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Can’t really resist logging this … In the late 80s (it must have been 1988/9) I bought my first Macintosh computer. I was at the vanguard (!) with a MacPlus where I needed 4 floppy disks just to load up a word processing program and at least 20 mins to save anything I produced. And now, in 2007, I’ve just bought my second Mac. In real terms cheaper than the first and, well, incomparable. I picked up this Mac Mini (basically a G4 laptop in a box), purloined an old but serviceable monitor/mouse/keyboard all for the princely sum of £160.
I still wish I had that first Macintosh though; it would be a constant reminder of the changes in computer power and ease of use through almost 2 decades.
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Jon Savage’s new book new book is about the century and a half of angst and ferment that created the Teen Age. Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 was discussed in today’s start the week. It included the notion that teenage years are about exploration, rebellion, and play – the intermediate years between childhood and adulthood where anything is possible.
But I feel there is a sense that such exploration and rebellion has all but disappeared – replaced by a ubiquitous and almost obligatory perennial ‘play’. This is reinforced by a society which values the ‘forever young’ and where adulthood is somehow something to be avoided at all costs. So play is King. Have fun: enjoy. Above all, have fun withing the parameters offered; in other words, conform.
This is picked up by Frank Furedi in an article in Spiked! when he discusses the charge of ‘grumpy old man’.
There was a time when criticising the status quo was considered radical. Throughout history, refusing to accept the world as it existed has been looked upon as a form of rebellion. Those who did not ‘much care for contemporary life’ were very often inspired by the conviction that human life and culture could be – and must be – improved upon. Today, such an aspiring outlook is seen as a social faux pas, something that can earn you the label of grumpy old man or woman. This suggests that there is a fairly formidable mood of cultural conformism today. Labelling objections to today’s institutional practices as a ‘grumble’ or a ‘moan’ is not only a way of dismissing these objections; it is also a way of defending and even justifying the world as it exists against what is viewed as an army of bad-tempered, fussy, ill-natured, irritable emotional cripples.
So, if the middle-aged are the new rebels dismissed as grumpy old men/women, and the teenagers the conformist middle-aged it looks as if we need a new cultural history from Jon Savage; Adulthood: the Creation of the adult in the 20th century …
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Public relations is consistently one of the top three career choices for graduates, whatever their degree subject. But as you would expect, competition for a first break into this profession is tough, with hundreds of applicants chasing each graduate-level vacancy. With this in mind, we have joined forces with the North-West regional group of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations to organise a Public Relations Careers Information Day at MMU Business School, Aytoun Site, on Tuesday 27 March 2007.
The day includes the chance to hear what public relations is really like from a panel of PR professionals and recent entrants, and with a registration fee of only £5.00, has been deliberately priced to fit the student budget.
Full information and a downloadable booking form are on the Careers Day web page at:
http://www.business.mmu.ac.uk/prcareers/
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Earlier in the year I ran a workshop on Endnote the bibliographic software that allows you to build a bibliography, add parenthetical references to Word documents and then format a references page – all automatically. There are many more features to it but these are the main ones that undergraduates seem to use. Although you can use the software on the student platform I realise that many of you would like to work on your bibliography at home. To do that with Endnote you would need to buy a licence and load it onto your personal machine. The licence costs £68 and is likely to put many of you off.
There are a number of online bibliographic options which are free or which cost only a few pounds a year to register with. One of these that I have been looking at is EasyBib. Free and straightforward to use, it allows you to build a bibliography, save it with them (they give you a reference number to use to access it) and print it, formatted, according to MLA (author-date) conventions. There is a pro version, MyBibPro, which contains many more features and costs $7.99 a year with a one-week trial – so that may also be worth a look.
Another is CiteULike the blurb for which states:
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software.
It’s free to register and although slightly less straightforward than Easy Bib looks very useful.
These utilities could answer some of your own ‘housekeeping’ problems when recording your reading and producing those reference pages at the end of your independent study project.
Categories: Independent Study · Uncategorized
