of some geometrical shape, or of a graph or diagram, or it may be some set of symbols or some procedure. Visualising means summoning up a mental image of something – seeing it in your mind. Some people can actually close their eyes and “see†a p Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: critically appreciate the significance of claims made for ‘global corporate citizenship’ understand the nature of work and ‘social citizenship’ recognise the difference between ‘acts citizenship’ and ‘status citizenship’ assess the ‘ethical dimension’ to arguments about citizenship identify the relevance of historical comparisons for understanding co Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Sue Cowley is an experienced teacher and subject co-ordinator, who has taught at both primar 5.7 Summary This section of the course has made you aware that: science is formed by a community of practice, creating knowledge and requiring a special language for its communication; there is a difference between objective scientific methods and subjective ways of knowing; political power influences scientific discoveries, and scientific knowledge is always socially embedded; public understanding and perception of sci
Activity 9
