From E-Learning V

Fig.1. Over doing the reading

I'm trying to put to bed what might be my 27th assignment: the last three have been non-OU but the same rules apply: whether tutor marked assignment, end of module assignment or an essay.

Have I ever been cut out for this?

Clearly, getting from TMAs in the 50s and a couple of EMAs in the 40s to TMAs in the 80s (and beyond) and EMAs in the 60s and 70s (though never beyond) indicates that I've learnt how to provide what is required ... and by default, that I have also learnt something (though my brain will complicate, and bury everything that goes in so fast that it's like putting rotten tomatoes onto the compost heap).

This is what I prefer by far: 'writing from the hip' I call it, or 'jazz writing' where a stream of consciousness, or drivel, fills the page.

I am taking a moments break from the nightshift.

This nightshift, awake at 2.00 am and writing by 2.30am has, over several years, become my default position whenever I need a three hour run at something; even the dog is asleep. I have to struggle to hear much more than a buzz in my head and either the tapping on this keyboard or scratching away of pen on paper.

Can I bring to some kind of conclusion this 'learning journal' in relation to writing 'the perfect essay'? 

Despite my best wishes I am NOT a strategic worker or thinker: my curiosity is too much of a pull. I do exactly what I was warned against a year ago - 'vanishing down rabbit holes'. I am the White Rabbit and Alice combined; an intriguing reference enthrals me so off I go. If I can I will source the paper, even get the long out of print book - I may even read the thing, take notes and then pop my head of this hole and wonder what the feck I'm playing at.

An essay needs a copse, not a forest. Imagine what it is like trying to turn an forest into an essay: too much wood (far too much paper). Not simply tough to digest, but any intrinsic pleasure from the act of writing at last is diminished by my knowledge of how much I will have to leave out. 

In the dead of night.

Giving up alcohol and coffee has not helped.

In every respect the alcohol was by far the easiest thing to cut back and cut out - just the conclusion to a ten year minor skirmish that ultimately was or is a medical irritant (allergic to it). Last week I managed 48 hours, or as it 36 hours without coffee. Hardly an achievement given that I was comatose, walking wounded or asleep for the duration. A mug first thing since has found me taking an afternoon siesta and still sleeping for seven + hours. I am sitting with the requisite jug of coffee now. 

I'll get to the end of this and do it justice

'On reflection' the couple of EMAs in the 40s I received was because having done the work, and got reasonable TMAs I blew it with this last struggle and deadlines ending up submitting the latests draft as the seconds disappeared. This time I have had months, really, months and even now I have another three days. I just want to do what I know has to be done: get a good draft finished a few days before, then do the re-read and edit. Nothing less will do and only then can I feel I've done all that I feel I am capable of. The truth is this does not, nor never has come naturally to me. I prefer being up on my feet doing and taking part with a team of people.

Take a nap, then, trusting to my wits and the fresh sea air, I'll be bobbing around offshore by mid-morning taking part in some global sailing charity event. 

From E-Learning V

 Fig.1 The effect of drinking too much coffee

With an assignment, TMA or EMA or exam deadline comes the inclination to get up earlier and drink stronger coffee, in larger doses over longer periods. Easing off the caffeine in take comes at a price: headaches. This isn't a drug you can come off in an instant ... or in my case, at all. 

I'm trying to stick to water after breakfast; the problem is that I may have had a jug of expresso by then. If I get a headache later in the day what do I need? Paracetamol and caffeine. 

My symptoms:

• Ringing in ears
• Heart palpitations
• Gut rot
• Dehydration
• Irritability
• Headache
• Restlessness

NONE of this is conducive to getting much done. I need to put in a couple of hours a day for the next four days at least. 

Quitting coffee is on the cards. Done with alcohol, meat might be cut back to the weekend or cut out entirely. Quit Facebook. Cut back on Linkedin. Off on retreat in a couple of weeks when I plan to leave all gadgets behind - let's see or prove how productive that can be. Five days with pen and paper.

Not at home and thinking of excuses not to get on with this - I have my laptop but left the charger at the front door, poor signal out here in the wilds of ... The Cotswolds, and busy. 

But instead I find the connecting is good, the last draft in Google docs is easy enough to work on (though no tables) and sitting by an open fire it is very conducive to refkection - though not hard graft. Just two days away from it makes it all look like a gargantuan task. I'm not short of words, rather the opposite, having to extract the bare bones to generate 5000 words from notes - this is where keeping a blog can feel counterproductive. Must I work through the 70+ posts on H818 in order to write the EMA? Apparently so.

I may try to tackle it as a 12 minute presentation - could I get up and talk it through with an audience unfamiliar with the module ?

For all the gadgets I've gathered around me and despite for 18 months doing everything on a screen through a keyboard or touchpad, I know have a whiteboard and put sheets of paper on the wall. I take notes. And when I need to hunker down I pick one of these and commit.

Green - One Minute

Yellow - Three Minutes

Black - Thirty Minutes

Blue - An hour

I practice I find 3 minutes does the job and I may keep going for several hours. My heart is telling me not to panic then the adrenalin rush kicks in.

An hour is just that. It is a pre-arranged slot and I find I am yawning at 55 minutes, as if I am waiting for the class to end.

And breathing space.

How I prepare a TMA or EMA is completely unlike anything I did in the early days, even in the first couple of years or more of the Masters in Open and Distance Education (MA ODE). It is far more like designing an Airfix model, making the parts, then constructing the thing. At this stage, having thought about and written up all the component parts I did a rough assembly and came up with 3437 words for a 4000 word assignment.

Actually this is too many words - not a problem as I know where the fat lies, ideas expressed in too large a chunk. After that it's a case of getting the prose to flow.

Prioritise and give it time to breathe. I've pretty much given up on social media too - this is study journal and a moment to reflect. 'Blogging' and writing an academic paper are very different things - even journalism doesn't get close. Blogging is playing in the sand, journalism is a papier-mache self-indulgent sculpture, whereas academic writing is gathering together a complete set of artefacts, carefully arranging them in a cabinet and including all the labels.

Excited and nervous about getting my head around an EMA and turning this into a P.hD proposal I wacked off an email to a contact on the US East Coast not expecting a reply for 24 hours. They're potty too ... either in the office at 9.00pm last night (their time) or taking 'office' emails.

My excuse is the dog decided to dig up her bed an hour ago. (1.00pm)

I have a lot of reading to do. I've made a start on 'The Future of Pharma' which is by an OU Visiting Professor. When I crawl off back to bed (like now) this can had an odd effect on my dreams - trials, drugs, 'Big Pharma' can meld into a horror story. Not helped by a dose of Netflix 'Resident Evil' earlier on either.

'The Worlds Most Important Industry' writes the author - not how too many people see it, but then when did they or a loved one last take any kind of medication that has improved their quality of life? Personally I would have been dead in the first six months ... and at some stage in the last 30 would have succumbed to an asthma attack, flu or bronchitis ... or all three simultaneously. My brother would have died age four.

On the other hand my grandfather made it to 96 and had little to do with doctors. While my mother might have succumbed to a couple of strokes instead of being kept alive in the most pitiful state for an additional three months ...

It took me a year ... no longer, 18 months. Even longer than that, two years, to recognise what it took to get consistently high marks.

I couldn't fathom what people were doing.

Is it a formula? Or just application? Is there a method? Whatever it takes until you feel confident you know what is going on ... so read, read again, ask questions. Then going and read something else. Disagree, agree ... sleep on it. Then, ever so slowly it starts to dawn on you. This is what they are on about. I am prone to read well beyond the listed resources though, picking through papers until I find the one that speaks to me - the voice that expresses it in a way that has ressonance. And I am prone, within reason, to get the book that is cited in a paper I like ... so a collection of second handbooks under the table and a larger collection of eBooks. eBooks I read faster, highlight and take notes as I go along, then migrate notes and quotes into a Google Doc. I kid myself when I have a lot to read that it is different on the Kindle, the iPad or on the TV size screen that is ... well the TV (but my computer too).

A couple of weeks ago I took the TV and put it in the shed. One of those things the size of a pedal car.

No one misses it.

Everyone is on a screen elsewhere in the house. We stream movies. We use BBC iPlayer.

I don't miss clicking between channels looking for something to watch, finding nothing much but glued to the thing for a few things all the same.

Movies?

Ironclad

That's the way to do Medieval!

A week away in April and I still haven't recovered my old rhythmn. Nor will I. Instead of bloggin I have every conceivable thing to sort out with the house and garden. Somehow both were abandoned for three years - I wonder why that was?

The lawn was so bad I needed an industrial strimmer. The lawnmower I bought in 2007 is still in its original packaging in the shed.

And then there's this - 12 grabs of an Activity System looking like Toblerone.

One per month, one per hour.

This is the point. The thing is

a) a grab in time

b) unstable

c) a construct or model (as well as a theory).

A theory because it can be re-apppied (for now).

Fig.1. Its image explains itself.

Engestrom and others go to great lengths to remind us that the model/theory of an Acticity System is a snap shot in time - that even as we look at it things are moving on, that the relationships don't simply change as a result of the interactions with each other - but because the whole thing shifts.

OK. Take a chocolate triange of Acitivty Theory and visualise it in sequence. Better still, drop what you are doing and go and buy some.

Now take a piece and eat it.

The logic remains equally sound when I suggest that by consuming a moment of the Activity System in its last iteration you are enacting what the Interenet has done and is doing.

This is what the connectivity of the Web does - the degree and scale of connections is overpowering and consuming.

One step more.

That triangle of chocolate, nougat, almonds and honey that I see as a multi-sensory experssion of an Acitivity System may be digested in the stomach, but its ingredients hit you in the head.

It's a brain thing.

Which explains my interest in neuroscience.

It happens. It should be visible. It can be measured.

Just reading this a million Lego Characters are kicking a few more million molecular bricks along a dendrite in part because they must, then again just to see what happens (yes, I have just read 'Neuroscience for Dummies'). So some stick in odd places. Some will hit the mark (whatever that is) while another will remind you of the very moment you first nibbled on Toblerone.

I LOVE the way the brain will throw you a googlie. (as a fraction of the planet know cricket other metaphors are required. I never even played the game as I was deemed rubbish - actually, though no one spotted it in five years of prep school, I needed glasses).

On the one hand, my interest is to take a knife to all of this, chop it off and put it in the compost bin so that I am left with something that is 'tickable', on the other hand I want to indulge the adventure of the composting process.

The EMA is due on Monday.

Instead of writing the penultimate draft from the notes, earlier drafts, diagrams and pics I have assembled I am spinning through people's blogs. On the MAODE modules this served a purpose because there are always a handful of people who get into the blog thing on H800, H808, H807 and H809. However I have only ever come across TWO people doing any MBA module here and never anyone who is doing or has done B822 'Creativity, Innovation & Change'. All I need, or benefit from is the knowledge that I am in the same place they are or were ... or are reaching, to help clear the fog so that I can give the thing some certain shape. One trick, I've done this, is to write my TMA into this blog space ... never publish, but somehow I feel, momentarily, I have grabbed my space on the Church Hall platform and I have no choice but to talk through what I've got.

What have I got?

• Five parts with a very clear sense of how many words per part are permitted and will work for what I think I know.
• A couple of drafts which very unusually for me gives a total some 1000 words under rather than 10000 words over the required total.
• A neat collection of course work references, quotes and diagrams.
• Evidence in the form of photos, more diagrams, and comments on the topic from discussions that I seeded 'businessy' groups in Linkedin.
• This stuff printed out and in digital form.
• Two hours before I need to get off to the swimming club where I swim an early morning Masters session then teach for a few hours.

SO

• Focus on pulling stuff together for two hours.
• Do the swim.
• Then look at it afresh this afternoon.
• This is a REPORT, so keep each part objective, and contained by the word count.
• Stop fretting! A pass will do, but if I submit nothing a fail is inevitable
• It MUST go on Sunday as I'm in London all day Monday.

(P.S. At some stage I'll be wandering around the Hockney at the RA if anyone wants to meet up)

Never one in the last two years to get behind I am now playing 36 hour catch-up.

I got through six hours of reading overnight, there's a tutorial tomorrow that must count for something, then another 6 on Sunday. Maybe a few hours on the train on Monday and perhaps another 6 on Tuesday, even Wednesday.

Next weekend I'm coaching Saturday then in London for a day of Gamesmaker Training ahead of the Olympics.

Can an EMA be written in transit?

You'd think I'd know this as I submit my first Tutor Marked Assignment of my fourth module towards a Masters in Open and Distance Education (MAODE), but when you think you have finished you haven't.

I would give NINE hours to the following:

a) Edit (to the parameters of the word count)

b) Referencing (everything)

c) Narrative flow, which can muck up (a) and (b)

Actually, my first edit had me bin the thing and start again, I'd written it like a letter to a Great Aunt, more of a blog post than the required report.

It has taken 12 or so of these, including EMAs, to feel comfortable with leaving things out, not simply writing succinctly, but dropping ideas that are weak or appear to be repetitive. My inclination is to leave nothing out.

An interesting exercise which will segue into the next two assignment and an exam in April. I feel I have a 'road map'.

Yes, a Christmas Break, but I'll use it first to catch up (I'm a week behind), then to get ahead.

On point c) it helps enormously to reference notes as you go along. Repeatedly I found I could search a quote or author in my own blog, which I use as an e-portfolio, and the correct reference was ready to be cut and pasted into the assignment.

On point a) I have been known to read the assignment out, record it, then listen to the play back. This can be painful as you find there are entire chunks of stuff in the wrong place, or an exercise you'd love to include is redundant. This pain slowly recedes as you feel convinced you have done the right thing by the assignment.

Mark prediction? New tutor, new topic? I never know, but somewhere between low 60s and high 70s.

On verra

Meanwhile, I've got bags to pack, a car to have a new battery fitted, then to load, then off.

This 6,000 word assignment is in its final draft.

My current estimation is that it will take another 16 hours to complete; it is due 12 noon on Monday.

Why so long?

The content and narrative is in place, and running at 8,000 words it should be just a case of judicious editing and referencing. The challenge is how to create the required, or my desired, weave of references, quotations and illustrations while not 'losing the plot' or making something straight-forward confusing.

Whilst two years to get to publication for an academic seems extreme, I do nontheless now appreciate how and why these things can take so long. However, I question why the marking system and the objective appears to be to turn us students into the writers of academic papers, when for most of us the desire, certainly in the Masters in Open and Distance Education is far more practical, indeed the Sussex University e-learning diploma is assessed through the completion of a series of workable e-learning modules or activities that can lead to students applying this content directly in their workplace or joining any of the many e-learning and web business along the Sussex Coast.