A Time of Magic

I’ve just started a world archaeology course which ironically is one of those listed as a new generation course. That means that it’s largely taught online and uses a lot of online resources albeit with a rather weighty tome as the course book.

Oddly though it means that it’s not so suitable a course for the ebook readers. Whilst the course materials may well all be available online, you’re constantly referred to other online materials. Thus you can’t just download everything to a reader.

Net effect of this is that I’ll be going back a generation of equipment in effect and using the netbook much more than the reader.

Although most people’s first instinct is to hit the search engines, realistically that’s only going to give you a superficial knowledge at best and at worst a seriously distorted one.

Another more sensible option is to take a course on your disease. Although, so far, that’s mainly an option for the various chronic diseases, that situation is gradually changing as more universities are realising that people are interested in disease for reasons other than that they need to trea it. Thus, you can take quite in-depth courses on things like diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Although these are available as entry-level courses, don’t underestimate the amount of medical terminology that you’ll need to get through in these courses and don’t let it put you off that many of your fellow students are paramedics and nurses.

Definitely a better option than the superficial internet search approach!

When things are quite so bad with the government finances as they seem to be in the UK just about every sector is looking at cuts.

Perhaps one of the saddest of those is the education sector where there are quite a number of schools that have been cutting back on maintenance for a number of years because they’d a lovely new school building coming along in just another year or two.

Except that now many of those new school buildings have been axed.

Unfortunately it is one of many necessary cuts across the government departments but it means that many of our kids will have to make do with school buildings for perhaps another decade and many of those have basically been let go in terms of any kind of significant maintenance. It seems sure that a lot of that maintenance will simply have to be carried out now as the buildings are very much at the low point of their life by now.

What is a little confusing in all this is that the buildings weren’t constructed better in the first place. One local hospital was only finished in the late 1950s yet is now needing a complete rebuild. I don’t think that 60 years is a very long time for a building to last.