General

The OU wishes to commission four artists to celebrate 50 years since Harold Wilson announced his plans for a 'University of the Air'. The OU is using this key date as an opportunity to celebrate OU research and its impact on society today.

In September 1963, Harold Wilson launched the idea of the 'University of the Air' which became The Open University (OU) in 1969.

The OU is launching an innovative arts commission worth up to £20,000 for artists and companies of all media to deliver one of four – one per home nation – art projects around the themes of design and technology, arts and humanities, science and social science. The artist/company can be based in any location across the nation within which they live/work.

The closing date for submission of an expression of interest is 2 August 2013 (5pm).

The final arts performance, installation or event will take place over three days in late October or early November in Milton Keynes (design and technology), Belfast (arts and humanities), Cardiff (social sciences) and Edinburgh (science) and create a memorable and unique audience experience.

The commission will challenge artists of all media and seeks to:

• Celebrate the impact Open University research has had on society
• Promote innovation and excellence in the Arts
• Provide a memorable audience experience

A dedicated PR team has been commissioned to publicise the winning submissions to the art world and beyond.

Application details.

Posted on 16 July 2013.

A practising solicitor turned OU physics student travels to Geneva to study the Large Hadron Collider. You can follow his blog and get the insight of – arguably - the most exciting scientific project of the century.

James Doherty studied law at Cambridge and Oxford before going on to qualify as a solicitor at a big law firm in the City of London where he practiced for four years. However he had always craved a passion for physics. Eventually he gave up the wing collar and enrolled on a physics degree module with the Open University.

Arriving at a halfway point of his module he received a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the summer months at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research headquarters in Geneva, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and a home of the 27-kilometre circular racing track for particles – the Large Hadron Collider.

James secured a place on the CERN Student Summer Programme 2013 and will be blogging about his experiences throughout the summer.

He writes:

‘CERN’s main Meyrin site spans the Swiss/French border and is plonked in the midst of beautiful agricultural estates which nestle in the shadows of the Jura mountain range. The largest accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, are buried deep beneath French farmland and so there are several CERN outposts dotted around in France too.

'The Meyrin site is massive and appears haphazardly distributed on arrival. Building are numbered in the order in which they were built and Building 41 will be my home for the next two months.’

Do not miss the report of the first collision he has already had and check out James’s cool ‘science pants’.

Posted on 16 July 2013.

 

New research by The Open University and Oxford University suggests that parents taking part in interactive and arts related activities with their two and three year olds could help promote their happiness and development of everyday skills.

The study, An Economic Analysis of Child Development and Happiness, found that child happiness, as reported by their parents, was linked to how frequently the children were engaged in activities such as reading, storytelling, shopping, painting and doing arts and crafts. In contrast, passive activities like looking at picture books or watching television, brought no discernible benefits. Watching television in fact, appeared in this analysis to have a negative impact on child happiness that was statistically significant.

Results suggested that more active activities may boost the development of a child’s motor and social skills. For example, painting or engaging in arts and crafts, could promote the development of movement skills, while reading, telling stories and singing have a significant impact on both talking ability and social skills. More passive activities did not contribute to the development of these skills.

Commenting on the findings Paul Anand, Professor of Economics at The Open University, said:

“We applied standard economic tools to analyse children’s wellbeing and development at a very early age. An economic study of very young children is relatively novel, but if our findings are replicated in other research, they could have significant implications for parenting education. It should allow us to reassess the role of arts in the development of skills and human potential.”

Dr Laurence Roope, Researcher at the Health Economics Research Centre, Oxford University, said:

“Our results suggest that parents may face difficult trade-offs with regard to time spent actively engaging with their children, versus providing for them materially via the labour market. Of course parents can’t engage their young children in these activities every hour of the day, but it is encouraging that time spent reading books to them, painting or joining in with a nursery rhyme, could help their development. It will be interesting to see whether similar results emerge for slightly older children and using other datasets.”
 

 

The study applied economic models to data drawn from the German Household Survey in the years 2007 to 2010. The data included responses from over 800 German parents about the happiness and wellbeing of their two and three year olds, the activities they took part in, and their development of talking, movement, and social skills.

The findings were presented at a conference on the economics of wellbeing at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)-Universities conference in Paris on 3 July.

The study received funding from the Leverhulme Trust.

Posted on 16 July 2013.