confused of Blogland
Okay, I’m confused, and whilst there’s nothing new there really I feel the need to share my confusions with the world in the vain hope that setting it down might help me make any sense of them…
1) There is a number of forums provided by the OU, specific to their courses. People "go" there to discuss the course, moan about how hard distance learning is, how they will never get the next TMA done in time etc and also to support each other and ask questions.
So someone asked a question about a specific text. it was a text that was to be looked at for a TMA but still the question didn’t directly relate to the TMA and she was almost as wobbly about it as I get sometimes so I answered the question in about 2 sentences, hardly going to fill her TMS’s 750 word allowance up for her now was it? Or even answer the question that the TMA asked, just helped her to understand the piece by pointing out that the course book had said that this bloke was prone to writing toungue in cheek.
The post has been pulled from the forum because it would help her to complete the TMA and was therefore in infringement of the forum rules. I would, however, be okay to send that message to her privately. So, erm, leaving asside the question of do we therefore think that at "real" universities they don’t discuss assignments in the canteen and bounce ideas off each other? Or that at the next tutor group I go to there won’t be discussion about this particular point? It’s okay to "share" and therefore "help" someone privately but not to pass taht same information on to the person who didn’t have the courage to pipe up that they didn’t get it either by making it available to the whole group on a forum specifically put there to support people through this course? I really don’t quite get that!
2) still with the OU here! I’ve got to go for a "formal assessment" so they can start the process of letting me do my end of year exam on a PC (so the poor marker can read it!) So I got the phone number of the person I needed to book in with and a form that if you read it is definitely meant to be filled in after the event. Clues like "How DID you travel to your assessment?" and "Where WAS your assessment conducted?" (or something like that any way) kind of suggest that it’s already happened doesn’t it? But this form came with a note to say fill it in as soon as you have booked the assessment and get it back to us so we can arrange payment. So I phoned to check and was told "yes, we get a lot of people asking that, fill it in now so we can authorise the assessment" Does this not tell them something? If a lot of people ask this question then maybe, just maybe they need to look at the form with a view to changing it?
On a brighter note though, I’ve just got audio tapes of all my set texts so I can put my feet up and listem to them instead of doing that thing where I need to either read everything twice because I sort of lose track every few paragraphs or read it out load (which drives Duke mad!)
