Learning resources

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in such a long time! I didn’t do as well at T215 as I had hoped, but I’ve just started M364 and it looks really good so far. I’m only doing one 30-point course this year since I’ll be in Japan for three weeks in the middle of it and I’m attending a lovely wedding in the US later in the summer too!

In any case, I have picked up a lot of learning resources that I thought were pretty cool during the time I’ve been silent on WordPress. This is largely through the magic of Pocket, which I highly recommend! It’s so easy to bookmark something for later.

Some of my resources are for free study, and some of my resources complement current studies. Let’s see what’s in my Pocket list…

• A Guide to University Learning (University of Guelph, ON, Canada)
• The Student Room – Revision and Study tips forum
• LifeHacker U – Spring Semester 2014
• 24 Invaluable Skills To Learn Online This Year (BuzzFeed)
• Free books: 100 legal sites to download literature
• Study help – list compiled by meltingliam on Tumblr
• Google Tips and Tricks Every Student Should Know (LifeHacker)

I think there should be at least a little bit of useful information on each of those pages! I hope you can find even just one thing that helps your study or helps you progress your study further.

I also got this book for Christmas, which has been on my Amazon wishlist for a while. I’ll probably have to give it a separate review sometime, because I need to have a better leaf through it now I’ve started a new module. Looks really promising so far though. :)

Library website, referencing, and plagiarism.

Hey everyone! Just a quick post to share with you that the Open University library section of its website has had a bit of an overhaul by the looks of it.

This is the new equivalent of the section I most used to visit on the old site: Referencing and plagiarism. While references are very important in most assignments on most Open University courses, you must make sure that you reference them correctly. Otherwise, you can be in all kinds of trouble!

There’s another page on the OU website about how they respond to plagiarism. This is common to all universities; everyone in the academic world takes plagiarism very seriously.

I know referencing can be tedious and time-consuming. One of my favourite tools for referencing is Zotero, which is a Firefox plugin, and can also connect with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. They’re developing applications and plugins for other platforms – I’ve just downloaded the standalone application for Mac OS X, so I’ll let you know how I get on with it!

Edit: Here’s me using the desktop version on Mac OS X! I’m using the Safari plugin to send page references from Safari into Zotero desktop version, and I’ve also added The Manager’s Good Study Guide using the ISBN wizard.

Zotero standalone version (Mac OS X)

Beginning TM128, and some study tips

I recently received all of the materials for my TM128 course, and the course website opened a few days ago. Fantastic! I’ve already started on Block 1…it’s split into six weeks, but I’m managing a lot of it in evenings alone. You should note that I did a lot of this stuff at college, back when I was doing my BTEC National Certificate.

Anyway, the first block of this course is based on the CompTIA Network+ course, to bring students up to speed on the fundamentals of networking, which of course is necessary if you’re going to start fiddling around with Windows Server 2008.

Here’s what I’ve done so far, laid out on our dining room table:

TM128 kit and notes

So what you’re seeing is the CompTIA book itself, the OU Good Study Guide (I cannot recommend this book enough – go get one, even if you’re not an OU student!), my snazzy Snopake pencil case, a big spiral bound notebook and some paper I’ve torn out for reference.

I’ve actually completed week one of the study, and now I’ve been looking through the TMA01 questions and linking them to what I’m learning over the next couple of weeks – to make sure I concentrate extra hard on the bits that are really going to matter at the end of the block. Those are the bits that are highlighted green on the loose sheets. I recommend going through your TMA questions as soon as they’re available to you, and map them to your reading materials and progress targets for the block you’re studying.

Part of the work in Week 1 was to look up some of the Skills for Study sections on the OU’s website. I did this, but I also read the first couple of chapters of the Good Study Guide again. Honestly, it’s the best support book I’ve ever had. When you’re a university student, you don’t get your hand held like you did in school and most colleges – you’re given the targets and the materials, and left to your own devices. If you get a good grasp of what the Good Study Guide teaches you, you’ll be well away as an independent learner. Like I said before, please consider getting one. I got mine from Amazon UK.

I’ve also downloaded all the useful booklets from this page and put them on my Sony Reader. My eReader has been great for my courses so far – I had kilos of books in last year’s courses, but the OU provided all the textbooks in PDF format on the module websites, and I was able to put them all on my Sony Reader. The PDFs are formatted for screen readers and therefore also scale and resize beautifully on my eReader.

If you don’t have a Sony Reader or something else that supports PDFs out of the box, you can download Calibre, which is pretty amazing open source software for eReaders.