So, I've finished the online part of Block 2 - and I have to say I'm relieved. I'm not a technophobe by any means - I have a blog (apart from this one), and spend far FAR too much time online.
As for studying online... meh. I like books, call me old-fashioned.
It was a pretty varied module. Starting from political rhetoric in some famous speeches (Martin Luther King, Barack Obama); moving to multimodal messages on food packaging and in advertising; moving to variants of English and attitudes towards them; moving to local accents influencing radio advertisements; then the difference between prescriptive and descriptive use of language (which would have made more sense earlier on); a brief foray into some history of the English language (would have been fun if there was more on this); terminology re: standard English, received pronunciation, dialect, accent, regional and social dialects etc; language and identity in rap and hip hop (Manu Chao, Roots Manuva; discourse communities; the discourse of news and comparing chronologies in news stories; case study of the Hillsborough Disaster (involving news reports, poetry); digital English; investigating hashtags and Twitter, and whether we thought we would use it; then recapping.
Wow, that's quite a lot of stuff.
It seemed like the OU team wanted us to join Twitter which was interesting. We had to research what was trending on Twitter, and I found the following things were trending on that day (16th January):
WORLDWIDE
- #makeabandgreener
- #diainternacionalcroqueta (international croquette day)
- #FelizMartes (happy Tuesday)
- #OTDirect16E (some music awards)
- OscarPerezHeroeDelPueblo (Venezuelan 'freedom fighter' assassinated)
- #TheBachelor (TV programme)
I was interested to see the prevalence of Spanish, but I suppose Spanish is the second most widely spoken first language in the world? (And 96% of statistics are made up...)
UK:
- #carillion (eg. Government says that the real losers in #carillion going tits up are the banks. F*ck the staff. Typical Tory response.)
- #Tuesdaythoughts (eg. There is a Voice That Doesn't Use Words. Listen #Tuesdaythoughts)
- #snow (eg. Who was affected by the #snow today?)
- #makeabandgreener (eg. Ecosystem of a Down #makeabandgreener)
- #charityTuesday (eg. #CharityTuesday is all about giving. You vote for us to WIN... etc etc)
- #JoshuaParker (eg. CONFIRMED: Anthony Joshua will face #JoshuaParker for the WBA, IBF, WBO and IBO World Titles on the 31st March in Cardiff)
Now, this was all very interesting. I then went on to see who the most popular (ie have the most followers) people on Twitter were. Katy Perry was top - who never tweets! And down at number 20 was... Donald Trump.
I then preceded to spend about 45 minutes looking through his tweets and marvelling at the kind of ridiculous things he spouts using lots of CAPSLOCK and multiple exclamation marks!!!!!
This is why I don't have Twitter. And can never have it. I would waste innumerable amounts of time.
So, back to the books tomorrow. Still very tempted to give in and give up on the course but a wonderful comment on my last entry has bolstered me a bit. Life (outside OU) is still pretty bad, but no more A&E visits (*touch wood*) and my meds have been changed which will hopefully make things a bit better.
So, thank you SIMON REED
