Nature & Environment
Recycling and Waste
How much do you think about what you throw away? Do you know what happens to the things you chuck out? Find out more about waste and recycling with our FREE resources:
Society, Politics & Law
Discuss: Does work define your class position?
...think about work and the working class? Fill in our short survey and share your thoughts and memories...[John Woods of Tower Colliery] It is said that work defines the working class. In fact, according to Karl Marx’s classic analysis it is only through work that we can understand society, with its division between the working class and the capitalist class. The former...
Society, Politics & Law
How do you know you are in a smart city?
Integrated urban technology is less apparent when it is functioning well says, Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford...Recorded at The Open University for BBC Radio 4's sociological discussion programme, Thinking Allowed. Transcript
Nature & Environment
Sir David Attenborough and The Open University
...thinks we are headed Transcript David Attenborough When I took over BBC2 I had the responsibility of turning Jennie Lee’s concept into practicality and working with The Open University as it was established, and looking back on it now the insuperable, the major problems that worried us all the time have simply evaporated, they don’t exist anymore. For example, The...
Health, Sports & Psychology
From sound to meaning: hearing, speech and language
...think human language and the call system of the vervet monkey might differ. Keep this list with you and compare it with the differences mentioned in the text as you go through the first half of this course. This course is in two parts. In the first half (Section 2), we will investigate the nature and structure of human language, keeping our vervet monkey example on hand...
History & The Arts
Minds and mental phenomena: an introduction
...thinking, reasoning and knowing – in short, they have the capacity for rational thought and action. But just which animals fall into the category of sapience is a vexing question. Certainly human animals are sapient – we dignify our species with the name Homo sapiens, after all. But is anything else sapient? What about birds, dogs, apes and dolphins? There seems...
Health, Sports & Psychology
Exploring health: is your lifestyle really to blame?
...thinking about lifestyle and obesity in Activity 1 (i.e. the question ‘Is being overweight related to a person’s lifestyle?’), you might have realised that when considered from the perspective of health and wellbeing the concept is far more complex. In addition, lifestyles go beyond the individual level (Jensen, 2007); for instance, they can be conceived at a...
Education & Development
Extending your learning with postgraduate skills
...thinking which can then drive changes in practice. This could be your practice if you work in one of these settings. It could be the practice of others, if you share what you are learning with professionals and volunteers in these settings, either in conversation or through more formal dissemination of what you have come to know. What you share could be insights from...