**spoilers alert** – it may be best to read this after checking my assignment!

After a blogging hiatus of two weeks I’ve decided to make my comeback with a post about the whole experience around the assignment. I thought it would be useful to do a kind of informal SWOT analysis as a way of acknowledging aspects of the task which I feel went well alongside parts I struggled with or feel less satisfied with. Based on these I’ll aim to identify a few important considerations for future assessment tasks.

Strengths

Reflecting on the whole process of researching and producing the assignment, one of the things I feel most pleased about is that I managed to do everything digitally without needing so much as a single sheet of paper. This heavily relied on a bookmarking programme called Diigo which I’ve come to swear by, which allowed me to save all my sources in one place, tag them to make them easily searchable and retrievable, and annotate them with highlights and notes. I was also happy with my approach to locating and selecting sources, using a combination of the course readings, references found in the course readings, Google Scholar, and keyword searches on MyEd by title or author. Skimming the abstract and, where necessary, the conclusion of an article was sufficient to help me decide which ones to read in depth, so little time was wasted on irrelevant reading. Thanks to all of the above, in the the final assignment I referred to a wide range of sources and I think these are generally well incorporated into the essay and argument.

Other aspects of the essay which I think turned out well are the writing style and structure. I noticed myself able to use a wider range of vocabulary than previously, assumedly as a result of all the reading I’ve been doing during the course and paying specific attention to the way language is used by proficient academic writers. In terms of the structure, I felt that I tackled the essay with a confident awareness of essay writing conventions and argument structure from my work as an academic skills tutor, which helped me considerably with the organisation. I’m hoping that the loose argument counter-argument structure, in which I present several claims about the benefits of digital education and then challenge them, achieves logical flow and conveys my stance effectively.

Struggles (purposefully sidestepping any reference to ‘weaknesses’!)

Unfortunately the writing process seemed far less efficient than the reading stage. On reflection I think most of my problems stemmed from a lack of clarity regarding my focus which resulted in me making considerable changes to the essay outline and content. It seemed that for everything I decided to omit, I came across something new to include and this back-and-forth process reached a point where it seemed endless and began to test my sanity! Perhaps the biggest challenge of all was identifying a tight focus when presented with such a broad assignment title and having to tackle a subject area which I wasn’t greatly familiar with. It was only after doing quite a lot of research that I began to appreciate the range of possible directions I could take and faced with all these potentially interesting possibilities I found it difficult to choose just one. And for that I suffered.

Another area I feel unconfident about is using my own critical faculties to evaluate the arguments and ideas that I read. As I was reading for this assignment, I only seemed to be capable of comfortably critiquing one or two articles and only after a significant amount of reading and drawing on the critical perspective of others. At certain points I felt like I might be falling into the trap of critiquing things simply under the burden of expectation without any genuine courage of conviction. Overall I finished the assignment with a slightly insecure sensation that rather than formulating my own argument, I had simply pieced together and pitted against one another the arguments of others. An additional and related source of insecurity concerned my use of particular terminology, such as ‘digital technologies’, ‘Web 2.0’, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ education. While I was aware of the need to approach such terms critically and with caution, and mindful of the risk of landing myself in a terminological minefield, I’m not sure whether in the end I adequately clarified my understanding and application of these terms.

Opportunities

Looking ahead to future research tasks and written assignments, on the one hand I feel optimistic on the basis of what seemed to work well with this assignment, especially the research/reading phase. I’ve demonstrated to myself that I have the necessary skills to carry out effective online research and manage sources in digital format, which should stand me in good stead for future digital education research. I’m also in the process of honing my academic writing style and broadening my academic vocabulary, which is a project I would anticipate to be ongoing and long-running but very worthwhile. When it comes to managing a more-extended assignment, most importantly the dissertation, I’m hoping that all that I’ve learnt about organising academic essays and structuring arguments in my work and consolidated in this assignment will be of huge assistance. One appealing opportunity the MScDE offers that I want to exploit in future modules is the less ‘conventional’ and potentially more creative assessment option; for example, involving the creation of a digital artefact of some kind. Although I’ve opted to remain in my comfort zone for the IDEL assignment, I can’t envisage graduating in Digital Education on the strength of a string of essays alone!

Threats

However, in order not to jeopardise these opportunities, it is important for me to be mindful of some threats that exist at this stage. The first is related to time. I’ve mentioned that I found my progress with writing this assignment frustratingly inefficient and I could extend this claim to my overall approach to the course so far. In the knowledge that I have an abundance of available time, I’ve rarely felt under any pressure to get things done and have had trouble staying focused. Granted I’ve also had a turbulent few months in my personal life which hasn’t helped. As a result I’ve fallen behind schedule at points and in hindsight I probably should have made an earlier start on the assignment. That would have allowed me to read more widely and reflect on the subject matter more carefully before attempting to pin down a focus and put together an outline. The second threat is related to confidence. I acknowledge that I’m uncomfortable with the idea of claiming that I am right and somebody else is wrong. The fact that I so often doubt my own opinion and find it much easier and safer to comment on the views of others makes me reluctant to go out on a limb when trying to build an argument. My voice can then be drowned out by the competing chatter of others and my argument can become subservient to my sources.

Hopefully the time issue will resolve itself when I start working alongside doing the course and the time available for studying becomes more restricted and contained. The confidence issue, on the other hand, is a trickier one to tackle, because I think it may be quite deeply rooted in parental influence and/or my personality. Perhaps one interesting experiment could be to try expressing my opinion in different forms using different media apart from text (starting with my blog entries) and then reflect on whether the form has any effect on my level of confidence in terms of self-expression. Depending on the results, this could potentially then feed into the creation of a digital artefact as an alternative form of assessment that I mentioned earlier.

My first Master’s assignment…phew! / Jemima Collins/An introduction to digital environments for learning (2018/2019)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0