OpenMusings

A Twitter contact was asking earlier this evening about what other OU students had blogs. Oh yeah! That would be me! ::cough::

After another long update break, let’s try this again. This year’s joy is T306, the second Systems course I’ll be doing and the final module in my degree. There’s a case study in Block One (part of TMA01) which is particularly interesting to me, being based on my real-world job from a few years ago, and I’ll probably blog about that further soon. In the meantime, I’m baaack! Let’s see how well I can keep this updated this year…

Another piece of software that’s been added to my “useful apps” list: Sketchbook Express for iPad. I’ve had to do a few “rich pictures” on T214 to illustrate TMA answers – in days gone by I used to do these on paper, then use a digital camera to snap the picture and insert the photo. Not particularly elegant.

Sketchbook Express provides an easy answer – fingertip drawing, exportable as a JPEG image which you can email yourself, and it’s capable of doing some rather impressive effects & text manipulations. The end results look far more impressive in the TMA doc, I can tell you.

Express is a free app – there’s a £4.99 Pro version as well, but it seems to be overkill for simple doodle purposes (some of the sample art I’ve seen produced with Pro is very professional-looking). Worth checking out if you have an iPad.

TMA01 is done! Let’s get this puppy submitted…

Oh. Right. I guess the lesson here is, the OU doesn’t want you getting too far ahead.

As an aside: I tend to wait until the results from one TMA are back before I start the next, in case there’s anything worth learning from one to the next. With 7 TMAs, though, they’re so close together in T214 (4-5 weeks apart) that that’s not going to work. Time to live dangerously?

Needed to draw a spray diagram for TMA01 on T214 – there may well be a tool for this on the Course Software CD, but a) I haven’t looked at that yet, b) at home I’m a Mac user and they usually don’t support us too well, and c) while I do some work on the office Windows PC when things are quiet, I can’t install things on it without invoking the wrath of the IT Gods. So I needed a web app that could do the trick.

Enter Gliffy. It’s a “freemium” diagramming web app – and, for what I’ve been using it for the past few days, it’s pretty darned good. “Freemium” refers to the business method of letting users have free access to certain levels of a tool & charging them for more advanced ones – in Gliffy’s case, it’s the groupwork and collaboration tools that come with a price tag. For basic use drawing spray diagrams and the like for TMAs, the free option is perfectly good enough. Could have used this when I was doing M359 (SQL), I can tell you…

Block 1 of T214 includes a case study on Napster and its affect on the internet – the beginning of the rise of peer-to-peer, essentially. What’s funny / curious about it (depending on your point of view) is some of the articles the case study links to to help you learn more about how Napster was viewed at the time, and the issues the legal battle between it and the RIAA raised. Have a read of this article over at the Harvard Law School (warning: long) as an example – especially the six possible ways forward that the article posits.

As far as music is concerned, the way things are today is almost unrecognisable from then – music is now freely available from legal download services, with no DRM restrictions, for reasonable per-song costs. The music industry has learnt the lessons that those who turned to Napster wanted them to learn.

But the RIAA’s place has now been taken by the MPAA and their ilk, who are seeking to keep their control over the movie business. It’ll be interesting to see if history repeats itself in their case.

Two years away from OU blogging, and in some places all that’s changed is the error message:

Yaargh. And with that, I promise no more complaining about OU system downtime. Until the next time it does it to me in the middle of a study session, anyway…

Something for the T214 crowd – there’s a general forum on the ‘net with a section devoted to the course, and that seems to have reasonable input from at least some of the OU’s course team – worth a look as an additional source of support for the course. Here’s the link.

A while back, I had a bit of a whinge about the number of Online Application CDs that I was amassing – OU was including one in the mailing for every module I did, and when you’re approaching 20 that starts to add up.

We all have broadband these days, just set up a students’ download page and save the money all those damn CD’s cost. Likewise, a PDF of the Electronic TMA guide would be plenty useful enough for those that need it – I have enough courses under my belt now that I need neither. With those gone, there would be no need for the mailing at all, thereby removing the need for packaging or postal costs. The OU’s been going on for a while about the need to control costs & raise student fees – well there’s a place to start on the cost-cutting that I doubt too many people would care about. It would even be environmentally-friendly.

There were a few CDs / DVDs in with the T214 mailing so I didn’t notice at first, but, praise the maker, there’s no Online Applications DVD – although with the retirement of First Class (bless its soul) and what I’ve taken as a strong hint that we should be using MS Office (the hint being the restrictions placed on TMA filetypes), there’s really nothing else that it could be used to distribute. But for me at least, it’s a welcome omission.

Speaking of T214, the course mailing for this one was impressively large – probably what you should expect for a 60-pointer, but I have to admit I do like digging through large piles of books.

My, that's a lot of books...

First thoughts: Block one is The Internet, which should be simple enough given that a) it’s my dayjob, and b) I’m never off it. Block four is criminal justice, and comes with a hefty “evidence file” book that implies some detective work will be involved – looking forward to that block, then, although it won’t be until June / July time that I get to it.

Course reviews for this one are mixed, but my own first impressions of it are quite good. Looking forward to getting properly stuck into this one – even though I need a distinction out of it if my hopes of a first-class honours are to be kept up.

Oh dear. I have been somewhat remiss about updating here, haven’t I? Only two years since the last update. ::shame::

I have been busy with my OU studies in that time – M256 (Software Development with Java) and M364 (Fundamentals of Interaction Design) have both been done and dusted, and the study path to B33 (BSc(Hons) Computing and Systems Practice) is now down to just two courses: T214 (Understanding Systems: Making Sense of Complexity) and T306 (Managing Complexity: A Systems Approach).

T214 starts, well, today, with an opening block all around the “network of networks” that you’re using by reading this blog: the Internet. The course recommends posting a lot of activity work to the ‘net for reference and whatnot, so I’m figuring this will be as good a place to post as any – so you may find seemingly random posts appearing. That’ll be why.

But I’m also going to try and keep this updated with other thoughts on my OU studies, as I’d originally intended to when I set the blog up. After 16 completed modules in 5 years, I’ve seen some changes in the way the OU, so there’re plenty of things to talk about.

For now, though, I’ve got some set-book reading to do. Later!