DD101 Introducing the Social Sciences - Week 1

The suggested time table for Week 1 

     Learning Companion 1, Week 1, p14 to p24 (4 hrs)

     Making Social Lives DVD, 'The Street' & 'Making Social Lives' (3 hrs)

     Audio CD 'Reading & Note taking' (0.5 hrs)

     Online Activities 1 & 2 (2 hrs)

To be completed by the 12th Feb

So I've got my learning materials, tutor, tutorial dates and the course website has opened, so time to crack on and try and get ahead of the timetable even if the course isn't due to start for a week. It would be good to get everything needed for TMA 01 done before the first tutorial - hopefully this should be possible.

This weeks study was a fairly sedate entry in to the course, the worse thing about it being the (excuse my language) 'twat' guiding us down City Road. 'llyod robson' (who doesn't believe in capital letters - oh how arty) is a poet & artist (so probably living on the state) who lives on City Road. I guess the camera crew surprised him as he appeared to have made no effort on his appearance considering he was going to be immortalised on film, and certainly this would be his biggest audience by far.

'lloyd' takes us on a tour of City Road with a series of fairly contrived conversations with residents. His strange accent does little to help his cause, especially when he goes in to the newsagent's shop, a shop that looks as though it is definitely going out of business judging by the sparse shelves on display, and has a meaningless conversation about "where can you buy rubber bands and stuff" - er.. W H Smith on every major High Street. I guess 'lloyd' needs to get out more.

You can find out more about lloyd robson and see how your taxes financed his years sabbatical in this   interview . Strange, I thought the 'dole' was for those out of work but looking for employment, I'd no idea you could just opt out of work for a year (or longer) and have the state fund your lifestyle. As 'lloyd' says " i decided i would go on the dole for a year to give myself a chance to write what i really wanted to write" - but is it anything anybody wants to read.

Anyway, that's two of the five video clips watched, hopefully he is not in the next three, I wonder if he declared his fee for this video to the tax man...... of course he probably did. 

The on line activities overlapped the audio CD, and the Learning Companion was a straight forward read, so hoping now to get TMA written in draft form prior to the tutorial.