Category Archives: Digital creation innovation & scholarship

Thing 19: Writing a reflective blog using ePortfolio

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‘It is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost. It is from the feelings and thoughts emerging from this reflection that generalisations or concepts can be generated. And it is generalisations that allow new situations to be tackled effectively.’ (Gibbs, 1988)

ePortfolio is a tool that can be used to encourage and improve your reflective practice. The ownership of the blog is with you. You decide what posts to share, and with whom to share them. This can help encourage deep reflection including writing about mistakes you have made, your fears, and hopes, confident that only you can see the post unless you choose to share it.

To write a blog post, follow these instructions:

Blog entries can be made from several areas of ePortfolio. You will see the adding blog entry graphic on the frontpage, the blog page, communities, and the skills section.Capture

  • Title – This is the title of your blog post.
  • Blog Text – This is where you should type the main content of your blog post.
  • Everyone in the University – tick this box to make the blog post public.
  • Tags – this is where you would enter keywords to describe your blog posts. Use accurate keywords as this will enable more effective indexing and searching.
  • Communities – Communities are online collaborative spaces, where ePortfolio users can share blogs and comment on other members’ blogs. If the blog post is to be shared with any of the communities, use this area to select which communities can see the post. You will only see Communities that you are a member of.
  • Skills – you can align a blog post with a skill from a skill set, or competency framework. All undergraduate students will be subscribed to the Graduate Skills Framework
  • Shared group – if you wish to share this post with any of your share groups, ensure that group is ticked. If you do not see this option, you are not a member of any share/supervision groups.
  • Upload a file – You can add a file to go along with your post. Your file will be shared with any of the groups you are sharing the blog post with.

Note: If you save a partially completed blog post and have some sharing options enabled (either share group, supervision group, or community), the partially saved blog post would be seen by those you are sharing with. They will see a live link to your post, so if you edit it later, they will see the updated version.

If you are looking to further explore the reflective process I would recommend reading some articles from Jenny Moon, Graeme Gibbs, and Donald Schon.

Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Further Education Unit.

Why is this useful to me?

The ePortfolio system is automatically available to anyone in the University to use. You already have an account there. There are already easy ways to tag your posts with skills relating to the UK Professional Standards Framework if you are working towards HEA Fellowship, or with categories relating to Staff Skills including Success Factors. Both os which you might find useful in logging things you have done as you go along, so that when you come to prep for your PDR, or to write your fellowship application, you have material ready and available to draw upon.

Neat eh?

Thing 12: Using styles and templates in Word, an introduction

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Consistency in document presentation is something that has come up several times recently, alongside using document templates.

One way of ensuring that documents we produce have the same consistent approach is to use styled templates in Word.

What are the advantages of using styles?

By agreeing to use styled templates we can ensure that we are consistent in presentation. When styled documents are converted into PDFs, the software uses the styles as a way to generate indexes, bookmarks etc that have a cascading hierarchy. This makes navigating longer documents easier for the reader, and for screenreaders.

  • You can auto-generate a table of contents.
  • You can move pages and numbered paragraphs around within a document and the page and paragraph numbers change automagically saving you time and frustration.
  • You can move well formatted text easily between Word, PowerPoint, Excel and even websites.
  • If you receive a styled document and want to take content from it into another document, using the paste and match styles function in word makes it match the rest of your document beautifully.

Mastering styles is worth doing as it will save you a lot of time in future.

Your task

There is a good online tutorial from FMS on using styles effectively in Word.

Work through it, and then think about whether or not a styled set of LTDS templates would be useful or not, and why or why not.  Add a comment to this post with your thoughts, and as Mrs Merton might say “Let’s have a heated debate…”

Thing 11: Writing for the web, the LTDS website and blog

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With the migration to a revamped website, and the relatively recent advent of the learning and teaching blog with its related host of social media accounts, it’s probably about the right sort of time to have a little reminder of good practice in how to alter your writing style for presenting information on the website, or for putting together a blog post for the learning and teaching blog.

Whilst Katie C and Claire are our blog and social media leads in the team, there is nothing to stop anyone in the team putting up something on the blog, and most of us probably have some area of responsibility on the website. So getting into practice with writing for the web and blogs is something we should all be doing.

This thing is not a technical how to. It’s more about when you know you have something to add to the website or blog, how you identify what goes where, and a reminder of the guidance which has already been put together, which you might like to bookmark for future reference. Go to /TeamSecure/Website/Website_content_update September_2015 – this folder contains a great deal of useful information about the website including guidance on writing for the internet and a writing a blog post.

Website, blog or email?

  • As a general rule of thumb, if what you want to tell people about is fairly time specific, its probably best on the blog.
  • If your content is fairly ‘newsy’ its definitely the blog.
  • If there is some long standing or non time specific content its probably best on the website. But you might want to tell people about it, which might warrant an explanatory blog post pointing to the website.
  • Consider if your message/content relates to a very specific audience. If it might be relevant to more that one group of people, a blog post might be better than writing an email, and then composing a short email pointing to the blog post.
  • Writing blog posts rather than sending out emails endorses our values of transparency too – content is public rather than ring fenced to certain groups.
  • Are you sending out a set of slides from something? Put them in a blog post, and you can point more people to them.

I’ve got nothing interesting to say

All of us have interesting things to say about what we do. Our job is about communicating. And the more we tell people about what we do and how we can work together, the better our colleagues will understand what the service does, and what its value is to the organisation.

Communicating what we do isn’t down to one person who has that word in their job title. It’s down to every single one of us.

Have a go

Think about what you are doing in your job currently. Is there an aspect of it that people should know about? Using the blog you set up on day one of 23 Things and have a go at using the guidance to help you to write an update on one thing you are currently working on.

If you would like some feedback on it, you can talk to Katie, Claire, Graeme, Nuala or Suzanne.

If you hear someone else talking about their work and you think its interesting, you might like to suggest a blog post to them.

Thinking about putting stuff on the blog is a mindset. And it takes a little while to get into thinking about blogs as a primary mode of communication. But don’t be put off – posts can be really short.

Here’s a good example from one of our colleagues in Computing Science who has written briefly about developing the Cyber Security free online course.

There are loads of good examples from this blog, so scroll through and see what kinds of content is being added.

I need more help

Talk to Katie, Claire, Graeme, Nuala or Suzanne.