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Owen Barritt

Week 8

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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.
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