Hello Everyone –
A warm welcome to the last week of our LRNT 521 course—time flies! Many thanks to all of you for your briefing notes (Assignment 3) that I see starting to appear in the Moodle drop box. I will begin reviewing them this week and will have my thoughts and comments back to you via Moodle over the next several days.
This week Unit 5 Activity 1 invites you to take time to look back at where we have been over these 9 weeks and reflect on our digital identity and presence decisions as they have evolved "in the moment". This is great way to home in on the various decisions you have made and reasons for those decisions which you then can use as you review your Assignment 1 submission to ensure you have included the key decision points there. Don't worry too much about perfecting your audio or video posting - just think through a few of your most important learnings and reflections and then share them in a quick and conversational style.
In addition to Unit 5 Activity 1, you are also working on Assignment 1 – Part 2 due on June 09th. It is a synthesis of all of your good work and thinking over the duration of this course. Taking time to review the Embedded Writing Centre resources in our Moodle companion shell will be so helpful as you write and edit your final assignment – specifically how to write academic paragraphs. And remember, you can cite your earlier blog posts as some of the evidence backing your claims in this assignment as well as the many readings and speaker sessions (remember the Virtual Symposium?!) that we have examined as a part of this course.
In Assignment 1 – Part 2, you are critically reflecting on your digital identity and digital presence plan and what you have conceptualized, created, and begun to cultivate over this course. You are looking back and reflecting on your blog, the various activities you have done as part of the course and how they have influenced your thinking, the digital identity, digital presence plan you created and all of those little decisions you made along the way. For example, have you deviated from your initial plan? Why/why not? Why did you make the choices you made, etc.? The assignment description offers other question prompts for you to consider, and you may also have some of your own. When you are exploring them, you are reading and critically examining your work, so you want to have backing for the points you are making. That may come from some of the articles you have read throughout the course, other articles you have read or your blog posts. There is an expectation that you will have literature to support your key points. And as always, with the end in mind, it is worth taking a look at the assessment rubric as part of one of your edit/revisions cycles to ensure that you are addressing the assignment invitation and meeting the associated outcomes.
Another thing to consider is to really pay attention to the transitions in your writing (see the quoting and paraphrasing library guide). Often when we start writing, we know what we want to say but may not have written it from the standpoint of someone who is new to the ideas or to the connections we are making between ideas. In your work you will be making lots of good connections between what you have read, your reflections, and your experience. What you want to ensure in your writing is that you are unpacking all of these for the reader so they can see and follow the logic in your thinking, they can understand how you got to your main points, and they can see the evidence you are drawing upon to back up the claims you are making.
Very best wishes for a productive final week. Please reach out with any questions.
Russ