Personal Blogs

So, Wednesday night I had my promised phone call from my tutor. All very constructive. But, what he says about how tutorials will work is nothing like what the talk about tutorials said! No classes, no slides, no video, all 1:1 by phone. Apparently Access courses never have all that.

Action: feedback to presenters of that talk?

I can find recordings, and a note of who ran it, here

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/connecthosted/viewrecordings.php?id=19619

Finish writing "activity 4" and send it to him (optional, but OK)

Which means sorting out how to do references.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/connecthosted/view.php?id=19619

It seems that link doesn't work after the talk is over. Here's the recording

https://ou.adobeconnect.com/pldj83g826tw/

General advice: 

PDFs downloaded (though I'm not sure where to)

I also got the emaiil to send a photo of my "study buddy" to.

Action: as I was thinking, set up a Google calender with all deadlines - done

Yodel did their thing.

That's a lot of paperwork!

Action: sort out where to put it. Some won't be needed till next year. Done - magazine rack next to the armchair

Yes, it's all here. I've done the "do this first" part,  and the next stage is reading the Assesssment Guide. Which is huge!

Action: page 10 tells me how to lay out a TMA. Fonts, headers... Set up a template for future use. (Done, Sunday)

And on reading through: I have details of every TMA for the year, with guidance on how to approach each one. It says not to try them until I've completed certain areas of study, and it seems to be right - my answer at the moment would be "huh?"

Length: like with the AET, my first thought is "that isn't an essay, that's a tweet!" Even the final, large one, is only 1000 words.

Yes, I am expected to use referencing right from the start. See earlier TODO about referencing tools.

So that was "welcome to the OU"

Some interesting links in the Chat, which I made notes of in Notepad as it went along. I seem to be one of the longest out of formal education - many of those worrying about it have only been out 10 years or so!

So all those links are action to do, and I'd better look at OneNote, since three people recommended it.

Up to activity 4, page 17. Which is way ahead of where I'm supposed to be. Looking at four posters, and need to Think about them. I'll pause for now and catch up with the follow-up from earlier posts.

https://studenthublive.open.ac.uk/content/am-i-too-old-age-just-number-17-sep-2024

No, I'm not (surprise!) I've been introduced to problems that others have, or expect to have. Most are irrelevant to me.

There were some interesting tools and terms used that may be helpful. I wish I'd read the guidance on note-taking before attending rather than as a result!

Further interesting demos  of what this Connect application is capable of. I'm impressed!

There was mention of a thing called "body doubling" as a study aid. They're using a very different meaning of that phrase from me!

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/body-doubling-adhd#alternatives

https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique

That's the Pomodoro technique (and I may have to hunt Amazon for  a tomato-shaped timer)

Like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Judge-Analogue-Timer-Tomato-Red/dp/B00SXKZ1TY?th=1
Arrived Wednesday afternoon 

And the note-taking techniques

https://help.open.ac.uk/notetaking-techniques

I'm signed up for a bunch of OU talks - some from the library, some from the Student Hub. This uses a new (to me) video conferencing tool, Adobe Connect. So it's been downloaded, and so far I've attended one talk. All seems very straightforward, though I'm not yet sure how I get a copy of the chat.

One thing I did notice was that when the slides are being shared, I can click on a link in the slide, and it works!

I did one yesterday from the Library, about reference management tools. Fascinating! I probably won't need it for my OU studies this year or the next, but I can use one of those to get my WEA notes under control.

Later this afternoon there's "Am I too old for this: age is just a number?". The reminder email tells me I can download the slides in advance, so I'll do that.

And in "freshers week" (24th Sep) I have a few more lined up. 

Note to self: list of more to sign up for!
https://studenthublive.open.ac.uk/

Not that I expect to use it for actual email all that much - I'm already set up to use my normal personal email for most things. But it should let me register for discounts, library access, things like that.

The problem is that it's an Office 365 account. A good idea, in general, it gives us all a common set of tools that some people may not have. But, they're not the only people to have this good idea, and MS in their wisdom will only let you sign into (and get "new mail" alerts from) one account at a time. I now have three. My work one is set up so I can access it via the Yahoo web email interface, and I rather hoped to do the same here. Or to forward these ones to another account. Or something! But no, not an option. For now, I've got my phone logged into work Outlook (and Teams) and the laptop into OU, but this really isn't ideal.

I'm not quite sure what this is for, or who can see it, but let's try out all the new toys.

Today is the day my registration went through. I don't yet have my new email address or Office 365, but I seem to have quite a lot of other things.

This is Wednesday. I went through "OU Ready" on Monday (except for the parts where I don't yet have access to do the practical), did all the  quizzes, and got my brownie badge.

(I wonder, can I insert pictures here?)

Tuesday was phoning to get the payment done (sadly I don't qualify to do this for free).

It seems that while I could wait for dead-tree material to be delivered, it's available as PDF - a much better idea in any case! So I'm working my way through it.