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…

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.

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?

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…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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!