World Music Marking

I have just peer reviewed the week 1 essays from six of my fellow students on the Coursera / Penn University course Listening To World Music.  They were rather a mixed bag.

One essay stood above the others, the student has phrased his/her essay in academic language, the question had been thought about and looked at from two differing angles and it read through as one coherent whole. Another essay was pretty good, asked to comment on positionality and emotion within music the student chose the original song, and then three cover versions of the same to illustrate his point, clever thinking.  The other four were hard going though, at least two seemed to understand only basic English, not one used any basic academic conventions and at least one seemed to be answering a different question.  Or perhaps even a question from a different course.

This is where I feared the Coursera project might begin to fall down.  I am going to be quite happy if the first two students read and score my essay, they have a good grip of what the course entails and understood the questions clearly.  Judging by the standard of the other four essays, I wouldn't want any of them marking my work as they appear to have little or no idea of what is going on. Asking them to give scores based on academic conventions and whether or not the arguments are convincing and nuanced just won't be possible as they do not seem to understand these terms.

Fingers crossed then. I think I have written a decent first essay, not as well argued as my Open University work, but then it is a free course without a recognised qualification so I am not spending the research time on this that I would with the OU. I am the only person I have seen so far who has presented references and a bibliography, the OU have drummed that into me over the last year.

Week one scores will be out tomorrow, I have a very busy weekend next week so I'm unsure if I can manage to whole essay and peer reviewing business.  It may depend on whether next week's questions really pique my interest.

Over in OU world, our collaborative wiki is coming on well, and I have made a start on next month's essay question - "To what extent has tourism transformed the meaning of religious objects?"

University of Pennsylvania

I signed on with the University of Pennsylvania using the new online university service Coursera. The first module I have opted to take is Listening To World Music taught by Professor of Music and ethnomusicologist Dr. Carol Muller.  I had expected these free courses, which cannot count towards any formal qualification, to be fairly simple stuff. I am very pleased to find though that the lectures, while easy to understand, are pitched at a fairly high level.

In the opening lectures, which are all delivered in short video sections, Dr. Muller talked about Arjan Appadurai and his theories of social rupture. I am already slightly familiar with Appadurai from module A151 with The Open University in which his book The Social Life of Things features prominently so the music lecture held some relevant crossover points with the material culture studies I am doing.

Coursera works by delivering video lectures with short quizzes and then writing a weekly essay which will be peer reviewed - your own essay will only be reviewed if you have reviewed someone else's work. I am not sure how well this will work to be honest, you can really only mark something correctly if you really understand the subject and know the answers.

This week's questions (choose one of) are...


Week 1 Questions
1) Appadurai argues that modernity is a form of rupture in everyday life, and that the experience of modernity is now globally present.  Moving places is one such form of rupture.  If you are from a family or community that has made significant moves in the last several decades—from rural to urban areas, from one country or continent to another--ask members of your family/group, if music provided a means to maintaining a connection between past and present places of residence and how it has done so--live performance, recordings, human travel? Has music worked to maintain your language of origin? How else might it have worked as a connective tissue in the move or significant moment of rupture?

2) Steven Feld argues that some ethnomusicologists who have studied traditional music have expressed a certain anxiety about commercial market forces in relation to 'traditional' and 'local' music-cultural practices. Others celebrate the potential for intercultural communication and collaboration that made possible with new forms of musical travel. In what ways do you think processes and forms of mass mediation have changed in the last two decades? How might these changes confirm, challenge, or otherwise problematize the anxiety/celebratory takes on musical change? How might contemporary forms of mass media affect our understanding of 'local' or 'traditional' musical practice? Such newer forms of mass media might include the internet, file-sharing, YouTube, iPods, Tablets, etc.: what others can you think of?

3) Find youtube examples of the three forms of authenticity outlined in this lecture segment, and explain how they are articulated in the clip.  It maybe that there are only one or two of these authenticities expressed in the clip.   How does the presence of authenticity contribute to the power of the music for you as a listener/consumer?

4) Watch this clip about the commercial recording of Gregorian chant by a German monastic order.  It provides a parallel example of commodification of the sacred to the earlier “Chant” recording.  It presents a narrative of monastic life and deep history, the place of prayer, work and ritual in that life.  Comment on the discourses of the sacred, the commodity, authenticity, the miraculous, new technologies, commercial success; on Father Karl, the narrator’s story and rationalization for inserting Chant into the commercial marketplace.  What do you think is to be gained by this process, and what might be lost?  How does the music work for the monks?  Is it the same as for the consumer?  Gregorian chant by the monks of Heiligenkruez

It is going to be hard getting this done alongside my Open University commitments. I will have a go at question 4 if I can find time.

Day To Day Activities As Cultural Signifiers

"...everyday activities can take on symbolic meanings representing underlying beliefs, distinctions. and hierarchies within a society." - Moira Vincintelli in Reflections on a Kabyle Pot: Algerian Women and the Decorative Tradition, Journal of Design History , Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (1989), pp. 123-138, Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315802.

Photo : A Kabylie oil lamp from the Victoria & Albert Collection.

University Cheats

One of the rules imposed by the Open University, and most likely by all other universities, is that you don't cheat.  Your submitted work must be your own work, not plagiarised, and definitely not copied from the internet. Some berks on my course, AA100, have been caught selling their essays to the cheat site Essayzone UK.

Essayzone is a website that allows people who are only interested in the result, as opposed to the education, to purchase marked essays so that they can then presumably try to pass off a lesser or greater amount of the essay as their own work.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was going to cheat and purchase such an essay, I would want that essay to be a top scorer, it would have to be a distinction level piece of work - that's 85% and above here at the OU. Two of the essays for sale are scored 74% for the Michael Faraday essay, and 72% for the Gunn/Flatman poetry essay. So for the purposes of cheating, the study book contains 100% of the information you require for this essay of which the submitter has only managed to glean just less than three-quarters of the meaning.  I just don't get it, if you're going to cheat, then at least cheat well.

This incident does seem to have exposed a difference between some people on the course.  On the one hand, and I place myself firmly in this group, there are those who see the educational and mind broadening aspects of the study as being at least equal in importance to gaining the degree.  In camp two are those who are only focused on the actual attaining of the degree and who tend towards such comments as "Why bother to read more books outside the course work, the course material contains all the stuff you need to pass."

Brick universities are at the moment packed with people in that second camp, teenage kids who wanted to go to university but without any clear idea of what they want to study.  I would say that some of these children have been railroaded by the school system and peer pressure into going to university, it has become the done thing to do, a three year party with a qualification thrown in at the end. Am I being unfair ? Some universities are reporting 1st year drop out rates of up to 20%, 21% of students starting in 2009 will not complete their degree (source - The Times 14 May 2012).

I cannot offer any proof for this, but it seems to me that someone who takes their second or third choice university course just to be able to have the 'university experience' may well be someone who doesn't care enough to put in the effort to make all their work their own.  Drop out rates from the very top universities, where students have to be the very best and presumably get onto their first choice courses, are tiny; Oxford, Cambridge and St. Andrews all have drop out rates of under 1.5%.

Cheating just seems so pointless.  I could have bought an essay here and there, and re-worded it a little to get around the plagiarism checks.  But if I had done so I would not have had the pleasure of researching and understanding the life of  Michael Faraday.  I would not have been able to explore a little known corner of British-African history (little known to me that is) that was the massacre at Benin.  My knowledge of many aspects of Christianity including Luther, the Reformation, the Dissolution, Pugin and church architecture would be much less.

I had twin goals when I began this degree.  I want to have the degree itself, that would be nice, I would like to prove to myself that I can work to the required standard to get a BA(hons). My other goal is more nebulous, I want to be able to answer more questions on University Challenge, I want to be able to listen to the guests on In Our Time and not only understand the flow of the argument but to be able to agree with or argue with the points raised in an informed manner, when an interviewee on The Culture Show starts to waffle about poetics versus hermeneutics I want to understand what they mean.

So I'm not going to cheat and buy an essay because I want to be more broadly educated, and anyway, I have consistently scored higher than the berks who have sold their work, so what can they teach me anyway ?

Objectivity

"Some scholars are doubtful of the usefulness of distinguishing between subjective and objective, arguing that even apparently objective observations are dependant on the judgement of the observer who makes them, or on the accuracy of their observations, and that objective facts which are independent of someone observing them cannot exist" - Phil Perkins in Hughes, J. and Perkins, P., Approaches A151 Book 1, The Open University, 2012.

A Poverty Of Contemplative Thought ?

"Over the last 100 years or so the loss of the religious as a reputable discourse in common life has led to a poverty of language, and thus to a poverty of contemplative thought and feeling about what we are, and what we need. We need some inner stuff, scaffolding to help us get around our inner space, something to help us map, explore and even settle those places where we are still primitive." - Jane Davis in the essay The Reading Revolutiuon in Vintage Books' Stop What You're Doing And Read This, London, 2011.

The Reader Organisation

What Do These Objects Tell You About The Owner ??

• hiking boots
• laptop
• wine rack
• bookshelf
• i-pod dock
• Le Crueset pans
• Yorkshire Cricket sweater
• Ford Zetec
• oak coffee table
• electric razor

What does this list suggest about the person who owns them ?

Does it tell you anything about their gender, age, beliefs, socio-economic grouping ?

The Great Paris Cat Massacre

The penultimate assignment for OU AA100 is to write a reflective piece about your study skills and learning experiences on the course.  This seems a fairly easy essay to write, especially for those of us who had to do a similar piece on the preceding course.  When considering my strengths I had noted that I have a very broad range of interests and very much enjoy reading and writing.  On the weaknesses side I put that partly because of my broad range of interests I have a tendency to get sidetracked when doing research for essays.

A case in point was yesterday when I was supposedly reading up on the history of rail infrastructure and the improvement of pay for the working classes in the rise of Blackpool as a leisure destination.  Everything was going well, I was poring through various scholarly historical journals and then...

Le Monde Illustre, April 1871. During the Siege of Paris (Franco-Prussian War) market stalls did a thriving business in cat, dog and rat meat.

The next article in the journal History Today was titled The Great Paris Cat Massacre. Who wouldn't want to read that ? Blackpool and the social history of Lancashire mill workers was forgotten as I read the exploits of two Paris apprentices, who, angered that their employers looked after their vast array of felines better than they did their humans, eventually held a trial for said cats, accused and found them guilty of witchcraft and then beat them all to death with clubs. It was rather gruesome, especially if you are fond of cats, but also blackly hilarious.



Oh kittens, in our hours of ease
Uncertain toys and full of fleas,
When pain and anguish hang o’er men,
We turn you into sausage then.

'The Arts' Are Almost Complete, On To 'Material Culture'

It doesn't seem long since I started the OU module AA100 The Arts Past And Present, but suddenly the end is in sight. I have an essay to hand in next week on the role of the chorus in Greek theatre, then a reflection piece on my studying, and lastly the End of Module Assignment on either pilgrimage as tourism or seaside codes of behaviour.

I have signed up for a summer course in order to keep my fees at the old, or transitional, level as opposed to the two and half times rise in fees that new OU students will have to pay.  It will be another level 1one course for 30 points which will leave me with an awkward 105 points of the 120 I need to pass year one.  Due to the availability of courses I may well have to do 135 points at level one now.

The next module I have chosen is A151 - Making sense of things: an introduction to material culture.  This is
a brand new module so this summer's students will be the first group to study it. It sounds really interesting.

"Book 1: Approaches

The first book emphasises key skills applicable across the humanities, and key concepts which you will apply through the course. You will explore the origins of the ‘idea’ of material culture and approaches to describing, classifying and interpreting objects, drawing on the disciplines of archaeology, history, anthropology and ancient history. The first chapter introduces the key concepts of ‘object biography’ and the ‘life cycle of things’, by considering how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century museums attempted to order and classify objects from across time and space. Chapter Two develops skills of close observation and description, considering different ways of writing about objects. Chapter Three broadens out to consider ways in which the historic, social and physical (or archaeological) context of objects can aid in interpreting them, focusing on the House of Menander at Pompeii as a case study. The final chapter focuses on classification, with reference to the study of ancient Athenian vases.

Book 2: Contexts

The second book emphasises the critical significance which an understanding of material culture has played in our developing understanding of history. You will look at the way scholars have used the study of objects and their contexts to shed light on a specific period of European history, from about 1200 to 1700. In particular, the focus is on the place of objects in the wider culture of the age and how they illuminate our understanding of religious and intellectual developments during the Reformation and Renaissance. In the first two chapters, you will study the central role that sacred objects played in the everyday lives of Europe’s Catholic population and the extreme reaction to them in Protestant circles, culminating in the mass destruction of much of the material culture of the medieval past during the Reformation. In the final two chapters, you will examine how technical developments in creating objects encouraged new ways of thinking about and understanding the world. This will be through case studies concerned with the origins of the printed book and the preparation of anatomical specimens.

Book 3: Afterlives

The unifying theme of the final book is the afterlives of objects, by which we mean what happens to objects when they acquire new uses or meanings. You will examine what happens to objects when they move from one social and historical context to another, and therefore the changes in the way these objects are understood. You will explore specific questions of power, ‘commodification’, memory and ownership and more general questions of change and transformation. Chapters One and Two examine religious and secular ‘relics’ and their contagious power; what happens when religious objects are transformed by global tourism; and whether tourism diminishes the ‘sacredness’ or ‘authenticity’ of such objects. Chapter Three explores issues of memory and absence with reference to Holocaust museums. In Chapter Four you will consider philosophical issues surrounding the ownership and display of objects. In particular, moral issues that arise in relation to objects removed from their place of origin, and in relation to bodies and parts of bodies collected by museums."

One flew over the GOP nest.

"Freedom isn't to do whatever you want to do, it's to do what you ought to do" ..."

Huh? I told you all that Ricky [I should be in a] Sanitarium is crazy, but you wouldn't listen.

Folks, make no mistake, A Rick [I should be in a] Sanitarium presidency would be scary for A-merry-ca.

I know all about Rick [I should be in a] Sanitarium, I am from Pistolvania. He was one of our Senators here before we decided to throw his ass out by 16 percentage points. Now that he has a national stage the rest of A-merry-ca is finding out about the guy as well.

Comparing O to Hitler. Wanting to do away with federal AND state involvement with education. (Yes, Ricky would prefer if all the children in A-merry-ca were home schooled like his own. Shhhh, let's not mention the fact that he stole money from the people of Pistolvania while doing it.)Wanting to do away with pre-natal care for pregnant women, and calling the religion of the president of these divided states "phony." Wow! This all makes him declaring contraception harmful to women seem like the norm. I will give Ricky credit; he is doubling down on crazy.

"The idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not."

"Anachronistic" Rick? Oh the irony. Folks, believe me, if there is anything that belongs in another time it's Rick [I should be in a] Sanitarium.

"There's nothing - there's no gift, no Christmas gift, that could be given better than Rick Santorum to the Democrats,"

I know that they don't believe me, but I want to say this to my republican friends in all sincerity: If Donald Trump believes that the guy heading for the nomination of your party is unelectable, just what do you think a normal person in A-merry-ca is thinking about him? Think about it.







       

The Humanities Whistle Stop Tour; Benin to Greece

Along with my fellow students, I am now at the halfway point of the AA100 module, and the whistle stop tour of all points of humanities continues.  In the next few weeks we will be studying...

A Benin bronze plaque

Cultural Encounters : Changing relations between Europe and Africa and the art of Benin

Cultural exemptions and the Musqueam people of Canada

World short stories

The transmission of medical knowledge from Greece to Europe via the Middle East

Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles' Antigone : The Burial At Thebes

Everything is going well so far.  Although our tutor had told us it is not compulsory to hand in every essay, I feel I am getting better value from the course and building my skills better by doing all the work possible.  So far with four essays handed in and marked I'm just a fraction off a Distinction grade.

There are two essays from this section of the module, on the art of Benin and cultural encounters, then either cultural exemptions and the Musqueam people or the contribution of the chorus in The Burial At Thebes.  So far when we have had a choice of essays I have tried to go for what seems the harder of the two choices.  My thinking here is that this is only a level one module so it would be good practise the mentally stretch myself whenever possible.

One aspect of student life that makes learning today so easy is the huge wealth of information via the internet, I kid you not, Melvyn Bragg and the In Our Time guests on Radio 4 are helping me enormously.  Having a group of renowned academics discussing the topic you are composing an essay on is a fantastic help.  Other great sources for research are Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg with their vast collections of texts, audio and picture files. The Open University also gives us access to its vast online library system, so big that sometimes it feels like diving into an ocean of information to find a single pearl of knowledge. It is quite possible to get hopelessly lost / bogged down when searching the seemingly endless OU databases for something you hope to be relevant.

The Benin section is fascinating, and I am very much enjoying the way that the chapters are now drawing the various disciplines of humanities together.  In the the two chapters on cultural encounters and Benin we start with straight history, then combine it with the history of art and a hint of religious studies, then mix in a bit of philosophy at the end.

This section of the course feels like real university work, I had little idea what was meant by the phrase 'cultural exemptions' before this and if asked to describe the philosophical mindset behind 'difference-blind liberalism' a blank and uncomprehending look may well have ensued.  It is all good stuff though, I'm still loving the work.  Onwards and upwards as my tutor says.

Education Ups and Downs and Ups

St. Chad's Cathedral, designed by Pugin

I set off on AA100 - The Arts Past and Present like a rocket, getting a really great score for my first pair of essays on Plutarch's view of the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra, and comparing and contrasting the painting styles of Cezanne and Zurburan.  The second essay should have scored more points, in theory, as it was a re-write of one of the first essays, I chose the Plutarch one.  I mucked up on the bibliography and referencing though which cost me points and left me with a lower score then the original essay.  A bit of a downer then.

In the run up to Christmas and New Year I was doing 80 hour weeks and so the little time I had for studying was fractured and at the wrong ends of the day.  Getting your head into your course books after a 15 hour shift is never going to garner any great results.

I sat down yesterday morning to get to grips with my current pair of essays, comparing the reputation of Michael Faraday from two different sources, and comparing and examining two poems ostensibly about cats.  An hour after starting I was almost sat with my head in my hands, my notes from the last month were hugely disorganised, written here and there on bits of paper with underscores and crossings out in abandon.  This then was my lowest ebb for the course so far. 

I had a quick flick around the Facebook groups, saw lots of other folk mentioning the same time problems and even worse, another course colleague had bitten the dust. Left. Quit. Dropped out.

Can't do that, I'm too Yorkshire.  I've paid for this course out of my own pocket so I'm determined to wring value from it. A couple of hours yesterday and then a solid four hour stint today and I had dragged my copious but random notes into some sort of coherent form and produced two essays complete with references and bibliography.

That's me back in the groove then.  I don't think these are the best essays I have done, I have a slight concern I haven't balanced the dual question in one quite enough, but they are done and with that I can press on with Pugin and the revival of Gothic architecture in English churches.

I have had a look to see what the next essay is, a choice between examining tradition and dissent in either the Roman Catholic church in England, or the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the word count is doubled to 1,200.  I have not yet done the work on Shostakovich, but I'm taking an early decision and have been to the library to raid it for background material on Catholicism.

Now then, another hour or two studying before I cook dinner, I'm a happy little student again.

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• The Blog Isn't Dead... (yorkshiresoul.blogspot.com)

The Blog Isn't Dead...

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...but it came close this time.

I know I've been rather non-existent on the blogging front for nearly a month, a busy period at work, uni work and then our annual holiday all got in the way.  The holiday was wonderful, we spent two weeks in Florida and did all the touristy things including the Universal theme parks, Gatorland, watching the Mars mission being launched and, er, shooting a Glock handgun. Not at anybody you understand.

After Florida we spent a weekend at the UK's premier classic/hard rock festival, Hard Rock Hell, drank slightly too much, got a new tattoo and heard some great, and hugely loud, bands.  Magnum, Black Stone Cherry, Therapy?, Michael Monroe, Voodoo Six, Quireboys, Wolfsbane, Kobra and the Lotus and a host of other bands made it a great weekend.  We have booked our tickets for next year's festival already as they tend to sell out rather early.

I got some rather good news from The Open University yesterday, I passed my foundation module with flying colours and received a Distinction.  I managed seven maximum scores from the eight marking points and a good score on the online multi-choice exam.

Now that I am a quarter of the way through the 60 point module AA100 The Arts Past and Present, I am very glad that I did the foundation module as nearly all the work we did on art, poetry and history is highly relevant to this course as well.  My first essays on this course, on Plutarch's view of the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra, and a critical comparison of the styles of Cezanna and Zurbaran, were both marked as being only a fraction short of Distinction level so I am really pleased with that as well.  The second essay, a re-write and reflective analysis of the Plutarch essay I handed in while on holiday. The next essays are on Michael Faraday, and a critical analysis of some poetry about cats, due in the first week of January 2012

People Listen To This For Pleasure ?!

My kitchen normally chugs along to the noise of angry sounding young people bellowing over a crescendo of wailing guitars and pounding drum rhythms, yesterday though as I pressed on to the next part of my humanities course, the fat lady sang.

Cover of Giuseppe VerdiTo be more accurate, she wasn't fat at all, I was just repeating an overly used jibe about opera, but like many people, I suspect that quote and a vague image of large men in tight fitting costumes is about my sum knowledge of opera.  Yesterday I was introduced to Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Donizetti and Luzzaschi, and I must admit, it was not an easy introduction.

I have no problem with listening to songs in another language, alongside the excellent German singing Rammstein I have a fair few bands whose singing language is either not English, or in some of the more extreme metal bands, possibly not human.

There is a quality to this operatic singing though that sends a shiver right through me, and not in a good way. To be even more precise, I can get along with the male singers, but the high pitched warbling effect favoured by the female vocalists is jarring and unpleasent to my ears. 

So far on the course I have gained knowledge of a good many art forms and historical figures about whom I previously knew very little, and the more I learn the more I seem to appreciate them, with the exception of Stalin, who was a git.  I have not come across anything so far though that has been so hateful at first contact and that has left me with the feeling that if I never encounter it again, I will be the happier for it.

Opera is regarded by many as being difficult and elitist, an art form reserved for, and appreciated by a narrow band of the upper classes.  As with many things regarded as being elitist, half the case is that access to opera, as with many things considered somewhat exclusive, is actually quite easy, anyone can download, cheaply or for free, a reasonable selection of music, and if you have the money you can buy a ticket for a gig.  What seems to be harder to come by though is an appreciation for the art form.  I am listening to (I think) Maria Callas warbling her way though a bit of Verdi's La Traviata, and to be perfectly honest, I just wish she'd stop.

Oh well, I will just have to apply our old Scout motto, POR - Press On Regardless.

Stalin's Giving Me A Hard Time

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later, I have reached a part of the degree course that I did not find easy.  I dare say as I add modules and move on to stage 2 and 3 work I'm going to find quite a lot of the work quite hard, but until the Stalin chapter yesterday everything seemed to be going quite well.



Krushchev and Stalin



Our task in the Stalin chapter of Reputations is to examine the myth of Stalin, both the story he built up about himself, and then the counter-myth spun by Krushchev, this is done by examining the conclusions of different historians.  This is a very different way to learn history than I am used to, this isn't at all the rote learning of dates and events I can remember from school, along with the very definite 'this is what happened' approach. The methods we are being trained to use to examine history is much more 'so X occured, but the reason might be Y according to Smith, or Z according to Jones', and then it's up to us to sort it out.

I have managed to complete the Stalin chapter, and did all the exercises within, but it was tough going, and when I read the suggested answers for each question, I had not made half so many connections and conclusions as I had been doing in the earlier parts of the course.

There isn't an essay to do on Stalin, for which I am quite grateful.  My Cleopatra essay is almost completed, just the bibliography to do, and I have my Cezanne vs. Zurburan essay in rough form ready to copy up. Looking to the next chapter of the course, it's music, focusing on the diva, and taking in Maria Callas, Madonna, Puccini and Luzzaschi, who as far as I am aware at the moment, plays inside left for AC Milan.

Diary Of A University Student Aged 44

For better or for worse then, introductory course Y-180 is a wrap.  I have submitted my assessment essay on Chris Ofili's mixed media painting Afrodizzia, I have done the multi-choice online exam and that is it, the course is complete.  All I have to do now is sit back and wait for the result and hopefully 15 points of the 360 I require to get a degree.

Except...I'm not sitting back and waiting because I signed up for a 60 point module, AA 100 - The Arts Past And Present, and as the Openings module ended, the new one began.

On Saturday I became a proper student as along with a largish crowd of fellow Open University students I attended our induction day event in the Rose Bowl at Leeds Metropolitan University.  A number of the Yorkshire (Region 7) students had contacted each other via Facebook, and so wet met up, slightly nervously, at Leeds Station before trooping off en masse to an actual brick Uni.

I know the first course was proper study, but this course feels more real after meeting fellow students face to face as well as getting to meet our course tutor.  Now, the Open Uni has rules about talking about tutors but I think it's alright if I say that our tutor seems decidedly forthright, blunt even, but in a very honest and helpful way.  I think he has left us in no doubt of what we need to do to pass this module, what we need to do to pass this module with flying colours, and what sort of things we should avoid to avoid looking like complete muppets - handing in 5,000 word count essays when the question asked for 500 for example.

I had a flutter of unease during the tutor introduction session, but not to do with this course, it was just that as the tutor explained why we must remove the 'I' from our essays I was thinking back to what I had written in my essay on Afrodizzia and wondering whether there might be a bit too much of myself in it.

Now, I know that some of my fellow students may well read this as my blog posts to Facebook, and I do want to panic anybody who might be struggling with the coursework, but...I was a bit worried when I took on this degree work that it might be too challenging for me, that I might struggle with the work and fall behind.  The opposite seems to ring true, well, its either that or I'm failing to understand the work.  I know that I have not quite nailed the art of the academic essay style yet, partly because I am far too used to writing in a chatty and informal style, but that will come with a bit more practise.  My first tutor also kept giving me a great bit advice - get in close to the subject.  I realise that I have a tendency to stand back a bit and look at the topic in overview, to try and drag in extra information and expand on the question asked. Practise should make better here if not perfect, read the question very carefully, and then, very carefully, answer the question that was asked.

I love all the work.  Our tutor said we can't possibly enjoy everything, but so far I have, the 1st World War Poetry was moving and powerful, Chartist history opened up for me a part of history I knew nothing about but was glad to learn, and the art, oh wow, the art is fantastic.

When I started this, I was pretty sure that a degree in English Literature was the one for me, after all, I read loads of books so it should only follow that my main strength and interest would lie in literature right ? I still love Eng Lit, but some of the art sets me ablaze.  Before learning about techniques, meaning, and especially context, I was content to look at art and judge it on whether I liked it or not, which is at the base level what everyone does.  When I can learn about the back stories to, and history of people like Picasso and Cezanne though it makes their paintings come alive for me, I can identify with what they saw and what they were trying to achieve, why they painted in the way they did.

Eyes down then, time to both study and enjoy it, our first theme is reputations and the people we are studying are a fantastically diverse group, Cleopatra, Christopher Marlowe, Paul Cezanne, Michael Faraday, Joseph Stalin, Madonna (the pop singer), Maria Callas and the Dalai Lama. It's all great, I'm sure I will hit a point when the work becomes a struggle, when my comprehension leads me astray and I need to phone my tutor and say "Help", but for now, I love the work, I love the way the OU and the modules work, everything is wonderful.

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Do Our Colleges Fail Their Students ?

Image by RobW_ via Flickr"There are more college students studying performing arts than there are people employed in the entertainment industry as a whole, this includes ticket sellers, cinema cashiers and lap dancers"

"There are ten times more people studying hairdressing than there are jobs in the hairdressing industry."

Educating Cinderella, BBC Radio 4

Representation of Depth in Art

Image via WikipediaRepresentation of depth…


• overlapping

• diminishing scale

• atmospheric or aerial perspective

• vertical placement

• linear perspective

• modelling

Pic - Satire on False Perspective by William Hogarth.

Form and Colour

Image via WikipediaForm as …


• use of colour

• use of medium

• arrangement of the composition

Colour…

• has a wide or narrow palette of colours been used ?

• have contrasting colours been placed next to each other ?

• are there more warm, or more cool colours ?

• in what way has dark and light colour been used ?

MeganEmmie BACKSTREET BOYS - As Long As You Love Me FCut

Another of the IGS Media Studies videos, this one suffers from some fairly harsh scene to scene cutting, but it does feature the lovely Paula, ex-waitress of this parish.