General feedback on topic 5

For topic 5 we challenged you to push yourselves a little harder and try something different – it was good to see a number of you responded to this with Piktocharts, Prezis and Powtoons! In your final assessed posts (due 10th January) you might like to reflect upon any specific value you obtained from these tools that you will take forward to future modules, or to the building of your own professional online profiles.

Open access is a challenging subject once you dig beneath the initial knee jerk reaction of “of course everything should be free”. The best posts took the opportunity to showcase critical writing skills by examining the issues from the perspective of all parties involved, not just the end users of content. If your marks for this topic were lower than you were expecting, please check out this post on critical writing because some of you were too quick to jump into rather simplistic solutions given the economics involved. We did discuss this in some detail in relation to topic 4, and those of you who clearly put the effort into the initial reading have seen the benefits in terms of increased marks.

We provide prompt feedback so that it can be incorporated into future work. In some cases it seems it’s not being read and acted upon, despite being an obvious route to improving marks….

Don’t forget to keep working on your own professional profiles with a view to the final assessed task for this module – there are still a few twitter “eggs” and blogs with a complex theme that is hard to navigate. You are asked to reflect on how your own digital profile has developed over the course of the module. To do this effectively, you will need to refer back to your original Self Test, AND gather specific evidence to support your discussion of the ways in which your activities/behaviour have changed, AND what you plan to focus on in terms of your learning and/or career development going forwards. Please check the detailed instructions in the Study Guide and ask if you still have questions.