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Anna Greathead

Taking Shape - TMA01, H818

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This TMA is the foundational document for our conference presentation and subsequent EMA. Which means that getting it right will be very beneficial and getting it wrong will create lots of additional work!

I have decided on a few things:

  1. I am doing the blog project. I will investigate the OU blog tool for who uses it, for what and why. I will conduct some primary research for this - both in the form of surveys, questionnaires and interviews and also by analysing a sample of the public OU blog posts which are handily displayed in reverse chronological order on the website!
  2. I will be looking at this through the overall theme of implementation. I am going to assume that blogs are useful both for student reflection and student collaboration (this is not a wild assumption - there is a lot of data) and consider why they aren't used as often or as much as they could be. Where and what are the barriers? How can the barriers be addressed?
  3. My project will be essentially a research project which will be presented as a paper. I hope to create an interesting and attractive poster in TMA02 and an engaging presentation for the conference but the project does not lend itself to the other two formats as naturally
So my hurdle of the week is TMA01. I a writing about implementation - most of the literature I have found seems to concentrate on why institutions and educators might resist pedagogical change or the introduction of technological tools for teaching and learning but I am equally interested in why students may not rush to engage with new methods and new technologies as well.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I feel confident I am on the right track but it's feeling a lot more coherent in my head! (Not always a reliable benchmark if truth be told!).
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