Hong Kong

4 days 3 nights in Hong Kong : great itinerary
Arrive in Hong Kong at 2pm and take the Airport express train with include the charter which will take passengers to their hotels. This trip the hotel picked is near by the MTR Jordan station. To travel around Hong Kong is not so difficult because they have a good public transport. The underground run until midnight and have stations close to attractions.

First day, visit ladies market, one of the famous tourist market. The name does not mean that they only sale the ladies things. Near by the ladies market is the night market open in the evening till midnight. At the end of the night market street also a place to eat. There are many restaurants which offer seafood dishes. Try the crab typhoon! Not very far from there it is a jade market. However, there are jade shops in the night market as well.

2nd day, visit Hong Kong Disneyland. It is really one day of enjoyment. Stay there until the end to watch a big firework.

3rd day, go up the mountain to visit a giant Polin Buddha. Then continue the journey to visit Hong Kong beach called Repulse Bay. In this place you can have sunbath or take a dip in the sea. Walk up the beach will see Chinese angles and different kind of Buddha and other items that believed to bring wealth and long life. Back to the city, go shopping at Harbour shopping mall and wait to see the symphony of light at the Avenue Square. The show is at 8pm every night.

Last day, take the open roof bus no. 15 to the peak tram station. Go up to the tower building to see the whole Hong Kong city. Before going to the airport stop at Chang Sui Po street. There are clothes, bags and shoes shops a long the road. Good place for shopping

Skill

Time goes very fast. For this month I have learnt many things and it was only 20 days of class.

• wring essay
• paraphrasing and summarising
• hedging
• referencing
• presentation

Also, websites that the teacher gave are very good to help to improve English but I don't have time to read everything. I only red some parts that need to be used in the work that have given. I copied some of the sites to my blog so I can study later after this course. I'm sure that I have to look at them again and again. The job of the teacher is harder than students. I don't need to search for a good website only find it in Jim blog. Thank you Jim.

Plan for the presentation

My presentation topic is the effects of globalisation on tourism management. I have made slides of what I'm going to present on Tuesday. Most of the content is in the essay that I have written. I also look on the website that Jim suggested to prepare my scription. I'm excited to give a presentation. I've never give an individaul presentation before. Also, I hardly speak English in front of many people. This is a very tough task for me.

Library and subject - based resources

I have visited the Library service to find the useful links to journals.
There are lot of journals that provided in my subject. This is very helpful to get information and reliable.
The way to get to the journal is easy by using Internet. Go to Metranet, then Subject Guides. Then click on your subject it will link to the online journal. You need your username and password to be able to read the journal online.

Last minute, Conclusion

Globalisation affects tourism in many aspects. In the economics, it speed up the growth of tourism industry and in social and culture it increase the improvement of the tourism services.
( This sentence refer back to the thesis statement)

There are also benefits and drawbacks of these effects. Tourism in globalisation world brings wealth to countries. However, there are local people who need to be considered.
( This sentence refer back to the key finding study)

The development of tourism still keep going and the number of tourism growth is predicted to be higher. Many countries depend on their tourism as it brings money to a country but with the loss of their culture.
( This sentence state what is the writer consider)

As the globalisation make technology become better, the management of tourism should become better as well in order to minimise its negative effects as possible and benefit more for local people.
( This sentence make a recommendation)

lecture online

As the subject of this month about globalisation so I pick to study online on a related topic. I found one lecture that the topic was very interesting " Is the party over? Sustainable Hopes" by professor Michael Mainelli from Gresham college.

The lecturer gave an overview of the problems that we are having today. Most of problems were related to environment and the increasing of production. The model of the topic was I-PAT.
I = impact
P = pollution
A = affluence
T = technology

I found conditional on the lecture which is very interesting,
" If everyone on the planet today lived at European level of consumption, we would need three planet Earths". and " If everyone on the planet today lived at USA level of consumption, we would need five planet Earths".

Havard referencing

1. What is havard and author- date system?
= It is a reference style which widely used in academic writing.

2. What is the difference between an in-text citation and a list of references?
= In-text citation is the reference that provided in the body of the paper while a list of references is a full bibliography of an in-text citation and other source that have been used to write an article. A list of reference giving at the end of the article.

3. What are 2 different ways to use in-text citation?
= One is put at the end of the sentences in a bracket, the other one is use in the part of the sentences.

4. What should you do if the book has more than 3 authors?
= Use only the family name of the first-listed author follow by the expression 'et al.' meaning 'and other'
( ellis et al.2004)

5. What should be included for a book of in the list of references?
= Family names and initials of authors, year, title and subtitle in italics, publisher and city of publication.

http://www.deakin.edu.au/current-students/study-support/study-skills/handouts/authordate-harvard.php

Summarising and paraphrasing

Summarising and paraphasing are the way to take other people ideas into your own writing.
However, summarising is to take only the key ideas of the text while paraphasing is to re statement by using your own words.
To summarise we have to understand what the author try to say in the text, then take his main ideas and finally re-write by using you own words.
Execise
LINK

Post lecture

The lecture today by Steve help me to understand more on the globalisation and also how it link to the economic and the problems that we face today. I also listen to another lecture that recommend in the booklet. It was a lecture by John Pilger. He gave a lecture of the effect of globalisation on Indonesia. Overall, there are more negative effects than the benefit.
Globalisation is a very difficult topic for me. As I read more about it, it become everything. I can't seperate anything from the globalisation. Mobile = globalisation, Internet = globalisation, Travel = globalisation, Shoes = globalisation.

The Internet Detective

Answers for the questions ' The Internet Detective'

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/crimestoppers.html

1. Reasons why you might fail when writing essay.

• missed out the key sources
• the sources are inappropriate
• bias, inaccurate and out-of-date
• plagiarism

2. What does 'brush up' means

= To evaluate the information that you find on the Internet

3. Is it good idea to use Internet sources for your research?

= It is good to use Internet for research. However, you need to select information that reliable and base on your purpose.

4. Which information sources are traditionally used to support academic research?

• peer reviewed
• scholar journals
• library service
• bibliographic databases

5. What is a spoof website?

= A fake website that design to look like the real website. Their content is humorous. In some cases the design is so like the original that you have to look very carefully to determine whether it is real or fake.

6. Case-by-case approach

= To know what is your purpose of searching and find the one that appropriate for your work.

7. When judging a website, which 3 questions should you ask?

• who = source of information
• what = the content of information
• where = location of information

8. How can you find more about who wrote the information of the websites?

= Look at the contact detail that given on the website and read on the About button.

9. Why is the URL structure important?

= The URL is the address of the page. Each component tell us more about the website.

10. Which URL are likely to be the most useful for academic research?

• .ac , .edu
• .gov
• .org

11. What 3 things is important when critical evaluation?

• Take a case-by-case approach
• Ask questions (who, what, where) and look for clues
• Weigh up the evidence in the light of your own information needs

12. What is plagiarism?

= claiming someone else's work as your own.

This is an excellent tutorial. Most of information I've never known before. This will help me to be more careful when useing Internet resource in the future. I will keep all the suggestion in to my mind when searching on websites.

Thank you for the people who produce such a very helpful website.

good ways of searching

Google scholar
"Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research."
Features of Google Scholar
- Search diverse sources from one convenient place
- Find papers, abstracts and citations
- Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
- Learn about key papers in any area of research
(http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html)

Peer reviewed journals
"Peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Although generally considered essential to academic quality, peer review has been criticized as ineffective, slow, and misunderstood"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review)

Intute
"Intute is a free Web service aimed at students, teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education. Intute provides access to online resources, via a large database of resources. Each resource is reviewed by an academic specialist in the subject, who writes a short review of between 100 to 200 words, and describes via various metadata fields (such as which subject discipline(s) it will be useful to) what type of resource it is, who created it, who its intended audience is, what time-period or geographical area the resource covers, and so on. In early June 2008 Intute provided 123,381 records. Intute is not to be confused with a simple search engine - it is more like a hand-built directory of 'the best-of-the-web, for academics'."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intute)
Link to intute: http://www.intute.ac.uk/

I think the websites which trend to be reliable are university websites and websites that end with .org, .gov and .ac.uk
Also, when read some articles on the internet and they give references. We should go to look at the sources that they have given as well.

For me I've never used google scholar or intute before. I think this will help me to find information which relate to my subject quicker. Also the information that I will get from these sources are more correct and viewed with specialists before they allow to public.

Self assessment exercise

Today I did one more task on http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=302464
The task was to identify the main point of the text.
The text was about people are being to be careful with their health by everything that surround them such as magazine and television. The information given is to eat healthy and take exercise. The health also affected by the environment that people are living. Some illness cause by pollution. There is development of diseases but also the new treatment to cure. Stresses and strain also cause illness.
The cause of illness is not only the individuals control but the society as a whole. The illness also have costs. The cost for health service and cost for working time lost.
This is what I understand from the text. I hope I understand it correctly. I don't know some of vocabularies but I didn't look at the dictionary. Normally, I don't look for the word that I don't know from a dictionary unless I really don't understand anything about the article. This is bad because I don't learn any new words and some parts of the article I don't get exacly what they wrote. I think it's time consume to find the meaning of every words that I don't know. However, I should look for them more.
The next task is making effective note. I chose notes 3 which is I think the most effective. However, my notes are seem like note 1.

What is globalisation?

Globalisation is a difficult word. The meaning of globalisation relate to the subjects that apply to.
Generally, globalisation refers to the join of difference countries together. This is due to the development of technology, communication and policy of each country.
From Collins dictionary : Globalisation is the process enabling financial and investment market to operate internationally, largely as a result of dereguration and improved communications.

Am I ready to study?

I did exercise on http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=302456 that Jim have suggested to do to assessment myself that am I ready to start the postgraduate course which will begin next month.
In the next course I will study about tourism management. This course is a Master in art. Therefore I chose task 1.
Out of the 5 questions I got one answer wrong and it took me about 10 to 15 minutes to answer the questions. Although I didn't have much concentrate because I was sleepy.

plan for January self-study

This month is about essay writing in globalization topic. I need to read more about the topic to get more ideas. A part from home work and tasks that have given in the booklet I would like to prepare myself to be ready for the next course that I'm going to study. I have looked in the first semester subjects. They are really scare me. Sometime I think that I will not be able to do it. However, I want to try and I will do my best for my success in studying.
I also take into account what Helen suggested me last month on the area that I have to improve. Helen advised me to improve vocabulary and try to use new words that I have learn. Therefore, I will create a vocabulary notebook and remember the new words that I have learn. The difficult about vocabulary is I don't try to use them. I need to try harder.