I am just starting week three of the course and have had to give myself a reality check. I was looking through the forthcoming Tutor Marker Assignment (TMA) and was panicking a bit at what I was seeing.
Let's step back a bit. I have had a difficult week one way and another - lots of pain in my hips so lots of tiredness and lack of concentration. This has caused me to have to force concentrate on the learning part. I have weeks 1 and 2 put to bed. I have the first ICMA (computer marked assignment and more on that later) finished and I was finding it difficult to stick with reading the recommended research papers for week 3. I have never been a fan of using jargon and, having been away from studying so long, I find that the way a lot of academic papers are phrased strike me as opaque for not much reason. First off, I couldn't find the recommended papers in the OU library and then, when I did, I found them impenetrable. This was probably because of my concentration difficulties. Eventually, I sorted out what the week was about but I was still panicky about the TMA.
Remember that "lack of concentration" means that you don't read things and take in the import. Well, it seems that, with the TMA, the questions (from 3 onwards), I was panicking over had a rider in the title that I had missed. How about "You should be able to answer this question when you have completed Parts 1 to 6 of the module"? Suddenly, it dawned on me that I was only up to Part 3! Giant relaxation all round.
Then how about this one in Notebook 0.4 of week 3. "We cannot cover the cases where the user has created sentinel values to capture semantic variations in missing data." I even posted on the forum for some help here! A fine example of using words to demonstrate writer understanding rather than to promote the same in the reader. This came back from the Moderator in an attempt, I think, to clarify the issue: ""We're not going to look at cases where the user has different flag or signal values to denote different sorts of missing data." Sort of... ". Hmmm. Well, I think I get the message but I would have said that the course will ignore cases where special flags have been used to note dirty data rather than the Nan or NULL that we are going to look at.
Enough of my moaning. I finished Part 3 feeling that I will, maybe, have to come back and re-run the reading but that I knew enough to go on. Today, I started tackling Part 4 and have found this much more to my liking.
On a personal basis, I am ringing tomorrow to see what the delivery hopes are for my new electric desk and ergonomic chair. I think that this combination will help greatly with my concentration.
Now, I need to discuss the first ICMA. I find the whole issue of the ICMAs to be quite strange. They want us to do them but they tell us we only have to get 30% in 5 of the seven. They then tell us that we can have up to three goes at each question. From there, it seems that we can have multiple goes at the whole ICMA and, if the score of the latest submitted one is below that already achieved then it is ignored. It seems to be a scheme to let you get to a 100% score - eventually - so why have the 30% - 5 out of 7 - rule? I have done ICMA 41 (the first) just the once and got 75.11 out of 80 which I make 93.9%. This seems to me to be a good score so I will not be going back and having another go. Incidentally, the scores that are shown on my student record, when I add them up, come to 75.11 whilst the same scores on the Student home page are totalled there as 75.09. I can only guess that the actual scores are calculated to 3 decimal places with only two shown thus giving a rounding error.
Right, I ought to finish as this is a very long post but I thought that I should mention Microsoft Dreamspark. This is a repository of Microsoft development tools and Operating Systems that can be free if you have the right student credentials. I tried signing up on the web site to find that they hadn't heard of the OU. I even gave them proof of my course but nothing happened. I then found out that the OU has a Dreamspark set up managed by them just for OU students. I sent an e-mail to mct-dreamspark@open.ac.uk and very quickly they had me registered. I was able to download a copy of Windows 10 (for my Windows Laptop which only had Windows 7 so no free upgrade) and Windows 2012 Server to replace the Windows 10 Home edition that I have running on my E-mail and Web Server. They even have MSDos 6.22 if you are so inclined. Try it. You could find something that you need.