Twitter

In January I am going to try to tweet more often. I was thinking of sending useful ideas (!) and reflections. If you want to follow I am  adesolaa

Presentation of your work

Presentation of your work, (is often) presentation of you: I wrote in blog some time ago about sending your CV to people. If you are sending information to someone for an audition for instance, do not send a document call ‘CV.doc’ or ‘Swanlakeaudition.doc’ The person receiving it is getting hundreds of CVs and if they are call ‘CV.doc’ it is really annoying because if they need to check something or contact you or something they have to open  each one them to find one they want at best, and at worst one  ‘cv.doc’ replaces another ‘cv.doc’  because it is the same the name and then your CV maybe lost altogether. Call it “yournameCV.doc” then it is easy to find for the person receiving it.

Likewise when sending in your work, maybe as a draft for feedback, call it “yournamexxxxx.doc” Otherwise if it gets separated from the email you sent it in it is really hard to find who wrote it.

Also ALWAYS page number everything – I like to use 1 of 6, 2 of 6 option because then if it printed and a page is missing the person reading it can see they have mislaid a page. Put the page number in the footer along with YOUR NAME, ID NUMBER (IN THIS CASE YOU STUDENT NUMBER), and the date.

This is about thinking about the person receiving what you sent and acknowledging you are not the only person in the world in contact with them. This is a professional way to behave I think.

Another tip is: if you are sending something to someone right at a deadline or after the deadline do not asked for feedback “as soon as possible” because you were so late sending it in! For instance some grant applications allow you to send in a draft to receive feedback before you send in the application. This is always a good idea for one thing you get to see what angle they are looking for from the feedback they give and it also means your idea maybe to talked about so people are already thinking about it. But if you, then, give the person ‘helping you’ an instruction Like “please get back to me as soon as possible so I can work on this”, it feels as if you are giving them another job to do. It can mean that the person feels they are being taken advantage of rather than extending a helping hand to you. The deadline was probably in place for THEM, so that they could mange the work NOT as a deadline for YOU.

Hope this helps!!

Portfolio and tasks

Hi, just a thought about the Portfolio (and the tasks). Please remember it is the Portfolio that is being assessed NOT the tasks. A word about guilt: some people feel they did not do the tasks completely. There is no point trying to back-fill the tasks before you start the portfolio. That is your guilt trip only. The assessed work is about you summarising your learning this module. Whatever happen is learning. What you do with the experience shows what you have learnt. If your experience was finding it hard to get started, or not wanting to blog that is your learning journey. NOW what does that mean, why did that happen? Use the module to explain this.

So it’s like a dance performance. You are being assessed on the portfolio you submit that is like the dance performance. To help you to do the performance has been like doing the tasks. The tasks are like ballet classes. You could have done a ballet class each day in order to prepare for the performance. (Done the tasks which would have guided you through a learning experience) BUT if you missed some of the ballet classes, there is no point coming on the stage and doing the 52 plies you missed over the term!!! Its time for the performance… What have you learnt?

This is also a nod to the professional arena we are not here to tell you what boxes to tick in order to pass. We want to empower you, you tell us what you have learnt and use the language and ideas in the module to explain to us.  It is not a case of us knowing and you having to find out. We really do not know what you have learnt because we are not you! What you put in is what you will get out. So let go of thinking you have ‘not done enough’ and ‘do now’, get drafts done, get feedback. (Then if you are feeling you did not get ‘your blog on’, blog about it too.

What do you think?

Rhizome

Hi
I don't want to confuse things but I read about a really interesting idea this week. It is in a book about Deleuze & Guattari (Post-modern): Rhizome structures. That is like grass lots of shoots that are connected running along them as a posed to the tree model where things develop and branch off from one thing. The Rhizome (grass) has an interesting implication on the connectivity we have all talked about. Also makes you think more about all the odds and ends that may be sticking out in your mind as you start to write the assessed work. Things may not connect in a linear straight way. Ideas (blades of grass) from one end of the field may connect to ideas (grass) at the other end but you just need to look carefully at the structure through which you are looking for connections.