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Owen Barritt

TMA 02

Sunday, 27 May 2012, 22:33
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Done!

I wasn't really sure in places how much weighting to put on learner choices vs practitioner choices vs my own experience in the activities.

I found the last part quite hard at first, as it wasn't entirely obvious what "learner experiences" could be looked at above and beyond those that had already been covered.  However, given recent experiences with offering our courses to Chinese students and their differences in expectations from the online course, this seemed like a good option to look at and easily gave me 500 words.

As with TMA01, the main problem with the TMA seemed to be keeping to the word limit given the amount of papers we have looked at to discuss, plus the fact they encourage us to include references to forum posts and also wider reading (using the magic extra time we can all summon up from nowhere).

Finding relevant forum posts to include with this one was a lot harder than TMA01, as the forums have been a lot quieter in this block.  There were some useful points raised in a recent elluminate session though, which I included.

Tags: asian learners, blog, tma02, tma, forum, h800, learner experiences
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Owen Barritt

Starting TMA 02

Saturday, 26 May 2012, 10:56
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Just about to start the first section of TMA 02 looking at the activity on blogs.

Have been through the TMA01 feedback and am going to attempt to include subheadings within each activity.

There seems to be 3 obvious sections for each:

  • Learner Choices
  • Practitioner Choices
  • Personal Experience

Looking back at TMA 01 feedback, I need to be more forceful in my suggestions for improvements to the activities and need to include a few more quotes from the forum posts I cite as examples.

 

Tags: h800, tma02, tma
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Owen Barritt

TMA2

Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 23:08
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Saturday, 26 May 2012, 10:57

Made more of a start at thinking about TMA2 this evening (still have activity 4 from weeks 13/14 to look at, but I think that is now going to wait until next week).

At the moment I'm aiming to look at:

  • Week 10 Activity 5 - Blogs
  • Week 12 Activity 5 - Face to Face vs Online Tutorials
  • Week 13/14 Activity 3 - Wikis

Spent this evening skimming through the relevant readings from the activities and jotting down ideas for learner & practitioner choices.

Also went through the relevant forums for each activity and the recent elluminat session and added some notes from them, plus a few from some of the other readings from blocks 1 and 2.

The result of which is 3 entirely illegible sheets of paper with lines going everywhere.

Think there may be a way to go before these turn into a submittable TMA...

Tags: h800, tma02, tma
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Owen Barritt

One Month Later...

Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 22:41
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 23:09

So, having said I'd kick-start his blog into life to help with my studies after the Week 10 activity on blogging, we're now one month later and I haven't posted anything.

Best laid plans of mice and h800 students and all that.

In going back into the other activities, I must admit during the week's, while there were occasions where I though "oh yes, I must post some thoughts to that blog", most of the time I just completely forgot about it.  Even at the points I did think about it, I was in the middle of doing another activity.  Then you get to the end of the activity, stop and hey presto the intention has got burried alive by other thoughts.

In H808, there was more incentive to blog as you needed to demonstrate reflection for the assessment, but also I think (although this may just be my memory of the course being wrong) that there were more activities suggesting things to blog about.

This was one of the things I mentioned to Shaun in the forums, in that personally I would find it easier to blog on here if there were occasional prompts of ideas to blog about.

With a lot of the activities on the course, they give you points to think about, and we all write down our thoughts as posts in the forums.  At which point the vast majority of my thinking has already been written about either in my initial posts or in the replies on there.  If I have anything more I feel I need to add, I tend to add it to the forum.

I've just been relistening to the elluminate session we had the other week to get some thoughts out of it for the TMA.  Most of the discussions there are things that we've discussed in the forums, but with Shaun raising thoughts and questions it gives you another prompt to rethink in the light of.

The main reason I've come back to the blog now, is because I've had a prompt to rethink how I've approach the blog in the form of TMA2 without this I think it would have probably continued to sit here collecting dust for a bit longer.

 

 

Tags: eluminate, blog, reflection, tma, forum, tma2, h800
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Owen Barritt

Week 8

Friday, 21 Nov 2008, 10:47
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Week 8 was basically the TMA.

I felt a little lost as to what was expected with this.

Part (a) was about the drivers and asked us to discuss these in a context familiar to ourselves. The context I know most about is wine education as that's what I do. However, there isn't really a strong drive to use eportfolios, so the discussion felt a little artificial. Some of the generic drivers were applicable though, but it was hard to put them into the context.

I'm not sure whether it would have been easier to choose a different context, but that would have involved a large amount of research as it would not have been familiar to me.

Part (b) was the reflection. I was unclear as to what contributed "one" piece of evidence. This blog, for example, is mainly a continuation of the reflections from activity 2.2, so I used a few excerpts as "one" piece, but it did feel that these should really be counted as more. However, they seemed a good way to show progression.

I tried using MyStuff to compile the evidence and essays, but the rtf output lost the tabulation in the wiki pages and the html output didn't open properly on my XP machine, only showing an xml file and no html files. I've tried it since and the problem seems to be with XPs compressed folders as my linux machine shows all the html files and folders. Discussing this with Robin, it seems that WinZip also opens them fine.

However, as a result I resorted to cutting and pasting into word and zipping them up manually for submission.

Results have since come back. I got 78%, which is frustratingly close to the 85% distinction boundary (compared to the 40% fail boundary). In general, for his comments, it seems Alan felt there was too much breadth and not enough depth to my discussion, which seems fair given my points above. The breakdown was 76% for the essay and 80% for the reflection, which also seems to match my feelings about the exercise.
Tags: practice, reflection, tma, skills, critique
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Owen Barritt

Week 7

Friday, 21 Nov 2008, 10:31
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I've now got a bit behind with this blog, so here's an attempt to catch up a couple of weeks.

Week 7 was looking at multimedia and once again we did the group tasks on the wiki. This time I setup the page at the beginning of the week and suggested using a table to show rate our competencies.

I started by putting a few obvious ones in and left space for other members of the group to add more. I also put a space for discussion at the bottom.

This task seemed to work better then some of the previous group based tasks and most of the group contributed at least details of there own level of competencies.

Unfortunately, the deeper discussions seemed to be limited to just myself and Colleen. I'm not sure how to get the rest of the group more involved. Perhaps it was mainly a matter of the TMA being just around the corner. I also got the impression that some members of the group were still doing the work from previous weeks. Perhaps it's just a matter of allowing more time for these tasks.

The second part of the activity was to record another multimedia item. I was intending to record a popcast of my reflections, but by the time I had been able to get to the shops to buy a microphone it seemed sensible to move onto the TMA.

I'm still intending to do this, but as it's holding back the rest of my reflections I shall just write this transcript for now and record the popcast over the weekend.
Tags: collaboration, reflection, tma, h808, podcast
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