I have completed the main tasks for weeks 1-3, including finishing reading the first Learning Companion, watching the films and completing the online tasks. I do need to go back and make some additional notes on a couple of the films, and listen again to the audio files and take notes. I also need to turn my notes into an essay for the first TMA.
It has been a pretty relaxed and gentle introduction so far, and I’m quite looking forward to our first tutorial.
I am a little troubled though about the TMA. The task is to write about a street ‘you know well’. Well, I have moved around a lot, and I have lived in several cities, but recently I have been in a very rural location.
The course materials use City Road in Cardiff as a ‘window’ on society, and state that it is possible to apply what is observed there to any street in any town in the world. Perhaps. I can certainly compare my location to City Road, Cardiff. But it does seem to me that rural locations have very different issues to urban societies. Perhaps ‘people are the same wherever you go’ but it will be interesting to see if the differences outweigh the similarities. I know my tutor would prefer me to write about an urban location, but I don’t ‘know’ any town streets and to discover what I would need to know to compare one with City Road Cardiff would require hours of research that would take it well beyond the 20 hours per week that I bargained for. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a case for writing about my rural locality.
City Borg on the Prairie 