Authors Electric

Displacement activity! This is something many writers know only too well. It can take many forms but its purpose is always the same and you don’t need many guesses to know that’s to avoid writing. However, I’m not going to discuss all the forms that displacement activity takes, I want to tell you about a new one I found. I’ve talked before about MOOCS the online education courses provided by FutureLearn. Well, I enrolled in Literature in the Digital Age , which is quite interesting, even though it talks about poetry a lot. As you know, poetry is not my thing. The course could be called displacement activity but I prefer to think of it as education. But it introduced me to an analytical tool which is perfect as a displacement activity. This tool can make comparisons between anything book related that you like, and if you want to try it out it’s called Google Books Ngram Viewer . You’ll also find an information page here . Please note that the search format is word,w...

This is not the first time I’ve written about MOOCS, but I’m currently enjoying one entitled Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime , and I’m a sucker for anything that involves crime. I’m getting to be an old hand with MOOCS, and I’ve taken part in quite a lot of them now. I’ve studied everything from crime, forensics, criminal justice, and a beauty called Identifying the Dead where we got to learn all about bones and skeletons and things as part of a course on forensic anthropology. But I’ve also done courses on the First World War, the Irish Revolution, as well as digital marketing, and how to read minds. Quite a selection. So what is a MOOC? I suppose you could say it is the modern equivalent of a correspondence course. The word MOOC means Massive Open Online Course and it is an online course of study with open access via the web. As well as using traditional course materials such as videos, readings, podcasts, and online lectures, it encourages participants to comm...