As I sit at my desk, I hear the imam in the nearby mosque tap the microphone before sounding the call to prayer. Six months ago this microphone tap was not even audible to me. Then I started studying again, and the calls to prayer became the punctuation of my day. Somehow, my study time coincides with the dawn, dusk and evening prayers, and the microphone tap has become my Pavlovian signal for a shift in activity. Today, it marked the beginning (at 12.30) and the end (at 3:40) of my quest for online resources.
My former lamentations have recorded the woes of students in Oman who struggle for access to resources for their international courses. The political implications are myriad and won’t be discussed here, but I, along with my fellow students, have come to accept the fact that we are on our own in this battle. The question is no longer whether we will receive assistance, but rather what we can do, under the circumstances, to help ourselves.
It turns out that, to misquote Benjamin Franklin, Google Books helps those who helps themselves. Though the university library offers access to a single full text of one of the recommended books, Google Books offers limited views of seventeen of them. This is not nearly what one needs for readings at postgraduate level, but it does at least give us a chance to familiarise ourselves with the field before our classes start in three weeks’ time.
And we take whatever we can get.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment