futurelearn

[futurelearn]

How to take great notes

We’ve been practicing our note taking and gif making, here’s some stuff we’ve learned.

Preparation = good, you need the right tools

The first step to taking great notes is using tools that suit you: maybe you love scribbling away with a biro and a small notebook, maybe you prefer bright colours and lots of blank paper, or maybe you want to sit with your laptop or tablet and type out your notes straight into an app. Try out different tools, and find the ones that make note-taking not just easy, but enjoyable. That way you’re far more likely to keep going.

Transcribing hurts, so keep it simple

Whether you’re sat watching a video, or in a lecture hall, it’s easy to just frantically try and scribble down everything the speaker is saying. The result is usually smudged, nonsensical notes and a sore hand. You end up focusing on transcribing instead of learning. Try and filter what the speaker is saying, listen for key points, or jot down things to research further. If you really do need to take down a lot of what they’re saying, try and use abbreviations and simplify sentences, it will help ensure you’re actually understanding what’s being said.

Highlighters are your friends 

Once you’ve finished writing your notes don’t abandon them – now is the time to have a proper sift through. You might highlight the most important parts, or highlight the parts to research further, or highlight key people to remember – the choice is yours. If you find yourself accidentally highlighting entire paragraphs try setting yourself a limit: if you’ve taken 5 pages of notes limit yourself to highlighting 2 lines per page, that gives you 10 key things to remember.

Summaries are really useful

The process of turning notes into knowledge is a bit like distillation. You start out with raw material, you sift through it choosing the most important parts and finally you condense those parts into something usable. This last part is key, it’s here you have the chance to turn your notes into something uniquely useful to you. For instance you might summarise a set of notes in 6 notecards, writing one keyword to jog your memory about an important concept, formula or figure. But that keyword might be something that only you find amusing, or memorable, about the subject, or it might be something entirely random.

**BONUS TIPS FREE OF CHARGE***

Get organised – having great notes is useless if you can’t find them. Try and organise your notes in a system you can easily use, whether on the computer or in folders.

Play to your strengths – prefer learning by listening? Record yourself reading your notes. Prefer visual learning? Get artistic and draw out concepts and illustrations. There’s no one way to take good notes, it’s about what suits you.

Write down any questions – even if your questions are tangential you can use these to expand your knowledge, or to test yourself later.

If you want to put all this useful stuff into action, remember we have loads of courses to try! 

[futurelearn]

Take a trip with a FutureLearn online course

This March why not take a trip? All you need is a computer, tablet or mobile and a FutureLearn course.  Check out the amazing places you could go this month...

Go underground at the Vale of Pewsey

What does an archaeological dig actually look like? Now’s your chance to find out. Join the team from the University of Reading on their course Archaeology: from Dig to Lab and Beyond and follow a month-long excavation at the Vale of Pewse – ‘an archaeological treasure chest’.

Take me to the dig

Go meet the ancestors in Flores

In 2003, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, a team of archaeologists were surprised to find the skeletal remains of a mysterious new human species. Discover more about what they found with the course Homo Floresiensis Uncovered: The Science of ‘the Hobbit’ – and learn how ‘the Hobbit’ has caused huge controversy.

I want to meet the hobbit

Go and experience the Cold War at RAF Museums

Discover how the Cold War progressed, and how the RAF played a key role in decolonisation, with the course From World War to White Heat: the RAF in the Cold War – all filmed in site at RAF Museums in Hendon and Cosford.

Show me the Cold War

Go and explore Ancient Rome

Do all roads really lead to Rome? Find out, and get a taste of Ancient Roman life, by exploring an incredible, award-winning, 3D digital model of this important city on the course Rome: a Virtual Tour of the Ancient City.

Let’s go to Ancient Rome

Go and find Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon

Get new insights into one of the world’s most famous writers thanks to an exciting collaboration between the University of Warwick and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on the course Shakespeare and his World. Catch a glimpse of new artefacts and explore the house the bard was born in.

Anon! Get me to Stratford!

Want to explore something or somewhere else this month? Check out our full list of courses.

[futurelearn]

Thank you Finn! Well done us!

did you know there’s this site called “futurelearn” and you can do all these online courses for free and lots of them are from proper universities that are really reputable

and you don’t get a degree or anything but you can learn some really interesting shit, like i’m doing one right now about shakespeare and it’s focusing on his world as well as his work (so looking at context and stuff which i find fascinating)

it’s so nice to do in your own time and not have to worry about going anywhere because it’s all online and stuff

[futurelearn]

I study with them!

[futurelearn]

Beautiful Shakespeare Covers

Shakespeare might not have approved of painting the lily but even he would have to admit that these covers are lovely...

Chris Hall

Guy Allen

Sarah Strandoo

Niamh Richardson

Manuja Waldia

p.s. find out more about the noble Bard with one of these free courses

[futurelearn]

If there’s one thing we’ve all got it common, it’s relatives - and Benedict Cumberbatch is no exception. 

In fact, Benedict Cumberbatch is 16th cousin to an English king. But which one? Take this quiz to find out!

[futurelearn]

You are extremely welcome! Let us know how you get on. And by the way, why not check out these other film courses while you wait? Film Production: Behind the Scenes of Feature Filmmaking begins today and takes three weeks.

Film school in ny is expen$ive and trash af. Ty for the free film courses @futurelearn

[futurelearn]

Have just finished my online class “Shakespeare and His World” (led by Prof. Jonathan Bate, through University of Warwick and Futurelearn). A fantastic experience, and looking through my notes found Prof. Bate’s gloss on “Macbeth” in a section of the course titled “Evil, Hell, Macbeth, and Dr. Faustus”: 

This is a play where, ultimately, Shakespeare is suggesting that evil is something that comes, not from a supernatural world, but from inside human behaviour. Like all Shakespeare’s plays, but perhaps to a more sinister and profound extent than any of them, Macbeth is standing on the threshold between an old world of superstition, a belief in witches, a belief that Hell is a real physical place, and a modern world in which the conditions of good and evil, the choices that make us human, are internal, are psychological. Macbeth is the great psychological thriller of the Jacobean age.

While not a super-rigorous course or particularly demanding, this was a wonderful overview of Shakespeare. Heartily recommended.

[futurelearn]

Wow, great sketch!

19/09

I’m on week two of my FutureLearn course on Identifying The Dead and I am really enjoying it. This week was focusing on the work of the forensic archaeologists and soil scientists which involved taking notes on the excavation and examination of the grave and doing my own sketch of the remains. (I looked very morbid watching Hannibal and drawing the skeleton haha)

I was ill Wednesday and Thursday so I didn’t get much done so I’m catching up on everything this weekend, I’ll post more when I’m finished!

[futurelearn]

GitHub dump of all my 6 weeks of Creative Code coursework.

I’ve been working on FutureLearn’s Creative Coding course for the last 6 weeks. Posting various images here and there. So in an act of graciousness (lol) I’ve uploaded all my hastily written late night code to GitHub. All of which created the images shown above and more.

Here it is: github.com/revdancatt/FutureLearn-Creative-Coding

Hopefully there’ll be something in there to help at least a few people learn a trick or two, or at least act as example code to help them work through a problem.

Good luck!

[futurelearn]

There are now over 2 million FutureLearners! Here are just some of their stories.

“It’s easy in today’s world to say we are too busy or have too much to do and be very reactive in life…Your mental and emotional health needs just as much attention as your physical health.”

Keep reading

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Submit your own tips and read loads more at http://learning-guide.futurelearn.com!

According to futurelearn.com , when asked several students how to organize your learning and prepare socially,physically and mentally.

[futurelearn]

For anyone interested, that forensic anthropology course is Identifying the Dead: Forensic Science and Human Identification from the University of Dundee.

I don’t know if anyone did sign up for the FutureLearn MOOC on forensic anthropology (there’s still time!), but either way, one of the best things this week was this “expert hangout” (or hang'oot’!) with Prof Sue Black. And since it’s on YT, I thought I’d share it.

Some excellent, and fascinating insight into the work - and some really good questions and answers at the end, too. Well worth a watch if you’re interested in the procedure. And loads of inspiration for writers, too!

Few notes behind the cut, mostly to remind my future self of some of the content.

Keep reading

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w2_04

just an example animation for the FutureLearn course.

(annotated code here)

[futurelearn]

Be careful not to look at this while listening to music. You might zone out for hours…

w3_02

Same code as before, slightly different settings for the FutureLearn Creative Coding course.

[futurelearn]

A snack between studying blocks. I am into FutureLearn online courses now, starting one about International Relations by the University of Birmingham. If you haven’t checked it yet, guys, you should! It’s a great way to keep your brain in shape during the summer. www.futurelearn.com Just search for the topics you will be interested in, studyblrs! ☺️

[futurelearn]

Such beautiful GIFs

Week 8: Processing (part 2)

The futurelearn Creative Coding extravaganza continues - so this week featured a heavy focus on Processing. I dove into 3d graphics (a little before we were supposed to) and had lots of fun - and frustration - with various aspects of 3d design in processing. Observations:

-Proccessing’s GPU utilization isn’t all that amazing - or maybe I’m missing something with how I’m utilizing it. There’s something very unintuitive about how you have to redraw every frame instead of having ‘physical objects’ you can move around.

-So far, basic trig is by far the hardest subject to truly “get” (a frustration that’s been shared by many of my peers at the group). Somebody told me about this lovely Processing trig primer that really made life easier - but it’s still a hard concept to grasp. Trig is, of course, crucial because it’s all about the connection between radians and degrees - circling the square, etc. Good command of (the basics of) trig is a must-have for any serious computer graphic work. It’s really not that hard, once you get the hang of the unit circle model.

So yeah, there’s are just little etudes, nothing too ambitious - but nevertheless, all coded from scratch (which, I’m learning, is the real measure of whether you’ve learned anything at all; anybody can play and tweak and example. Show me someone opening a blank sketch and I’ll show you a true Processor, or, er, whatever we’re called.

Moar Processing next week, probably! Till then!