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 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 ?

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.