The final week of the Rome course focuses on entertainment. Juvenal, a satirical Roman poet, wrote in 133BCE:
But what about Remus' mob? They follow fortune, as always [...] they discarded their responsibilities long ago [...] for the people who once handed out power, political office, command of the legions, everything, now holds itself in check ( Read more... )

The penultimate week of the course is all about life and death, and looks at the every day lives of the Romans. There were a million or so inhabitants in the city at about 1BCE, where did they all live and work? It's quite a huge metropolis - in comparison, London didn't reach that size of population until well into the Industrial Revolution ( ( Read more... )

Week three of the course focuses on religion and how it was a focal point in all aspects of public and private life for Romans. Whereas today religion is sometimes more concentrated in particular events and occasions, for the Romans, it was a part of everything they did. Individual homes had private shrines and the city was filled with temples to ( Read more... )

The second week of What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us? starts off with a look at the history of Rome from 753BCE to 337CE. One of the mentors on the course has made a great timeline of all the emperors giving details of when and why they were appointed and how their rule ended. Some of it does make rather amusing reading: in 193AD Pertinax was ( Read more... )

I know I said that I wouldn't be doing any more of the FutureLearn courses but that was before I'd found out about the upcoming one on Rome. It's called Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City, and it's a five week course produced by the Department of Classics at the University of Reading. I've always been interested in the Romans, I think it's ( Read more... )

The second week of the Archæology MOOC moves from the dig to the lab, and from the Neolithic period to the Mediæval one ( Read more... )

A while ago I signed up for yet another MOOC on the FutureLearn site, this one is Archæology: From Dig to Lab and Beyond from the University of Reading. It's only a short course, just two weeks and three hours a week. It may be the last MOOC I do through FutureLearn as they've decided to introduce a charge. Previously, it was free to do any of ( Read more... )

This is the last week of the Norwegian course so a lot of it is recapping what we've learned in the previous weeks. There was some new information this week, mainly about sets of words with similar meanings. The first was the verbs gå and dra, both of which mean 'to go'. However gå is only used when walking and dra is used for all other modes of ( Read more... )

The Norwegian course continues! It's proving to be quite enjoyable although a lot of hard work as well. This is actually the third week, I missed posting last week, so there's two weeks worth of content here ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I've done a MOOC but I did quite a few back to back last year so it was nice to have a bit of a break. I got an email a while ago letting me know about the exciting courses that were on offer this year and one of them was Introduction to Norwegian from the University of Oslo. Well, I'm a sucker for languages and with the ( Read more... )