Open Research Online and new blog

To pluck the fruit from the next tree, I'm looking for new opportunities and blogging them at http://carpediempostdoc.wordpress.com/.

Before I go, remember that I've uploaded my PhD thesis to the Open University's Open Research Online (ORO) repository.

Then continue here.

Grades of PhD degree

A doctorate from the Open University may ultimately be a pass or fail, but there are five grades given after the viva:

• Award of the degree
• Corrections and modifications
• Substantial amendment
• Major revision and resubmission for re-examination
• Alternative recommendations for PhD candidates
• Fail

Straight award with no corrections is rare. The most likely result is minor corrections and modifications, for which you get a couple of months to do them in. Substantial amendment is still a pass and you get six months to fix the deficiencies. With amendments you don't have to get reexamined. I am not contemplating the lower grades.

OUBS blogs

Some OU Business School new blogs are available from

• Marketing Talk our marketing specialist who markets marketing
• The Sceptical Economist our economist, the one who does BBC Radio 4 the Bottom Line blogs too

I am also supposed to be blogging there at Winding Up, as I said I'd post my final progress on the OUBS web site. But I said I'd post only once every couple of weeks. It's funny but I find that the more I have to write on my thesis, the less time or interest I have in writing my blogs.

Reading PhD theses

Supervisor tells me to read PhDs to get examples of how to write mine. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to get PhDs to read. If you go to the Open University library, you have to ask for a particular thesis, which means you have to give the library the title and the author, and then the librarian goes and fetches it for you. You can't just browse theses. So it's a bit difficult to find useful theses when what you want is to see the content, the structure, the layout, and perhaps what the author has addressed when writing the methodology chapter. These aren't things you can search for on an electronic database, so there's no point in going on the OU catalogue system to look for a helpfully structured thesis because the catalogue can only search for content and topic of theses.

The OU has this wonderful repository of research, Open Research Online, but that doesn't reveal theses. You'd think that the Open University would have got round to putting its PhD theses on line, like Cranfield does.

Open University on BBC last night

Did you see the Open University on BBC last night? You can see it for the next seven days here. This is what it was like in the sixties - lots of people didn't expect to get a degree. People didn't expect and weren't expected to get a degree. Lenny Henry, who presents the programme, is an OU graduate and he tells you what it was like when you saw all these people around you with degrees and you hadn't.

The Open University was controversially new, an opportunity helped by the advent of television, and Michael Young realising that in the USSR they were using radio to educate people and telling Harold Wilson. Fancy that! The OU came out of soviet Russia.

There was hostility. But Jennie Lee argued for it. Thank goodness for these people. I suspect in today's climate we'd never get the OU going because there aren't politicians who would take it as seriously.

Open 40

See the Open Unlimited photos on their flickr page

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40682471@N05/

Fortieth anniversary

At the staff development day, we had a wonderful celebration birthday for the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the Open University. Then I realised that I had in my car, a sticker from the 25th anniversary (I've had the car a long time).

Staff development day

Open University region 02 associate lecturers had the annual get together for a staff training day. It started with a talk from our regional director, Celia Cohen, who had the job of giving us the bad news of how our funding is being cut. The long-term outlook is bleak because of cut backs on funding on students with equivalent or lower qualifications (ELQ) than they are studying for and other probable public expenditure cuts. Although student numbers are rising, in the long-term we still must reduce costs. So we'll remove courses that don't make a contribution, have too few students, are too complex, or are expensive to run.

In our faculty groups we then had to come up with good ideas to help the situation. Usually we get told something about the state of the faculty, and which courses are being withdrawn or rewritten.

So it was a bit of a bleak day compared to previous years.

Still, there were some good sessions, like the one on using Elluminate, and we finished with strawberries and cream, and a big 40th birthday cake for the OU.

OU's 40th birthday

The OU celebrates its fortieth birthday this year. There's to be an open day on campus this Saturday. See http://www.open.ac.uk/platform/campus/events/open-unlimited-anniversary-open-day. It looks full of interesting activities, and what's unusual is that some of them seemed aimed at teenagers rather than small children.

I'll be there.

Robin Wilson

One of the joys of being on campus, or living near, is that you can get to good lectures. Inaugural lectures tend to be good. And Robin Wilson is particularly worth listening to. He is:

• now Professor of Pure Maths at the OU,
• as well as Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College
• a fellow in maths at Keble College.

He's written over thirty books on:

• graph theory
• sudoku
• philately
• Gilbert & Sullivan operas
• the mathematical activities of Lewis Carroll

Yesterday he delivered his inaugural lecture on Communicating Mathematics: a historical and person journey. His lecture explored the context of communicating maths over the last 4000 years.

What is unusual in these days of PowerPoint, is that he doesn't use it! He uses handwritten transparencies, on two overhead projects. This means that the transparencies aren't photocopied in black and white, so you can see the different colours he uses to differentiate between lines, which makes reading the lines easier. And the two OHP means he can leave up one transparency while he discusses another.

Apart from the unusual presentation, whatever topic he takes, he makes interesting. This time he split his lecture into two parts: one on oral communication of maths, one on written communication. At the point where he moved from the first to the second, he demonstrated the use of maths in music. His wife and his colleague came onto the stage, then Robin and his wife played recorders to accompany the harpsichord, so they could demonstrate the pattern in the musical piece he was showing on the screen. How many lecturers play music to their audience?

I recommend watching. You can see it here.