Speakers for Schools are offering state schools the opportunity to access a fantastic network of speakers who are willing to give inspirational talks to young people for free.

These speakers have kindly agreed to give at least one talk per annum in a state school and will address the big subjects: technological, scientific, political, economic, historical, cultural, artistic, ecological and ethical. They are people who will be able to explain the latest developments in areas such as business, cosmology, biology, medicine, linguistics, history, engineering, inter alia.

Speakers include: Honorary graduates Baroness Tessa Blackstone, Sir Peter Bonfield, Sir Christopher Bland, Sir William Castell, Evan Davis, Sir Richard Lambert and Martha Lane Fox. As well as David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Lord Sebastian Coe and other well know faces.

 For further information or to apply for a speaker, visit the Speaker4schools website: http://www.speakers4schools.org/

The figure is nearly double that of a year ago – with 70 per cent of visitors now downloading straight to mobile devices.

The BBC reported that the OU is now neck and neck with rival Stanford University, and ahead of universities such as Yale and Oxford.

Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor of The Open University, said: “Right from the start, the OU has always kept pace with the new technologies of the time and it is fascinating to see the development of the post personal computing stage of the OU on iTunes U.

“It is crucial for part-time students to be able to study when, where and how it suits them and we excel at finding new and better ways to enable students to study on the move.”

The OU is one of the biggest and most popular contributors to iTunes U, averaging 275,000 downloads a week. It regularly appears on the iTunes U Top Charts and has one of the widest ranging libraries, including both audio visual collections, and over 400 eBooks derived from our award winning OpenLearn site.

In July 2011, the OU’s The History of English in Ten Minutes collection which went straight to the iTunes U (UK) chart at number four after just four days. Shakespeare was the top OU download on iTunes U that month.

OU material on iTunes U gets a worldwide audience with 90 per cent of visitors to the site coming from outside the UK. An OU on iTunes U audience survey revealed that 96 per cent use the materials for learning.

The Open University first posted material on iTunes U in June 2008 and recorded 20 million iTunes U downloads in June 2010. In October 2010, the OU was one of the first three universities worldwide to put eBooks onto iTunes U.

Bad parenting has been blamed for the recent riots in the UK. Journalist Jane Gordon, in the Mail on Sunday last week, looked at one of the solutions that aims to help people become better parents, Parent Gym.

OU student Samantha Mullen, 26, a mother of three, is studying for a degree in psychology and says that her daughters are not only performing better at school since she attended the Parent Gym, but that family life has become calmer and easier too.

Once Samantha has completed her degree and her youngest son (Deacon, one) is at school, she hopes to volunteer as a coach for Parent Gym.

Do you think initiatives like Parent Gym can help people be better parents?

To read the full story click here.
 

Making Modern Mothers by Rachel Thomson (OU Professor of Social Research), Dr Mary Jane Kehily (OU Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies), Lucy Hadfield (OU postgraduate research student) and freelance researcher and writer Sue Sharpe is the culmination of a five-year study.

It is based on the experiences of first-time mothers themselves and in its nine chapters the authors develop an analysis of motherhood as a changing identity shaped by work and education.

A woman’s transition to motherhood is charted using stories of conception and it explores how pregnancy and motherhood affects the mind, body and relationships.

The book is the culmination of the five-year Making of Motherhood project into the experiences of first time mothers based at the Open University and directed by Professor Thomson and Dr Kehily.

The project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the Identities and Social Action programme. The study involved 100 interviews with mothers in the UK and included 12 inter-generational case studies.
 
Dr Kehily said: “This important and timely book asks what it means to be a mother today. The authors present a fascinatingly diverse portrait of modern motherhood as a profound moment of identity change and also a site of socio-economic difference that shapes women’s lives."

Making Modern Mothers is published by The Policy Press, priced £16.99. It can be ordered at 20 per cent discount from their website.
 

Cambridge University has for the first time found that autism diagnoses are more common in an IT-rich region. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Cambridge, led the study (which was conducted in the Netherlands) with Dr Rosa Hoekstra, a Dutch autism researcher based at ARC and The Open University.

The Medical Research Council (MRC) funded study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, predicts that autism spectrum conditions (ASC) would be more common in populations enriched for ‘systemizing’, a skill required in disciplines such as engineering, physics, computing and mathematics.

The team had previously discovered evidence for a familial association between a talent for systemizing and autism in that fathers and grandfathers of children with autism spectrum conditions are over-represented in the field of engineering. The team had also previously found that mathematicians more often have a sibling with autism spectrum conditions, and students in the natural and technological sciences, including mathematics, show a higher number of autistic traits.

The researchers tested for differences in the prevalence of ASC in school-aged children in three geographical regions in the Netherlands: Eindhoven, Haarlem, and Utrecht-city. The Eindhoven region was selected because it’s rich in IT, having the Eindhoven University of Technology there, as well as the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, where IT and technology companies such as Philips, ASML, IBM and ATOS Origin are based. The Philips factory has been in Eindhoven since 1891. Since then, the region has attracted businesses in IT and technology.

The growth of the High Tech Campus Eindhoven has led to Eindhoven becoming a major technology and industrial hub: 30 per cent of jobs in Eindhoven are now in technology or ICT, in Haarlem and Utrecht this is respectively 16 and 17 per cent.

'In regions where parents gravitate towards jobs that involve strong ‘systemizing’, such as the IT sector, there will be a higher rate of autism among their children'

The two control regions were selected because they have similar size populations and a similar socioeconomic class. Schools in each region were asked to provide the number of children enrolled, the number having a clinical diagnosis of ASC and/or two control neurodevelopmental conditions (dyspraxia and ADHD). The participating schools in the three regions provided diagnostic information on a total of 62,505 children. The researchers found school-reported prevalence estimates of ASC in Eindhoven was 229 per 10,000, significantly higher than in Haarlem (84 per 10,000) and Utrecht (57 per 10,000), whilst the prevalence for the control conditions were similar in all regions.

Simon Baron-Cohen commented: “These results are in line with the idea that in regions where parents gravitate towards jobs that involve strong ‘systemizing’, such as the IT sector, there will be a higher rate of autism among their children, because the genes for autism may be expressed in first degree relatives as a talent in systemizing. The results also have implications for explaining how genes for autism may have persisted in the population gene pool, as some of these genes appear linked to adaptive, advantageous traits.”

Rosa Hoekstra, a psychology lecturer with the OU's Faculty of Science, added: “We need to conduct a follow-up study to validate the diagnoses and to test the alternative explanations for the elevated rate of autism in Eindhoven, including the possibility that children with autism may more often remain undetected in the two other regions. These results are important findings in the field of autism epidemiology, since they suggest regional variation in autism prevalence. In our follow-up study we plan to study the causes of this variation in more detail. This will help local authorities plan services appropriately for the number of children with autism.”

The research team also included Martine Roelfsema (a Dutch graduate student), Sally Wheelwright and Dr Carrie Allison (experts in autism screening), and Professor Carol Brayne and Dr Fiona Matthews (experts in public health research and biostatistics).

Useful links

• The full research on Open Research Online

OU lecturer Dr Rosie Flewitt, a research associate in the study, Multimodal Literacies in the Early Years, found that many early years practitioners lacked confdence in how to use technology, were uncertain about its value, "or feared the potential harm to' childhood'".

Concerns have previously been raised about how children from poorer families often miss out on the oportunity to use new technology but this time it is the nurserys and educated, middle-class families who are in the spotlight.

Dr Flewitt said in the report "Some children from highly educated, affluent families had very little exposure to new technologies whereas some children from less affluent families were given excellent support at home to develop their literacy skills through diverse uses of new technologies."

To read the full story click here.

A secondary school in Croydon has apparently banned pupils from physical contact with one another, including hugging, high fives and shaking hands. The schools says reduces bullying and fighting, but Dr Mary Jane Kehily, OU senior lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies,  disagrees.

As a tactic to reduce violence, banning physical contact is "hopelessly misguided" says Dr Kehily. "If you increase regulation, that also increases the potential for trangression.  Young people are very creative  about transgressing adult boundaries."

So if having rules means chidren are more likely to break them, is there nothing schools can do to combat bullying? "Any initiative has to be done in consultation with the young people who are going to be on the receiving end of it. The most effective form of regulation is the peer group."

Dr Kehily argues that a touching ban has all the hallmarks of a moral panic – an over-the-top response to an exaggerated fear, a phenomenon well-known to social scientists. "Every now and then there is a moral panic about the kind of contact children have with other people, usually motivated by safety or sexuality. You get things like banning conkers in schools or stopping male teachers attending to girls who have fallen over in the playground. Parents are fearful too.

"What particularly strikes me with this is the focus on the negative aspects of physical contact. We are probably more tactile and in touch with our bodies in childhood than at any other point in our lives. Children at play bumping into one another and touching one another all the time, and that sensory experience is an essential part of childhood.  If the headmaster at that school had spent half an hour just watching children in a playground, he would have seen this."

Dr Mary Jane Kehily has a particular interest in youth cultures, school-based cultures and the everyday experiences of children and young people.  She is a member of the academic team working on U212 Childhood  and KE308 Youth: perspectives and practice. Her research project Childhood in Crisis looks at how moral panics and social anxiety impact on children and parenting.

Useful links

• Childhood in Crisis podcast
• Childhood in Crisis news release
• Full research article

Roz Lambert was once struggling to bring up four children on her own while living on benefits. Now she has turned her life around - she owns her own home and has built herself a new career thanks to her studies with the OU...

Eight years ago her world fell apart when her marriage broke down. “Suddenly I found myself in a situation where I was the sole provider for my family - I had to build their lives again.”

Her self-esteem and confidence at rock bottom following the break-up. While seeing a counsellor Roz was advised to enrol with the OU. Although she had taken A-levels at school she had never considered going to university, thinking she wasn’t clever enough. She began by taking an Introduction to Humanities course (now replaced by AA100 The arts past and present), and soon found that her fears about higher education were unfounded.

“When I started, I had absolutely no self-confidence at all, but my tutor was really positive and supportive. I never believed I could complete the whole degree and just took one course at a time.”

Keen to get off benefits, Roz took three jobs to make ends meet and support her family. But she still managed to make time for her studies. Gradually her career progressed and today she manages six children’s centres for the national charity 4Children.

Her children Hamish, 22, Polly, 21, Gemma, 19, and Alexander, 16, are very proud of her achievement and have followed in her footsteps. “They are all doing well, one having graduated, another at university and the younger two planning to go,” she said. “The Open University has literally been a life saver for me and I would recommend it to anyone.”