Reading Task 09: Peer reviews

 

Image by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash.com

This week's tasks involved creating and receiving peer feedback on our writing pieces. This week's task differed from the previous task as we have completed our introductions and conclusions and thus these reviews encompassed our almost completed products. I find this task very difficult as I feel that it is most helpful for my peers to receive in depth feedback on their work and thus I try to be as in depth with my comments through the entirety of their work. I may be doing a lot more work than is necessary but I do so in hopes that I can help them both personally and help the book as a whole. I also received feedback from my peers and lecturer and have taken it into account and reviewed my own work. I have adjusted my work slightly as a result of the reviews but have also used my own discretion on how I apply the feedback. I also that saw there was general feedback from the lecturer and reviewed my own work to check if I also needed to take it into account. I have found this overall project quite enjoyable/fulfilling actually despite how difficult it has been at times.

Tech Task: Quote Maker

 

I took on this task because I've recently been watching a lot of different shows and comedians, and just a lot of varied media in general recently and I've come across a lot of quotes and sayings that I liked a lot and wanted to visualise one, both for myself and others while experimenting with the new sites. After messing around with a bunch of the different site I ended up using the one from Quozio.com.

Reading 08: Intro, Conclusion and questions

Image by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash.com

For this week's reading task we were tasked with writing the introduction and conclusion paragraphs for our sections in the book. I went into this week's task expecting it to not be as difficult as the previous writing we have done because it would feel more routine but once I started trying to create the introduction alone, I started to see how difficult this week's task was actually going to be. Unlike the introductions for each the content paragraphs, this introduction served to introduce all five of the previous paragraphs and the overall idea of my section. I found it really difficult to find suitable phrases that were applicable to everything I had already written without directly referencing it, in other words, it was really weird writing a conclusion after I had already written my body content, it was a very unfamiliar process. The same went for the conclusion, as it had already been quite some time since I had read my body paragraphs and was a little hazy on the details. It was also really difficult to succinctly conclude such complex paragraphs in a cohesive and satisfying way. I had to turn to the recommended video on the website for help and it served as a pretty good refresher of what a conclusion paragraph should be. The questions were by far the easiest part of this week's task but they were still quite difficult in their own right. Formulating questions that weren't too easy or hard but still tested a good amount of knowledge from each paragraph was hard and required me to get a full understanding of my paragraphs again that I could then break down to a single, or two, question. I have drafted them out for now and plan to make them interactive for next week's task, hopefully I'll get some inspiration from everyone else.

Reading 07: Peer feedback

 

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This week's reading task involved us critically reading two of our peers' work and providing constructive feedback for improvement. It was also an exercise of reflecting on our own work as we would receive feedback back from our peers too. I was lucky enough to have my document labelled as exemplary for the last assignment and thus felt that I would be able to provide helpful feedback to my peers, or at least that was my hope. I began the task by reading through both documents and noting any major critiques that jumped out initially, then I used them as comparison pieces to see if there were any similarities or different critiques I could spot. I noted all of this down as quick notes and then left it for a day. I then came back to the documents to see if there was anything I may have missed in the first read through. I then began to structure my feedback in a more digestible way as I felt that my notes were not clear enough. In the lecture we were advised to be clearer and more exact with feedback for it to be more helpful so I created copies of the documents so that I could highlight the feedback that I was given to be more precise. I then sent them off and waited for my feedback back. Luckily enough the feedback I received wasn't too major and I was able to incorporate it well into my writing.

Reading 06: Paragraph Framework

 

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This week's task had us writing the paragraph's for the five codified themes that we selected last week. This week's reading tasks proved to be slightly more challenging than I had initially expected but not nearly as difficult as I had found the previous tasks. This week's task was our first 'actual' academic writing task, it that, we actually began writing content for the final paper as opposed to the prep work that we had been doing over the past few weeks, however, all the work that we had completed up to this point really helped in making this task a lot lighter and streamlined the actual content writing process by not needing to go and look for and read absurdly long sources for each paragraph. It also helped a lot that Shaun provided us with a clear framework structure for the paragraph's that was easy to follow and apply, though I found myself needed to adapt it differently at times. It was satisfying to be able to collate the all the work that I had previously completed into more cohesive paragraphs but I did encounter difficulty when it came to topic overlap. Due to all of my sources being selected for one overall topic, with some even referencing others, I found it difficult to separate some of the content into the specific themes without blatant overlap but I think I got around it alright. Overall I found this week's task find and I'm interested in seeing my peer's work next week.

The working document of my Annotated Bibliographies can be found below

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kIdExr3wTsuJPG7_vqhq16mfJYXuLErrlTTSxPtdLF8/edit?usp=sharing