Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand the relationship between technological change and industrial revolutions; appreciate the pervasive effect that new technologies can have on the economy and, in particular, on productivity; understand how industry dynamics can be analysed using the ‘industrial life cycle’ model; use data and historical examples to support economic arguments.
Introduction The material presented here focuses on the politics of racial violence in Britain. The material is an audio file, originally 30 minutes in length, and examines the issues around this subject. It was recorded in 1995. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Crime, order and social control (D315) 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 Author(s):
Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: identify criteria to evaluate whether prison works.
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able: define social construction and social constructionism.
1.6.4 Blogs The founder of Technorati claims that the number of ‘blogs’ doubles every five months and that the creation rate is approaching two per second. One estimate I read in July 2010 put the number at 400 million blogs. Because these online diaries offer instant publishing opportunities, you potentially have access to a wealth of knowledge from commentators and experts (if they blog) in a
1.5.9 Plagiarism Referencing is not only useful as a way of sharing information, but also as a means of ensuring that due credit is given to other people’s work. In the electronic information age, it is easy to copy and paste from journal articles and web pages into your own work. But if you do use someone else’s work, you should acknowledge the source by giving a correct reference. Taking someone's work and not indicating where you took it from is termed plagiarism and is regarded as an infringemen
1.5.7 Referencing We mentioned above that we need to reference sources to ensure we abide by copyright legislation. But there is another reason we need to give accurate references to items we use – so we can share it. Consider this scenario. A friend says they’ve just read an interesting article where Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious has spoken about why it isn’t a faceted search system, and you should read it. How would you go about finding it? Would you start looking in a news database, a s
1.5.3 Desktop search tools Finding your paperwork or electronic files can be a problem. You may find that even if you do have some sort of filing system, your structure soon gets quite large with files in multiple locations, which can be hard to navigate. You may find yourself making arbitrary decisions about which folder to place a document in. It may make sense now but in the future, when you look where you think it should be, it’s not there. At times like this you may resort to the search command from the Wi
1.4.7 T is for Timeliness The date when information was produced or published can be an important aspect of quality. This is not quite as simple as saying that 'good' information has to be up to date. Here is an example of a news item from an on 1.4.3 R is for Relevance Relevance is an important factor to consider when you are evaluating information. It isn’t so much a property of the information itself but of the relationship it has with your question or your ‘information need’. For example,if you are writing an essay about the geography of Chile, a book or website about Chilean political history would not be relevant. So there are a number of ways in which a piece of information may not be relevant to your query: 1.3.10 Choosing the right tool for the job Before searching it is always a good idea to check what the source you have chosen covers to make sure it will unearth information that matches your search need (you will notice that all the resources we’ve covered in this guide have short descriptions to enable you to decide which to use). Some of the decision makers, depending on the context of your search might be: Does it have full text? Does it cover the right subject? 1.3.6 Journals Journals and articles written by academics or experts are an excellent source of information. Journals are usually published monthly or quarterly, and contain a selection of articles providing details of recent research. Often they will also contain reviews of relevant books. They are usually published more quickly than books, and so are often more up to date. To access content of journals, most publishers require a subscription. There are, however, some journals which you can freely ac 1.3.2 Search engines and subject gateways Although both search engines and subject gateways will help you find the resources that you need, the types of information that you find will differ. Search engines such as
Google and
Yahoo! search the internet for keywords or phrases, and then show you the results. These results are not mediated by the search engin 1.3 Constructing a new image The image ‘Glasgow's miles better’ was deliberately constructed by the City Council, avowedly to make Glaswegians feel better about Glasgow but in fact largely on behalf of business. But it begged a question – ‘miles better for whom?’ Certainly, the city centre was better for shoppers and visitors and the new roads were literally ‘miles better’ for motorists, but the spiralling problems of the housing schemes provided stark counter-images. In other words, as with all images, the 2.2 The shift from manufacturing to services in industrialised economies There was a profound restructuring of economic activity in ‘older’ industrialised countries in the last quarter of the twentieth century from manufacturing to service activities. There are several reasons for this restructuring. First, the long-established industrialised countries such as Germany, the USA, Japan and the UK have faced increasingly intense competition as more countries have industrialised. Second, productivity, or output per worker, has increased in manufacturing industries 2.1 The semiotic approach to textual meaning We can talk of the process of meaning-making as one where producers encode information into texts and consumers decode meanings from them (Hall, 1980). This idea of encoding and decoding implies that the process is one-way – producers create texts that are then read by consumers – but movement can occur the other way as well: texts can be created as a response to consumers’ expression of their enjoyment of existing ones and desire for similar texts (which is how producers Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. This extract is taken from D218: Social policy: welfare, power and diversity, produced by the BBC on behalf of the Open University. © 2007 The Open University. 1 Developing reading skills John Clarke and course team member Ross Fergusson, look at developing reading skills in the context of Social Science resources, with suggestions on how to read such materials critically and effectively. The material is primarily an audio file, 11 minutes in length and recorded in 1998. Participants in the audio programme were: John Clarke Professor of Social Policy at The Open University; Ross Ferguson Social Scie Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand how arguments may be presented in the Social Sciences. Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: illustrate how cities can be represented as dangerous places to live; give examples of the place of crime in representations of cities.
Activity 9
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