Coping... but only just

For various reasons, I wasn't able to do much study in the early part of the week.  So I spent the best of part of the last two days writing up my essays.  I finished work late on Thursday evening, spent some time playing with my kids until they went to bed at around 8pm and then got down to work.  I kept writing till well past 1am before falling asleep of exhaustion.  I then got up at 7am to get ready for work!

I found it hard doing my essay on Tools for Online Learning.  I have used quite a range of tools over the years including Facebook, Twitter, Discussion boards etc.  Since starting my course, I have tried new tools such as Posterous, Google +, and Blogger.

I read the relevant material and considered what tools I wanted to write about.  I had always intended to use Facebook and Google+ in my essay but was a bit put off by the fact that many other students had already used them in their work.  After much deliberation, I decided that I would go ahead anyway.  So what if others have beaten me to it, I will be writing my own thoughts and doing work that is my own so it shouldn't be an issue.

I started by planning what I wanted to write.  I decided to structure the essay so that it sort of tells an evolutionary story of social network sites and my experience of using them.  I planned to include an introduction to give context, then look at individual sites (Myspace as well as FB and G+) and end with conclusion and references.  It was a hard slog but I finally finished and posted it in the VLE.  I have done it but not sure if it's any good!  Mainly due to time constraints I only used plain text whilst other students used images and charts in their work.  I wonder if this count against me...

With the ICOT task out of the way, I needed to urgently finish my Working Life essay.  In my previous post, I spoke of getting the photos done but never got round to finishing my essay.  But I got my head down and got this done as soon as I could and uploaded to Shared Document area in IWS section.  My essay had not been completed when the tutor looked at the work of other students.  But I am hoping that she will maybe still take a quick look :)

I had originally planned to make a video for my Working Life task, something along the lines of Collecting Stories by Jonathan Harris.  I've not made a video before and so needed some time to look into this.  Hopefully this is something I will do for a future piece of work..

I had spent time today catching up post on Posterous and discussion threads in VLE.  I have also done a peer review for a fellow students essay on Work Relationships.  I now need to start thinking about my essay on this and how online communities can support learning.