Educational Goodness

Will post about Fantasycon once I get my brain back in gear.... but if you're on Facebook, I added a load of photos there - mostly of the awards banquet, but a few set up ones too...

Anyhoo, whilst I was nicely distracted by Fcon, the OU results came in. So I'm well chuffed to say I passed the Archaeology: Science of Investigation module. It was only a shorty 10 pointer thingy, but still nice to get the pass! :-)

Next on the OU list are another couple of short 10 -pointers - Perspectives on Leonardo Da Vinci and Life in the Oceans... fun things to keep me going until the big one starts in February. Namely, Arts: Past and Present.

This one's a proper sized module :-) and also apparently something of a foundation course for OU study as most of the courses I was looking at doing all say somewhere in their blurb that it's recommended to do the Arts one first. At least, if you've never studied with the OU before, which I haven't. (And given the distinct lack of prior education elsewhere, I figured it was probably not the time to blag it and leap straight to the World Archaeology module, which is a level 2 course...)

And the Arts course is quite the fascinating beast... it covers history, art history, philosophy, classical studies, history of science, religious studies, music and English. Plus there's nifty looking stuff on the reading list... Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (which I've never read, so this makes the perfect opportunity), an anthology of multi-cultural short fiction (which I've read and there's some good stuff in it!), a poetry collection (which has me mildly worried) and The Burial at Thebes - the Seamus Heaney translation of Sophocles' Antigone. (Which definitely has me worried!) And there's also the quite cool looking film Bhaji on the Beach to watch for the course too! (Hell, I just love the name of the film!)

And that's without whatever the OU sends out for the course... It looks quite hefty from the course description as the first part of the course is titled Reputations and is going to include case studies of Cleopatra, Josef Stalin, Michael Faraday and the Dalai Lama, as well as examining the artistic reputations of Christopher Marlowe and Paul Cézanne. Which is nice. :-) Apparently this part of the course is designed to develop close listening skills (for the music section) and basic competency in visual anaylsis and crticial reading. All of which I definitely would like to get the hang of, so it promises to be a good course...

(This has not been an advertisement for the Open University!) :-)