I am wondering if any of my readers has ever taken a Massive
Open Online Course or MOOC (pronounced “mook”). These are free courses online
that generally don’t have tests or grades, put out by various universities. My
Irish teacher alerted some of us to the fact that City University of Dublin had
an Irish 101 course on a platform called Future Learn, so I signed up. Now I
have done Irish 101-108. Future Learn then sends me emails about other courses
I might be interested in. I did one on the culture of Catalan which kind of
seemed to be an apologia for separatism, put out by the Universidad de
Catalonia. I also did an interesting one on the Book of Kells put out by
Trinity College of Dublin. Future Learn suggested a course on Hadrian’s Wall
put out by Newcastle University, so I am doing that one now, but whoa this one
is hard! All sorts of archaeology and forensics, Latin inscriptions and
anthropological questions. Future Learn wants you to upgrade each course for a
charge, and it didn’t make any difference for the other courses, where there
were free quizzes, but this one has actual tests you can take if you upgrade. I
haven’t yet. I’ll put in a plug for the Irish language courses – they also have
lots of cultural stuff, and the series starts over every few months, so if you
are interested, watch for Irish 101. I would recommend doing them in order.
Today I took some pictures of the tulip tree blooming with
my good camera, but even when I zoomed in, they weren’t that great. Then I took
a walk and discovered yet another, very large tulip tree in the woods along the
lakeshore path. I tried to take a picture of this one with even less success.
Maybe my good camera is not as good as Travalon’s – check out this photo he
took of a catamaran off the coast of an island in the Bahamas we passed on the
cruise ship. We couldn’t even see this with our naked eyes!
Here are the pictures of the tulip tree blossoms I took with my good camera. Travalon promised he could take some with his good camera soon.
Famous Hat
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