4.5 Drawing ideas together This key skill has used a three-stage framework for developing your skills. By developing a strategy, monitoring your progress and evaluating your overall approach, you take an active role in your own learning. But learning does not necessarily follow a path of steady improvement, it involves change: revisiting ideas, seeing things from different perspectives, tackling things in different ways. You are unlikely to be able to complete your work by working through it from beginning to end
3.8.1 Select and bring together effective ways to present outcomes The most appropriate method to present your work may depend on what you are required to do either for your course, or for a work-related project. For example you could be submitting a written assignment, making a presentation to work colleagues, or putting together a collection of designs. You also need to look back at your notes and comments and take time to consider what you have learned while completing this key skill. Bring together what you have learned into a synthesis. A synthesi
2.8 Making the framework your own If there was a simple way to improve our own learning, we would all be geniuses by now. What this key skills approach tries to show is that learning is a complex process that draws on many skills and can be made more effective by becoming aware of what you are doing, how you are doing it and how well you are doing it. Once you are aware of what's going on, you can start to change things to suit your own learning style and the demands of the task or assignment you have to tackle. The nex
1.4 Using this unit There is no single way to use this unit and no single way to develop your key skills. The unit is designed so that you can use it flexibly, moving around the sections to suit yourself. You can also choose when to use the unit, but remember that skills development does not happen in isolation – it requires ‘content’. Therefore, you will find it helpful to use the unit alongside a course or a specific project so that it provides you with opportunities to develop, practise and get feedbac
Introduction This key skill develops your problem-solving skills in your studies, work or other activities over a period of time. To tackle this key skill, you will need to plan your work over at least 3–4 months to give yourself enough time to practise and improve your skills, to seek feedback from others, and to monitor your progress and evaluate your strategy. Problem solving runs through many other activities and, rather like the key skill in OpenLearn unit U071_1 Improving own learning and
8.3 Synthesis Your synthesis of what you have learned needs to show you can comment critically and reflectively on the ways of learning you have used. Think about what you had to learn, how you learned it and make an assessment of how well you learned it. On reflection, would you change anything? If so, what would you do differently? Your synthesis does not have to be long (e.g. one side of an A4 page), but it does need to show you can think critically about your learning, relate it to specific work (that
6.3 Referencing Once you start using the web for study and research, you'll see how convenient it is to find information that you can use for course notes, essays or reports. One of the most important of all your study skills is the ability to summarise information from other sources in your own words. Whenever you make use of any information that has been created by someone else, the author and the source must be clearly identified and acknowledged through the use of proper referencing. Providin
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).
4.6 Not knowing what to say It's perfectly possible to learn from what other people say without contributing anything yourself. After all, at a face-to-face tutorial some people won't say anything, perhaps because they feel shy. Working online means you can't see other people smiling in encouragement, so it can be hard to take the plunge and join in. One good thing about online discussions is that they generally happen over a longer period. This gives you plenty of time to think about what you want to say, and eve
3.2 Using diagrams of your own choice and design This option is the most challenging and most rewarding, as it clearly shows that you have explored and analysed the source material and reworked it for yourself. In many cases, the source material may not contain any diagrams, simply text or numbers, perhaps expressed as a table. Alternatively, you may have had to make some specific observations or undertake an experiment to produce your own data. In this case, you may be expected to produce a diagram to enhance or improve your assignment. If
1.2 Types of diagrams As there is this variety in the types of diagrams we use, we need to think more broadly about what pictures and diagrams are trying to represent. You will encounter three main types of diagrams when studying MST subjects.
Pictures or pictorial diagrams that attempt to represent the essential features of a part of reality – for example, diagrams of equipment, molecules or parts of a plant. Diagrams that try to describe
5.1.9 Music
Blom, E., revised by Cumings, D. (eds) (1991) The New Everyman Dictionary of Music, London, Dent.
Isaacs, A., and Martin, E. (eds) (1982) Dictionary of Music, London, Sphere.
5.1.4 History There is no general dictionary or companion to the study of history as such. However, there are period and subject-specific companions and indexes, such as:
Jones, C. (1990) The Longman Companion to the French Revolution, London, Longman. Consult those appropriate to your course.
5.1.2 Classical Studies
Hornblower, S. and Spawforth, A. (eds) (1997, 3rd edn) The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Howatson, M.C. and Chilvers, I. (eds) (1993) The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
3.6 Taking an objective, analytical stance One of the things I said an essay should be is ‘objective’. What does that mean? Being objective about something means standing back from it and looking at it coolly. It means focusing your attention on the ‘object’, on what you are discussing, and not on yourself and your own (subjective) feelings about it. Your ideas should be able to survive detailed inspection by other people who are not emotionally committed to them. An essay should argue by force of reason, not emot
3.2 Answering the question An essay can be good in almost every other way and yet be judged poor because it ignores the question in the title. Strictly speaking, I should say ‘it ignores the issues presented in the title’ because not every essay title actually contains a question. But, in fact, there is usually a central question underlying an essay title, even when it takes the form of a quotation from a text followed by the instruction ‘Discuss’. And you need to work out what that underlying question is, beca
2.5.4. Choosing the right words and phrases Both Philip and Hansa occasionally use words and phrases that don't really do the job they want. We saw, for instance, that Philip uses the word ‘resemblance’ when actually he means ‘contrast’. Here are some other examples from his writing.
