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History & The Arts
Start writing essays
Returning to study or starting it for the first time can be daunting. Many students are frightened of writing essays, but it’s a craft that can be learnt. This album will help you to build confidence in all areas of essay writing. A student discusses with two tutors her writing methods and how she adapts her techniques for exams and assignments....
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History & The Arts
The Arts Past and Present: the Benin Bronzes
Are ancient sculptures ethnographic artefacts or works of art? How can objects like these throw light on the relationship of our culture to other cultures, both in the past and in the present? This album explores some of the issues surrounding interpretation and display of bronze sculptures originating in Benin in West Africa. The video ...
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History & The Arts
Power and people in ancient Rome
The ancient Romans constructed some of the first ever purpose-built venues for mass-entertainment. How do these structures enhance the audience’s experience of the spectacle? This album looks at famous Roman buildings like the Colosseum, a venue designed to impress, where vast numbers of people congregated for gladiatorial combat, chariot-racing...
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History & The Arts
Roman funerary monuments
How and what can we learn from fragments? Thousands of fragmented inscriptions survive from the ancient city of Rome, the majority of which are funerary inscriptions or epitaphs from tombs. This album looks at the impact of funerary monuments. From the Mausoleum of Emperor Augustus, to the more humble tombs of freed slaves, these monuments ...
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History & The Arts
Sensory augmentation devices
How can new technology help you to play a new musical instrument? The E-Sense research programme is experimenting with novel augmentation devices to explore sensory, bodily and cognitive extension. In this interdisciplinary research, philosophy and art combine with various flavours of computing: ubiquitous; wearable; and physical. We take a look...
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History & The Arts
Black British Jazz
What is Black British Jazz? This short film explores the research carried out by The Open University research team led by Dr Jason Toynbee who has been examining the history of Black British Jazz and the stories of the artists who have performed it. This video looks at the history of jazz and how the story dates back as far as 1919, documenting ...
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History & The Arts
Are you a Christian without a church? Take the survey
What does it mean to be a Christian without a church? What exactly do people mean nowadays when they describe themselves as Christian? Share your views, and learn about other people, in this anonymous survey.
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History & The Arts
Wordsworth re-visited
Renowned as one the key figures of Romanticism, William Wordsworth broke through poetic traditions and barriers to produce verse that redefined the principles underlying the writing of poetry, placing the poet's emotions and interaction with a natural, pastoral world at the centre of poetic philosophy. Wordsworth's influences are a topic of ...
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History & The Arts
Analysing European Romanticism
The principal tenets of the movement known as Romanticism first began in Germany and England, with the former pioneering the moral and philosophical beliefs and the latter producing the first Romantic artists and poets. This album concentrates on the development and spread of Romanticism in mainland Europe, analysing in clear, concise terms the ...
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History & The Arts
Building on History: The Church in London
How will the church maintain its identity in the face of religious decline in the modern world? This is addressed in Building On History, a collaborative project between The Open University, King’s College London, the Diocese of London and Lambeth Palace Library. The project aims to give participants within the diocese an archived insight to ...
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History & The Arts
The Final Cut
It is often said that a movie comes to life in the edit suite. Ben Harrex of Final Cut post production studios in London discusses five themes with examples; The Cut, The Dissolve, Cropping and Resizing, Titles and The Sound. Ben explains how the video editor has a huge amount of creative control over how the final product looks. This material ...
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History & The Arts
Re-assessing the Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, better known as The Marquis de Sade, is infamous throughout literature and popular culture for a life and body of work that pushed boundaries. Literally synonymous with sexual and violent excess, his reputation as a writer is often clouded by the extreme nature of his work. In a series of lively and engaging ...