between courses
2009-07-15
I’m between courses and
I’m bored!
a long wait
My next course [M255 Object-Oriented Programming with Java] doesn’t start until October, so given that I finished M263/MST121 in mid-June that’s a break of three and one half months. Which seems like a long time.
Is this a problem?
Perhaps. I must admit that apart from feeling a wee bit bored I hadn’t thought too much about it until I read another OU blogger with the same problem. Which got me thinking about when courses started rather than what courses to do. To which the answer is—mainly February.
So every year I’m going to have an enforced break of nearly four months.
I have to agree with Dougie—this seems like a waste of time. I don’t see a solution, and I’m not blaming the OU—there will be good reasons for it, I doubt that it is done just to annoy me, but it does leave me with time on my hands.
what to do?
The obvious thing [at this point in time] would be to learn Java, but I don’t want to do that. Why not? Because if I learn Java before the course I won’t be as interested when the course actually starts—and that’s a bad place to be [for me].
Nine months is a long time to maintain your enthusiasm for a course, always having new things to learn is a great help. If I know Java I’ll be tempted to coast during the first part of the course, or to get ahead of schedule. That’s tempting fate.
Now, although I’ve only done two nine-month courses, I’m certain that sticking to the course schedule is vital. Getting behind is an obvious enough problem, but getting ahead? Yes, that’s a problem too. Rushing through a course may lead to you missing things.
Although I moaned about it at the time the fact that the books for blocks three and four of M263 weren’t mailed until they were needed was a help. If they’d been available earlier I’d have skipped past blocks one and two and gone straight to the ‘interesting stuff’. But blocks one and two were part of the exam too and I didn’t understand them half as well as I thought I did. Being forced to spend ‘extra’ time on them will improve my result.
so the plan
One possible path that my studies might take is artificial intelligence and having borrowed a book on the subject, so long ago that it is now effectively mine, perhaps it’s time to read it?
This would seem to be going against everything that I’ve been saying here but AI is such a vast subject that I think I’ll be pretty safe.