Learning outcomes After studying this unit you will: recognise that ‘European identity’ is a socially constructed attribute; appreciate the basis for the unities as well as the divisions amongst Europeans; understand the ways European identities are assessed and measured; appreciate the key role of ‘culture’ in the organisation of a common European identity; see that European identity could be a bottom-up process as well as a top
8.8 Finding information in society This unit will help you to identify and use information in society, whether for your work, study or personal purposes. Experiment with some of the key resources in this subject area, and learn about the skills which will enable you to plan searches for information, so you can find what you are looking for more easily. Discover the meaning of information quality, and learn how to evaluate the information you come across. You will also be introduced to the many different ways of organising your
5.2 The origins of the wars of the three kingdoms From Catholic rebellion to Civil War, what happened during the latter years of the reign of Charles I that caused people to take up arms against their fellow citizens? This unit looks at the background of the wars between England, Scotland and Ireland and how the King's actions led to the rift between royalists and parliamentarians. To access this material click on the unit link below. It leads to a separate OpenLearn unit and will open in a new window.
3.5 The incredible shrinking chip This unit focuses on the creation of a semiconductor transistor – a versatile tiny transistor that is now at the heart of the electronics industry. In video clips the history of the incredible shrinking chip, its Scottish connections and an explanation of the physics that make chips work are accompanied by a reconstruction of the making of a transistor using the crude techniques of yesteryear. In this unit we follow two Scottish computer engineers with little or no physics knowledge a
1.1.1 Culture and society in Scotland Scotland has a rich and distinctive cultural heritage based on many aspects including language, history, music and literature. For a small country whose population has never been much in excess of five million, Scotland can be justifiably proud of its past achievements. However there have been significant changes in Scotland over the last decade, principally arising from devolution in 1999. This section of OpenLearn Scotland introduces learners to a wide range of topics reflecting both Scotla
2.1 The development of gender identity In this section we are going to look at where we come from in terms of childhood experience and the development of gender identities in childhood. Gender identity involves the construction and use of gender categories. Children's gender categories are at first rather simplistic; but, as we shall see, children refine their categories so that they become more reliable and useful for their social lives. Studying the development of gender identity in children reveals that this is a story of a sea
5 Further reading For further discussion and explanations of events in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, G. Squires and C. Hartman's (eds) There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (2006, Routledge) brings together a series of social sciences essays and commentaries around different dimensions of the disaster. There are many books and studies detailing the evolution of council estates in Britain and focusing on the many problems facing some of the residents who live in them. Tony Par
3.1 Photographic content and context Can we analyse photographs to tell us something valid about gender, ethnicity, class and nationality? As the wedding pictures example begins to suggest, there are traces of social facts embedded in the images, as well as evidence of the social conventions and organisational practices that underpin their production and diffusion or circulation. What will be clear is that there is no simple interpretational tool or reading skill available to us that allows us to reduce the picture to a simple f
1.6.1 Introduction The process of keeping up-to-date in your chosen subject area is useful for your studies and afterwards, for your own personal satisfaction, or perhaps in your career as part of your continuing professional development. There are a great many tools available that make it quite easy to keep yourself up to date. You can set them up so that the information comes to you, rather than you having to go out on the web looking for it. Over the next few pages, you will be experimenting with some
3.2 By medium We can divide texts up by the medium in which they appear. This is a broad division that is technologically based. It may seem excessively obvious, but it can be quite revealing. For example, different media have different periodicities (frequency of appearances) – most magazines appear weekly or monthly, while newspapers are weekly or daily. Episodes of television programmes are most commonly also weekly or daily, but films appear on a different basis altogether, since, like books or CDs t
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.
The Story of Wakefield
A basic skills learning resource booklet with interactive activities designed to introduce the Wakefield Museum.
Spanish Demonstrative Adjectives - Adjetivos Demostrativos
This is a Spanish lesson about demonstrative adjectives. (05:08)
Introduction ‘Europe’ is a key issue of contemporary political debate and provides one of the most contentious questions facing party leaders and the voters of more than one country. But what is the nature of the issue, and what does it actually involve? What are the precise questions that contemporary Europe poses? Europe is in flux, and many of the key reference points of a traditional Europe have weakened or disappeared altogether. One of the key aspects of the present situation, therefore, is that
8 Conclusion: the view from social constructionism This unit has concentrated on the question of how social issues are socially constructed. It has done so not because this is the only form of analysis in the social sciences. There are many different approaches, theories and perspectives that bear upon social problems, patterns of social differentiation and the organisation of social welfare. Nevertheless, all of them have to operate in a social world where the meaning of things shapes how we act. It is this that makes processes of soc
Introduction This course examines the type of system which is described by the umbrella term ‘e-commerce’. A number of typical application areas are examined including retailing using the internet, supply chain management and online auctions. The course also looks at some of the underlying technologies used to implement e-commerce applications, for example web technology. The final part of the course looks at some of the problems which are encountered when developing distributed e-commerce systems, fo
Acknowledgements All materials included in this unit are derived from content originated at the Open University. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence 1. Join the 200,000 students cur
7.2 Adding 2's complement integers The leftmost bit at the start of a 2's complement integer (which represents the presence or absence of the weighting −128) is treated in just the same way as all the other bits in the integers. So the rules given at the start of Section 7.1 for adding unsigned integers can be used. 2.7 Input and output considerations So far in Section 2 I have focused on how the data is represented, or encoded, inside the weighing-scales computer. But how does it get into the computer? And how does it get out again in a form that users can recognise? These are big questions, and ones that later parts of the course will be going into in some detail. But I can sketch some answers here. Weight is the most important input in the kitchen scales. To detect a weight, sensors are placed under the scalepan. They produce an e 2.3 Representing numbers: fractions In the denary system, a decimal point can be used to represent fractions, as in 6.5 or 24.29. One way of encoding fractions uses an exactly analogous method in binary numbers: a ‘binary point’ is inserted. Some examples of 8-bit binary fractions are: 0.0010110 110.01101 0101110.1 The weightings that are applied to the bits after the binary point are, reading from left to right, 1/2, 1/4, 1
Example 7
