Mathematics and Statistics - OU Community Online

I didn't want to go to the maths residential. It was an unwelcome interruption, a distraction away from the bike ride and its lofty mountain roads and pretty, flower-filled alpine villages. Instead I would be going to grisly, drizzly Nottingham. Thanks, OU. But as the course was a requirement of both degrees I'm doing I couldn't escape it. Now it's over I'm so glad it was forced upon me. The residential, that is, not Nottingham.

This might seem irrelevant but bear with me. I've mentioned on here before that I once lived in Austria, in Graz, about a decade ago. Each week, every Thursday evening, a gang of us would descend upon the same gasthof for a stammtisch, basically a regular, night-long, beer-fuelled opportunity to talk utter nonsense. I was surrounded by bright, funny people and we'd sit there every week, all 10 or 15 of us, and we'd laugh ourselves sick. Eventually I moved on and the group slowly disintegrated but a few of them still linger in Graz. When I go back, we can manage an equally worthy subset of the original, which is the reason I had to detour my ride to Graz last month, but I miss the big group and I've never been able to find or recreate a similar one anywhere else. And then I arrived in Nottingham.

The beauty of the residential is that you have an instant in, conversationally speaking, with everyone there, which means starting a chat with someone is easy. You're all in the same boat, working towards some future degree and with a life full of stories attached. It's not difficult to make friends.

On the first day we were split into teams of four or five. An unembarrassing, maths-related icebreaker gets the friendship going and before you know it you've got three or four new buddies. I was teamed up with Chas, Chris, David and Don, all fun and interesting for different reasons. Later on, you get separated into a second team, a new set of friends. I got lucky again, this time with three women, Adele, Asma and Lisa. If you're the sociable type, the connections between your two groups, and between your team mates' groups, means you meet even more people, around the dinner table, or in the bar in the evening, or at the karaoke, or the quiz, or the other quiz, or the frisbee game, or the ceilidh (which was thankfully cancelled during our week), or the end of week disco. You're not short of things to do.

That group I had in Austria was recreated for a far too short week in Nottingham. We laughed ourselves silly. I've never bonded so quickly or so profoundly with a group as I did at the residential. Some of the others attendees avoided the social side of things and didn't seem to have so much fun. But if you want it, it's there and the tutors are equally happy to be a part of it. In many cases, they're the ones initiating it.
Oh, I forgot. We also did some maths. That was good too.

Unfortunately, many of the OU's residential courses are being phased out, which is a massive shame. I've been an OU student since 1997 (although that includes an eight year gap) and I was never once able to go to a tutorial. There, at the residential, was the first time I felt like a belonged to a real university and I enjoyed every minute of that belonging. A reunion has been mentioned. I'm looking forward to it already.
 
Pictured above: Adele, me, Don, Chris, Sonya and Sarah, some of  my team  mates and their team mates' teammates. If you're wondering why Adele and Sarah have identical silly poses, they're sarcastically emulating my photo on the last blog entry. Thanks for that.
 

 

Thanks to the continuing generosity of the Comino Foundation, five students about to embark on their research projects, have recently each been awarded £1,000 to enhance their studies...

Successful student applicants from T450 The engineering project, T885 Team engineering, and T802 The MSc research course currently benefit from these scholarships.

The Foundation was set up in 1971 by the late Demetrius Comino with his daughter Anna and these scholarships are offered in memory of Norman Bailey, a former Trustee who himself was an engineer. The Foundation is committed to encouraging people to want to succeed and enable them to develop their self-esteem, enterprise and initiative, their ability to lead and to work with others. It encourages creative thinking and decision making, and to accept personal responsibility for their decisions and actions.

Two rounds of scholarships are offered each year and this Spring there were 30 applicants. The successful scholarship recipients will be working on a diverse range of projects, from the use of composite materials in the operation of the Thames Barrier, to the design of a satellite network that will interconnect numerous rural communities in Ethiopia.

The Open University and the Bailey-Comino scholarship recipients are very grateful to the Foundation for this, their ninth year of support for Open University students.

• Find out more about engineering at The OU
• Find out more about environmental decision making at the OU

 

The Open University's teacher training programme, which was judged Outstanding by inspectors in Northern Ireland last year, has received a glowing report for its work in England.

Ofsted, the government's office for standards in education, has rated the OU's initial teacher education in England as Outstanding in all but one area. That area, Attainment, is rated Good.

The Ofsted report, based on its inspection in March,  says that the structure and flexibility of the Open University teaching training provides high quality training for people who in most cases would not otherwise have entered the teaching profession.

It says: "They are trained well and the very large majority successfully complete the course and secure teaching posts that suit their personal circumstances.

"The overwhelming majority of successful trainees remain in teaching beyond the early years, a testament to their personal qualities and to the quality of training and support they receive."

The Ofsted report follows a glowing assessment of the OU's teacher training programme in Northern Ireland, conducted by the Education and Training Inspectorate (ETI) last September.The OU was the only Northern Ireland institution to receive the highest grade, Outstanding.

The Open University offers a professional graduate certificate in education (PGCE) to teach in the 11 to 16 age range, with post-16 enhancement for most trainees, in: design and technology; geography;  mathematics;  modern foreign languages (French, German and Spanish);  music; and science (biology, chemistry and physics). Successful trainees can take an additional masters-level module, leading to a postgraduate certificate in education, at the end of the course.

Useful links

• Professional Graduate Certificate in Education

Picture: Thinkstock

A project to make it easier to compare and choose between different university courses has won a £50,000 prize for Open University Telematics lecturer Tony Hirst .

Tony (pictured) came first in the OpenUp competition with his proposal to make the course information on UCAS  (the university places clearing scheme) course search website publicly available as open Linked Data.

"At present it is very difficult for anyone outside UCAS to build a course choice website that has coverage of all UK undergraduate courses," he told Platform. "So you are limited to the UCAS website.

"My proposal is to build a platform that makes the information available as Linked Data, and then perhaps build a few applications on top."

He said the end result for students will be a course choice site that is easier to use and richer in information. "It will make it possible to compare courses between institutions, which you can't do at the moment.

"We can also pull information in about student satisfaction, employment rates off the back of courses and so on. It can be used as the basis for building comparison services between different courses at one university, and the same courses across different universities."

Tony will be using the £50,000 prize to bring the project to fruition, which he hopes to do by the time the next set of students begins their UCAS applications in October 2011, he says. "There is no reason why it shouldn't be done quickly if we can get hold of the data in a timely fashion."

Tony is a member of the T151 Games and gaming  module team

Useful links

• Tony's winning project
•  
• Story in wired.co.uk

 

Born with spina bifida, Tanni Grey-Thompson is a wheelchair user, one of the UK’s most successful disabled athletes and three times BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year. In 2004 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University. In an interview in 2010 she talks to Platform’s Robyn Slingsby about London 2012, the challenges of being a mother, discrimination, her heroes and skiing.

She’s just turned 40 and although she no longer trains to compete at world-class level, Paralympian Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson certainly has her hands full. While she admits that not having to watch her weight anymore is a huge relief, she’s a huge advocate of the fact that exercise fuels the brain. She still does a lot for sport since retiring in 2008 – with 16 Paralympic medals to her name - but confesses that her biggest challenge yet is being a mum.

“Winning the 100 metres in Athens for me, as an athlete, was the best thing I did. It was probably the closest thing to perfection in terms of any race I did, technically and in terms of my preparation. The trouble with me is I’m never ever  happy with what I’ve done, I’m really self critical so for most of my athletics career I didn’t think I’d done enough, and then at the point I didn’t think I could do any more, I retired.

“But, to be honest, having Carys, my daughter, has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Being a mother is way harder than any of the work stuff I do because it changes every day. One day she eats peas, the next day she refuses to eat peas and she’ll sit there and say she’s never eaten peas in her life. We’ll be in a shop and I’ll buy her an outfit she says she likes and then you get home and she won’t wear it. It changes every day.

“I was in Beijing for two months last year and before we went, Carys went into school and told the teacher that I was making her going to the Olympics . We had tickets to the opening ceremony and she asked if there would be fireworks, that’s all she was interested in. But once she was there she loved it.”

Permanent state of chaos

Tanni juggles a lot of commitments and has to manage her diary carefully so she spends enough quality time with her husband Dr Ian Thompson and daughter Carys, seven, at their home in Eaglescliffe. How does she do it?

“We live in permanent state of chaos, and that’s fine. There’s a lot of guilt put onto mothers that you have to be perfect mother who cooks, cleans, washes and can hold down a job. I just think that’s nonsense, it’s about not beating yourself up over things and I don’t feel guilty if I give my daughter cheese on toast for tea, even though my own mother would have thought it was dreadful. It’s about not feeling guilty about the stuff you can’t change.

“I really enjoy my work and do lots of different things and I love it, and that has consequences on my husband and daughter but you try and balance it the best you can.

“When I was little my mum stopped working when my sister was born – she’s two years older than me – and went back to work when I was 19, and the world’s not like that anymore. Very occasionally Carys will ask me why I’m away – usually because she wants something out of me. I’ve learned from right back when she was really little that children are amazing at making you feel guilty.

As well as her charity work, Dame Tanni has been involved in the bidding for and planning of the Olympics in London in 2012 – and she’s very excited about it.

Tall poppy syndrome

“London will do an amazing job, when you look at the bid process the team were really professional and did their homework. There’s a bit of a tall poppy syndrome within UK culture, we do sometimes see the negative. This is the best opportunity in sport to showcase what we do and show the world what we’re good at.”

What about disabled access?

“I joined the board at Transport For London (TFL) last year, and going into it my view was why can’t we make all underground stations accessible? But then you look at putting a lift into a tube station and find out you don’t get much change out of £150 million. A lot of work has gone into making the newer stations accessible, but there are issues about air conditioning on the tubes, line upgrades, platform rebuilds, health and safety, and access is one part of it so it all has to go in the melting pot that is the TFL budget and it’s a hard balancing act.

“Every single London bus is wheelchair accessible, every taxi is, so we’re starting off at a much stronger point than any other Olympic or Paralympic city has for quite a while and, for me, the key is educating people. Not a lot of people will know this but there’s a really cool underground map which shows the accessible stations, so the ones I can’t use are in pale grey so they don’t cloud my view of where I can travel. So for me the key is education and we’ll have amazingly well trained volunteers at Games times to help people get to where they want to go. Education is key.

“2012 can be a platform to try and make London more accessible in a wider sense to everyone - mums with prams, wheelchairs, blind people.”

Discrimination

Dame Tanni has no problem getting around but says disabled people do suffer discrimination and things like access to higher education are more challenging.

“The reality for disabled people is that education is harder. So whether they miss school time because of illness or they’re in hospital of if they’ve missed things because of their impairment, I sometimes think that higher education isn’t seen as an option.

“When I was in school I’d just sat my O Levels and the careers teacher told me he could get me a nice job answering phones. I said I wanted to go to uni and he basically said ‘Don’t be so silly, what do you want a degree for, it’ll be difficult and won’t help you because you’ll probably end up answering phones anyway.’”

As it turned out my first job was working for British Athletics and part of my job was in fact answering phones, and I really enjoyed it. But lots of people look at impairment and it starts off as inherently negative and if someone tells you that you can’t do something then it’s very easy to believe that. The beauty of the OU is that people come back when they feel they’re ready to but they also have the flexibility, which makes a real difference.”

So, if Dame Tanni could study an OU course, what would it be?

“Law, I always wanted to do law. I went to Loughborough University, which didn’t offer law so I did politics. It was something I was interested in and actually it’s been incredibly useful. I always thought there wasn’t politics in sport and then you get involved and realise there’s loads.”

Self belief

And what about trying a new sport, what she go for?

“Skiing, but I hate the cold and the wet and being out and going downhill doesn’t appeal to me. I like the concept of skiing and saying that I will ski one day, but I don’t think Ill ever actually go skiing.”

Dame Tanni is an inspiration in her own right, but who does she admire?

“I was at the Young Sport conference, to look at what you can do beyond sport to help people, and Desmond Tutu was there and he was just so cool. His charisma and his personality and the way he talked about Africa was just incredible, so I’m a huge fan of his.

“My mum, who has passed away now, was stroppy and stubborn but just an amazingly strong person to have around, she was really cool. We used to argue a lot but she brought me up to have a lot of self belief.

“And Gareth Edwards. I was brought up by mother to believe that he is the closest thing to perfection that will ever walk this earth and it was the way he played, he knew he was good but he wasn’t arrogant and you listen to some of his stories and he was a really cool bloke. I still get awe struck when ever I meet him.”


 

The collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia is consulted by students, academics and other experts in their field. But many such readers are reluctant to contribute to it. 

Why? Dr Panagiota Alevizou is a researcher in the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology who is trying to find out.

She and other academic volunteers on the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee are running a high-profile survey to uncover the barriers to scholarly participation –  and they want to hear from as many OU folk as possible. 

"We would like to hear from experts in their field,  who do not contribute, what has deterred them from participation. But we'd also like to hear what motivates people who do participate, either randomly or actively, and gain an insight into the opportunities this offers. 

"It is important we have a large volume of respondents to get a representative sample, so we're hoping as many as possible will take part. The online survey only takes about 15 minutes to complete." 

She said the anonymity of Wikipedia may be an issue for some academics because they can't get credit for their postings. But it is precisely this anonymity is which motivates many people to participate.  

Other possible deterrents could be technical difficulties interfacing with Wikipedia, and not being able to cite particular academic resources because they are not open or accessible to all. 

Some academics continue to be sceptical about Wikipedia's credibility as a source of accurate information, she said. "A lot of people say they do not like Wikipedia, but it is a very popular site and it has masses of information, which can be vetted.  

'It's like any other resource in that, if you're doing research, you don't just rely on one book or one encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is an entry point to research."

Take part in the Wikimedia survey here. 

 

Useful links 

• Experts to underpin Wikipedia’s open wisdom? 
• Why don’t more scientists contribute to Wikipedia? 
• Wikipedia Comes to Age
• Time to Underpin Wikipedia Wisdom
• Come out from under that bushel
• PlagiPedia shows the web is passionate about correcting its own follies

Who employs mathematicians? Companies in every field from accountancy to utilities supply, according to a list  published by mathscareers.org  This website is produced by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and covers not only careers but all sorts of ways maths is applied in different areas of life. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in the subject.