Foreign Perspectives

Is a very high IQ useful when studying with the Open University?

Arnold — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:24:59 PST

“Ok, I’m high IQ and easily bored” is how a recent comment on one of the Open University forums begain and it pretty much immediately sparked off something of a war which is still running. I’ll grant that the original poster was rather insensitive to say the least in her post but it is an interesting topic.

To begin with the OU is an open access outfit which means that for almost all courses you don’t need to provide any kind of proof that you can do them before you sign up. The net effect of this is that the dropout rate in first year courses in any subject is generally 40 to 50%. This isn’t solely because people are signing up for courses that they just don’t have the brainpower to do though. As with all part-time courses the dropout rate is a little higher because people have real lives that interfere with their studies. And, of course, there’s quite a lot of people who sign up for courses and don’t fully appreciate what’s involved before they begin.

But, does a high IQ actually help you when you’re studying? Well, yes, obviously it does. The question though is just how much it helps and that’s a more difficult question. One that I suspect is impossible to answer before you’ve tried out one of the OU courses.

From my own experience, it would appear that you can try out just about any course to get a general feel for how well you will do with them taking into account your IQ and indeed all your personal experiences. For example, although the OU recommend around 16 hours per week for a 60 point course and 8 for a 30 point course, I find that in most cases I need less than half that time. The one exception was a 60 point English course which I managed with about 3 hours a week vs the 16 recommended.

Obviously the IQ will be a significant factor in helping you to understand material that is radically different from anything you’ve done before. However, don’t underestimate the effect of previous experience. The reason that English course took 3 hours a week rather than the six or seven that I’d expected was that I’d done similar work in French & Spanish to that in parts of the English course. Similarly, I am going through my current astronomy course at a frightening rate because I’ve met a number of the concepts before.

So, yes, a high IQ will certainly help with the OU as it does everywhere else. However, don’t underestimate the benefit that you’ll get from prior experience of the subject as that seems, for me, to be at least as significant.

Isn’t it amazing the way even some non-tech products have dropped in price?

Arnold — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:37:15 PST

We’re all used to the price of computers and electronic items generally dropping in price over the years but it happens to some surprising items outside that arena too.

One major example I spotted lately was the Encyclopedia Britannica. Way back in 1981 that cost £600 for the full set yet now you can pick up the 2007 equivalent for £450. Granted, that’s on an offer at the moment but even without that offer it’s still only £745 (although, oddly, the 2010 edition is only £712!). That gets you a LOT of books: the 32000 pages spread over 32 volumes add up to over four feet of shelf space and weigh in at over 60 kilos.

Yeah, I know, people tend to look towards DVD or online versions of these things these days and, yes, I know that the paper one will date a whole lot but I still quite like having the books sitting there to leaf through. Besides, in reality, knowledge doesn’t really date that quickly. Sure, the likes of the Haiti disaster won’t be in even the 2010 edition but then it’s not so much the immediate information that you want in an encyclopedia but the more historic stuff and that doesn’t change terribly quickly.

Now, if only I could find a corner in the house to fit them in…

Eeek… three assignments in the one week!

Arnold — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:31:36 PST

One of the problems in doing three separate Open University courses at once is that the timetables they run to are completely independent of one another.

Thus I find myself looking at the prospect of doing the End Course Assessment for the cardiology course, the third TMA for the human biology course and the first TMA of the astronomy course all in the same week. Fortunately, that week is the third week of March so at least I have the chance of spacing the assignments out over the next month and a bit. Not quite so much as I’d like to though as part of the cardiology assignment involves submitting an essay plan to the tutor sometime in February and the astronomy assignment requires some practical work to be in hand by then and with our weather that’s very much hit and miss.

What I’m still amazed at is how quickly I’m managing to get through the courses. All being well, I’m on schedule to finish the course text for the human biology course in the next week or so which should let me get going on the notes for that which’ll definitely be required come exam time in June. I finished all of the reading for the cardiology course before Christmas so it “only” has the end of course assessment to be done which looks fairly doable at the moment though I’ve not actually started on it yet so that opinion could change very easily. I’m getting through the astronomy reading quite well though I suspect that I’ll be needing to go over a few things again for the assignment as it’s proving to be a more difficult course than originally expected.

Interestingly, courtesy of the astronomy course I have been assigned a “pathway tutor” as part of the pilot project. What that means is that I will retain that tutor throughout the course of my physics degree with the OU. Previously, one of the consistent comments that they’d received was that all the courses were entirely independent which, whilst nice in some respects, meant that a lot of people felt a little at sea when they’d finished a course and weren’t always that sure what they should do next or for that matter how they should go about designing the perfect sequence of courses for them. In the past that planning assistance has come from the regional centres officially and a number of course forums inofficially. Neither are ideal. The official source involved people who didn’t always have the knowledge of what was entailed in particular subjects whilst the unofficial route produced advice that might have been intended to be helpful but wasn’t always as it couldn’t take into account the particular backgrounds of those enquiring nor did those replying have anything like the full picture of what was coming up in a particular degree programme anyway.

So far, it’s in typical OU style: it’s there if you want to use it but if you’ve your own ideas you’re free to ignore it.

Progressing too fast with the OU course?

Arnold — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:33:40 PST

Thanks to the Reader I find that I’m getting much more time to read the text books than I ever had previously. It might be only 10 minutes whilst wandering around a supermarket, 20 minutes waiting for James & John to finish their class, or even just 5 minutes when I’m a little too early for them at school but it’s all been adding up.

Thus I find myself likely to be completing the biology texts by the end of the month which is getting on for four months early and when the course is officially 9 months that’s saying something. Even with the astronomy which I only started on at two weeks ago when I checked the timetable I’m at the point I should be at the end of February!

That’s not to say that I’ll have completed both of those courses because I still have the assignments to do and, of course, the exams to revise for. However, it looks like the summer will be much less busy than I had ever expected it to be this year.

One handy consequence of all this is that I should have quite a lot of time to make decent notes on the topics which I’ve rarely gotten around to in the past. All being well, I’ll be getting going on the biology notes (definitely required!) early in January. I might even consider the astronomy notes after that although so far most of the text has been largely revision from my astronomy readings many years ago.

Andrew Barrington Montgomery

Arnold — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:33:02 PST

Andrew, the second son of my granny, was born in Killinchy on September 18th 1920. and almost made it to 90, dying just a few days ago on January 16th.

Growing up in the depression obviously limited the options open at the time but even so after starting off in the day school of McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian church in Belfast, he went on to Euston Street school and then to Belfast tech (now the Belfast Metropolitan College). By the time he’d passed through those the war had started and Andy joined the merchant navy rising in due course to the rank of Chief Petty Officer. During his time in the navy he was stationed in Jamaica and New York from whence he sent various momentos back home and picked up a number of medals along the way.

With the end of the war he joined Mackies which was one of the big engineering works of that era in Belfast. He remained there the rest of his working life. Following the death of his father in 1963, Andy cared for his mother through to the end of her life in 1988.

Although born in Killinchy, for the majority of his life Andy lived in the family home at 16 Lecumpher Street. When that was earmarked for redevelopment at the end of the 1990s, he was forced to move on to the Clarawood Estate where he spent a few brief years before moving into the Tudordale Nursing Home where he spent most of his final decade.

Andy was quite keen on cars and motor transport generally. Over the years that I knew him he managed to get around in a variety of them including a “mods” type scooter in the early 1960s and an Austin A40 (one of the tiniest cars you ever did see!) and latterly a Mini Metro. A number of these would never have passed a modern MOT and at one stage he ended up driving the A40 minus the floor of the car! Added to this was a keen interest in photography with quite a steady build-up of photographs over the years although perhaps his best photos were taken the time when he’d managed to forget to put a film in the camera!

Whilst he’d travelled the world with the navy, afterwards Andy limited himself to Northern Ireland and specifically Killinchy where he spent the summer months in a cottage rented by the family for over 30 years. From that base he went on numerous day trips with his favourite destination being the reservoir at Silent Valley and the Mourne area generally. In his latter years though he found that the travelling became too much and gradually the trips became shorter and in his final decade he never travelled more than a few miles from the nursing home.

There’s no mention here of surviving children because Andy never did get around to having a family. That’s perhaps the saddest thing about his death because though he loved children he never had any of his own. It does seem particularly sad to go to the funeral of someone like that: though there are probably more tears from any children when a mother or father dies at least there is a continuation whereas here that’s not the case.

Using the ebook reader: one month on

Arnold — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:14:04 PST

It’s been almost a month since I started using the ebook reader so I’m really getting settled into using it now.

Although it’s “only” got 1/2 GB of memory that’s proved not to be any kind of restriction at all. Frankly, I doubt that I’ll ever fill it with books that I’m actually going to read. The manual says that it’ll hold 350 books but I suspect that it’ll be more in reality for me (the number depends on the length of the book and if it’s illustrated). Although 1/2GB doesn’t sound like much in computer terms it’s an awful lot of books. To give you some idea of just how many books you’re really talking about, consider that the library in our son’s school has “only” 10,000 (about 14GB) and in terms of footage that 1/2GB is equivalent to roughly 7 shelves of books each 5 foot long.

Actually those stats make for some sad reading in some ways because I suspect that once these readers drop some more in price the day can’t be long off when libraries will cease to exist, at least in their current form. Even now, if you get one of the connected readers you can buy books directly from the reader so in theory you have access to a library of millions of books regardless of how much memory your particular reader has.

What’s it like using it though? Well, one “problem” that I’ve encountered is that I find that I read more with it than when I’m reading the equivalent “real” book. That’s starting to become a slight problem in that I’m moving further ahead of the course schedule for both the human biology and the astronomy courses that I’m doing at the moment than I was planning to. Thus it seems likely that I will complete all of the reading for the biology course around the end of this month rather than the end of the following month as per my schedule. It’s also extremely useful for the astronomy course which has a whole bunch of books amounting to a couple of inches thick in total which I can flick between as necessary, something that I just wouldn’t have done with the paper books.

Although in an ideal world I’d have a screen on the reader about A5 size rather than the A6 size that I currently have, that’s really only because of the diagrams that are in my textbooks. They are readable on the A6 screen but barely. Having said that, with an A5 size reader I wouldn’t be carrying it around all the time so I’d not get as much reading done.

Colour would definitely be nice for the textbooks and that’ll come in a few years time I expect but normal books are in black and white anyway so I suspect that colour isn’t really a big deal for many people using the readers at the moment.

Availability of books hasn’t been an issue for me as yet though there seem to be a lot of ebooks available these days and the number will only increase over time. There are loads of classics available free too although if you’re really keen you can buy these too (they’re the ones sitting at the lower end of the price range usually). In practical terms, you can get a fairly sizeable chunk of ex-copyright (ie older than 75 years) books ranging from Shakespeare to the popular books of the 1930s (and some later ones too) free. That includes such things as the massive Webster dictionary of 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica of the same vintage (though not called that for copyright reasons) and a whole bunch of stuff that sounds really impressive to have on your reader. Included amongst that is the “5 foot bookshelf” of classics which dates from the early 1900s and from whence I did my shelf calculations above.

If you’re flicking through the demo readers in the shop you might think that the slow screen refresh rate is just way too slow. However, it actually seems to work out at close to the speed at which you’d be able to turn a page in a normal book and it’s best to think of it in those terms. You might flick through computer screens fairly quickly but you don’t do that with books, do you? The only downside of that is that video obviously isn’t possible so science-fiction style animated books aren’t a runner with the current generation of readers but wait a few years and they’ll turn up.

One not so obvious point is that people don’t know what you’re reading. So, the OH has the impression that I’m constantly reading the textbooks which is good in some ways, although not so good in that she thinks I’m totally obsessed with the courses.

Definitely a very worthwhile thing to get.

Growing old gracefully

Arnold — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:04:00 PST

We’re all getting older and, thanks to the baby boom generation, there are more and more products to deal with that on the shelves these days and increasing number of medical treatments too.

But do you really want to stay young looking forever? I imagine that most peoples’ first reaction is a very definite “YES” and that would certainly be the answer were staying young an easy thing to do. The problem is that it isn’t easy and takes up increasing amounts of time as the years add up.

Those age spots that may be starting to appear will increase in number as your years add up thus it’s gonna take more time to cover them up as the years mount. Likewise for other treatments to cover up the cracks and wrinkles not to mention the hair to be dyed.

The alternative is to aim to gain a distinguished appearance gradually which is going to be much less time consuming I suspect.

Moving your email from Windows Outlook over to Evolution

Arnold — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:05:21 PST

Moving to Linux would be very easy were it not for the hassles of getting your emails transferred over. However, at least it’s not the showstopper that it was just a few years ago.

Your first issue is finding your .PST files which you can do by clicking on properties. To copy those over, go out of Outlook and copy them onto a USB stick. Likewise for contacts, calendars, etc. if you want those too though I’ve never used them so won’t be talking about them here. Evolution has a PST import limit of around 500MB so if your PST file(s) are bigger than that you’ll need to create some more and move your email into them until you’ve the PST files below the limit. At this point, it’s best to disable Outlook which you can so simply by changing the POP server that it uses to pick up your email; note down the settings as you’ll need those to set up Evolution.

Next you will need to install Evolution if you’ve not done so already and also ReadPST.

Evolution can take quite a while to import PST files (hours in my case) so you’ll need some patience for this step. Once that’s done you’ll discover one limitation of its import facility: it doesn’t import email in top level folders. Thus you’ll find that various folders which it has created are empty. This is where ReadPST comes in because it will read those PST files and separate them out into the various folders with mbox files in each of them. For the folders which Evolution has left empty, you need to import the contents from the appropriate spot in the folder hierarchy which ReadPST has created for you.

Finally, there’s the business of getting new mail into Evolution. Go into Edit, Preferences and create the email accounts that you had in Outlook. As always, the settings here aren’t quite the same as those in Outlook (why that’s so is a mystery as the mail servers obviously work with all mail clients). In my case, I found that 1and1 needed a bit of tweaking to get outgoing mail to work, the settings being server: auth.1and1.co.uk (as per Outlook), server requires authentication, no encryption, authentication type: login. Once you’ve those set up, it’s best to send yourself a message to check that it’s all working.

What about email rules? I took the chance to do a little rationalisation of my email folder structure so didn’t bother trying to import those but that seems the best approach anyway as Evolution doesn’t seem to have nearly so much complexity as Outlook did. I say complexity rather than flexibility as there are just so many options in there that if you’re not careful email can seem to go into random folders sometimes.

And that’s it. Sadly, importing the messages isn’t as automated as it could be and, in my case, took quite a while but then that’s down to me having email back to 1996 and a far too complicated folder structure.

One week into S282 astronomy

Arnold — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:20:30 PST

Well, not quite a week as I really only started it on Wednesday but it’s enough to begin to get a feel for it I think.

The first thing that struck me about it was that it’s a course that uses an awful lot of different resources. As well as the course guide and course book there’s a series of booklets on “activities” (which covers a lot of different stuff), several course forums to look at, the course website and a series of practical activities related to the assignments (which aren’t, yet, on the site).

In fact, over the last few days I’ve been looking at the course guide, observing guide, first course book and the first observing activity. If that’s a typical week it’ll be quite a large course. So far I’ve been doing pretty much all the reading on the little Reader which is just as well since that chunk of books weighs a fair bit. Downside of that is that the PDFs don’t come out so well with so many diagrams so I think I’ll be needing to read some on the computer (very few are available as printed texts).

I’d have liked to have a look at the assignments but they’re not on the course website yet. The specimen exam is though and, at the moment, it looks a pretty scary affair but, hopefully, that’ll change over the course of the next nine months.

So far it seems like the interesting course I expected to, albeit with quite a lot more work to do than expected.

Getting carried away with Kumon

Arnold — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:58:14 PST

John’s been wanting to have his own Kumon box for a while now so we signed him up for their maths programme this week.

Unlike James, he’s gotten into the UK school system at the right time so the Kumon with him isn’t a matter of catching up with work not done in France but rather of moving ahead of the class work. In fact, it’s starting to become that way with James too: for the first time his Kumon work is ahead of the work that he’s been given in school. That’s not to say that he’s ahead of where he should have been in school but at least the Kumon is starting to stretch him a little.

With John it’s quite a different matter and he’s finding the Kumon work very easy. That’s as it should be of course as the idea behind the programme is that the children shouldn’t find the work difficult therefore they will be more inclined to do it. Although each stage of the work is quite easy, it does build up over time and the theory is that after a year or two you start working above the level that you’d ordinarily be at in school at that time.

John’s also finding the school work far too easy so we’re expecting that he’ll race through a number of Kumon stages quite quickly to get to a level that’s interesting and useful for him. At the moment, it looks like he’ll be doing twenty of the Kumon pages a day rather than the usual 10 so he should get through the levels fairly quickly and may find himself doing P3 work before the summer break.

One thing the Kumon teacher keeps reminding us is that sometimes it causes “issues” with schools if the children in the programme are too far ahead of the rest of their class. I suspect that we’ll end up with that problem at some stage but I’d much rather be dealing with that than having the kids well behind the rest of their class. Certainly from our experience with James it seems a much better plan to aim to be at least slightly ahead of the class.