smallhobbit | Something New

I've wracked my brains to come up with some new things for this month, and all I can manage is I had my first flu jab; I watched a streamed recorded version of Andrew Scott in The Kings, which was reasonable, Andrew Scott's a great actor, but it was still a one-man show and via my laptop; and I led a zoom Advent Group, which would be so much easier face-to-face.

I've completed three FutureLearn courses since I last wrote:

Poetry & the Holocaust by Yad Vasham. I admit to be slightly unsure about this course when I started, but in fact it was really good. It began by looking at the role of poetry within traumatic events, so including poetry from WWI. From there it looked at the events of the Holocaust, and considered some of the poetry, both by those who died in the Polish ghettos and the concentration camps, and those who survived. I was particularly struck with how the course participants were able to make up their own minds about the poems, and although there were suggestions as to what was being referred to, everyone was free to make their own interpretation of the poems, and pick out the lines that spoke most particularly to them. I would thoroughly recommend the course.

The Scientific Revolution (Understanding the Rise of Modern Science) by the University of Groningen. I found this quite a challenging course, in understanding many of the texts, which not only dealt with complicated concepts, but were in the language of 300 years ago. I posted my assignment elsewhere, and apart from my first peer review, which was positive, I received one which said it was all party political (which, although it was critical of the current government, the point I was aiming to make was that science is still used as it was centuries ago) and another which said that mine was outstanding amongst the posts he had reviewed.

Many Faces: Understanding the Complexities of Chinese Culture by the University of Exeter. These seemed to concentrate on the efforts of the modern Chinese government to appeal to the wealthy middle class, and how this was giving a false view of China. It wasn't really what I'd hoped for.

That was my final FutureLearn course of the year. I have now followed 59 courses since I began in October 2018. The next course I'm thinking of following starts the middle of January.

In the meantime, I'm following some Open University courses. I don't like these as much, I prefer the FL structure, but they can be interesting. I'm a sucker for online Advent calendars, and the OU had one again this year. Right at the beginning a music course was their 'interest of the day' so I took 'Discovering Music Through Listening', which was interesting, and I learnt something. Then, because FL does very few art courses, I decided I'd look at some of the OU ones over the Christmas period, since I have more time. So last week I took 'Making Sense of Art History', which turned out to be learning how to look at art via various winners of the Turner Prize. I found it helpful, because it was explaining about the composition of paintings etc, and how certain effects bring about certain responses in the viewer. And I've found another couple of courses to keep me occupied for the moment :)