Questions
I am struggling to get into academia again. Self-analysis of my writing:
- I don’t think I am structuring my writing well enough; it is all rather a stream of consciousness.
- Examples I use are anecdotal – does that matter? Am I using enough concrete examples?
- The model of a blog – having never written a blog before, nor paid much attention to blogs (life as a mother and full time Deputy Head was all-consuming), so I really don’t know the style expected.
- If I were able to talk face to face with you, I would be asking for your opinions. I also recognise that I am making assumptions and expecting you ‘to read my mind’. It is difficult to be concise whilst avoiding assumptions.
- My writing about social scientific concepts is naïve – does that matter?
Are these the sorts of questions I can ask you, or would rather be my Personal Tutor? Should I just be engaging in academic debate with you?
I didn’t like my stream of consciousness attempt to talk about the Hamilton & Friesen paper, so I am going to try again.
Thanks for the questions and in response:
1. No, I think the structuring is OK but I will be a bit more specific for future posts. The IDEL blogs sit in a funny position of not being academic papers but demanding some sense of academic discourse and not being a personal blog but demanding some personal reflections and an individual ‘voice’. Getting comfortable with this can take a while. I would say that the post on Hamilton a Freisen does tail off in to note form but that is OK especially if such notes are then further developed in a later post.
2. Yes, your personal reflections work well. The trick with these is to tie them back to the readings or course activities in an explicit manner. But you do seem to be doing that.
3. Model of a blog – see my response above. Its also worth remembering that we are expecting your blog ‘voice’/ style to emerge as the course progresses.
4. The conciseness of the posts (500 words or so) can be a challenge. You can assume I’ve read the material but do remember that one of the assessment criteria is demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the ideas introduced. One way of addressing this is to think of a post as making a single point you want to make about a reading (or comparing/ sythesising a couple of readings). We can’t & don’t expect you to address all aspects of a theory or article but rather to focus on a particular aspect – imagine starting the posts with “One aspect of XXXX’s paper I note is that ….”
5. These are tricky social science concepts so again, take time to embed in to your thinking and reflections (particularly posthumanism and STS based perspectives). It is fairly common for students to struggle with these in the first half (or more) of the course but to really demonstrate their growing understanding over the duration of the course through the blog.
I hope that helps. In terms of the assessment criteria, you are writing regularly and making connections between your practice and the theories under discussion, you’re demonstrating sustained reading and are in the process of developing your understanding (it is early days after all) and have an emerging blogging voice including mulimodality.
Do please keep raising questions as we progress. There will be a slightly more formal blog feedback at weeks 5-6 as well.
Thanks
Pete