U316 The Environmental Web

Milestone! Whoop!

curiouspursuits — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:49:06 +0000

A couple of days ago I reached 1000 hits, a tiny amount in the grand scale of blogsville, but a mahooosive* number in Collette-world

Hopefully the TMA pages are useful, please let me know – I’ve had no comments yet & I’d love to know what you think and to say hello. I’ve also added a ‘rate this’ stars thingummy on each page. Yep, that’s how needy I am…

* really quite large

and finally…

curiouspursuits — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:57:44 +0000

… the posting of my ECA project website is finished! It’s all on here now, links and formatting hopefully fixed. I’ve also changed the theme so the text is black on white rather than grey on black – I really liked the other one but i figured this one would be easier to read.

As with the other two TMAs, the work is a combination of opinion and my own interpretation of the research I did, I am not passing judgement on any person, company or institution or alleging dishonesty on anyone’s part.

References are as they were in the original assignment so were available on the dates I last accessed them and they haven’t all been checked recently.

So, I guess this is it for U316, the lovely honey bees (til spring) and year 3 of my degree. Definitely my fave course so far

Results are in…

curiouspursuits — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:06:53 +0000

Well, results were in a month ago, Christmas is well and truly over and I’m still really shocked and pleased!

So, here we are -

and these are my TMA scores -

(apologies for the hopeless blurriness of the images, after 6 attempts at getting them to display better I gave it up as a bad job – think I need an OU course in making a blog page look presentable…)

U316 was a really hard year of work but so worth it. I dropped marks on TMA04 (maths of course, bane of my life…) but still scraped a distinction. Bless those bees!

I’ve been working on getting my ECA website project on here and hopefully it’ll be on in the next few days, possibly a bit at a time but it’ll get there…

Winning News Story!

curiouspursuits — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:41:23 +0000

I’m still stunned to have won the prize for best news story of this years U316 presentation! (cue big smiles and a small happy-dance)

Each tutor group of students voted for their favourite news story then the winner from each group went through to the ‘final’ vote – it was a brilliant surprise to win.

ECA website

curiouspursuits — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:22:22 +0000

I can’t publish my ECA website on here until after results are out in mid-December. I’ll post the whole thing as soon as I can, no matter what mark I get – if I get a terrible mark at least I’ll be an example of what not to do…

curiouspursuits — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:13:23 +0000

I decided to post my U316 pages online because I really appreciated being able to look at past students’ work. Seeing what could be done motivated me considerably, especially at those stressful points in the course

The Environmental Web is a compulsory level 3 course for the Open University’s Environmental Studies BA/BSc and is worth 60 credit points. U316 is a multi-disciplinary course with material from the sciences, technology, social sciences and humanities. It covers, amongst other things, biodiversity, climate change, the effects and consequences of human activity on the environment and water management and sustainability.

Course activities and assessment take place online (aside from a day school in week 5 of the course), there are six TMAs and an ECA – and there’s no exam!

It’s an excellent course, I loved every minute – even the controversial web wizard – and although it was a lot of work, I learned a lot. My tutor, David, was brilliant, provided me with encouragement and answered all of my inane questions with infinite patience!

Two of the TMAs and the ECA require work to be ‘published’ as web pages using the OU’s web wizard, a basic web-publishing tool which I really enjoyed using and it’s these three assignments that I’ve posted on here. They can be viewed using the links on the right.

Useful links:

The Open University

U316 course description

U316 course taster

Are you ready for U316?

Environmental Studies Degree description

Open2.net : science & technology