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I spent a little time with
Trudie who looks after the Scottish Studies office trying to find out a
bit more about the department. What I found out is that there seems to be
an undergraduate program of some sort but no fixed courses. They seem to
change each year depending on what Professor is willing to take on a
course. There are also distant learning courses but again they change as
well each year. They
also help folk that are taking a Doctorate or Masters and you'll see below
some of the writings that have been submitted. As you will see I did visit
the distant learning centre and the computer systems department to see if
I could get further information but not too successful.
I was taken through the system for distant
learning and that did seem to work very well but I suppose I was looking
for courses that people could apply for that just wanted to learn more
about Scottish history and that I didn't find.
Here is Trudie in the Scottish Studies office
Ok I'm going to get all the techie stuff wrong
but these are the papers submitted to the department from the Masters and
Doctorate courses and below I'll open up a few to give you an idea of the
subject matter
And so you can perhaps see that some of these
are very detailed indeed
And this is Trudie showing me the Scottish
Studies web site
http://www.uoguelph.ca/scottish/
And so we visited the office of Open Learning
to try and find out what was on offer but confess to not finding very
much. I tried to get some feel for content of courses but wasn't allowed
to copy any of the material although some enquiries are being made to see
if I can get some course material
To that end we also visited the computer folk
that keep all the material on file but again didn't get very far but some
of the enquiries being made by them may produce a result
We did pop up to the fifth floor to see the
grad lounge where they serve many different curries!
OK... I'm going to put my hand up and say I
really don't know what relevance the Scottish Studies department has to
the University. I just don't understand what they contribute to the
study of Scottish History that isn't actually done by the library with the
Scottish Collection or other departments at the Uni. As there is to be a
permanent chair of this department I can only assume that things will
become clearer in the months ahead. As it stands I know if I wanted to do
research on Scottish History then I'd most definately want to make use of
the library but why I would go through the Scottish Studies department is
beyond me at this time. There again I'm just a simple chap and not
used to this academic life so I'm probably not asking the right questions
:-)
I will be spending some time with board
members of the Foundation for Scottish Studies over the next few weeks so
hopefully I'll learn more about the Scottish Studies department from them
and I'll of course share by findings with you.
See Addendum on the
Scottish Studies dept |
