The best way to spend summer


What is the best thing you can do in summer?  Most of us would include the beach, camping, swimming, picnics, kayaking, tramping, sunbathing etc. All really great activities which I like to participate in.  However this summer I decided to further my education by completing a compulsory course towards my long unfinished degree in geography.  I was a little unsure about this choice as I am not generally known for my natural talent in communication, however I was hoping it may improve my general writing ability.

Anyway...here we are.  In the last 10 weeks, I and we (my team) have strived to do our very best in this course, with reasonable but not brilliant results. I did enjoy the assessment topics given to us and surprisingly, I really enjoyed writing the blog. Assessment two was the most frustrating part of the course, not because of the team aspect but more that we struggled to understand the ethical focus of the report.  Our queries to our tutor never really clarified this much for us (even though he tried).


The three thing I will remember about this course:

• Easy! The team, the team and the team.

The key things I have learnt about science communication:

• Referencing is very finicky and difficult.
• Think of the audience.
• The Belbin roles were fascinating and I could really see how these worked in a team situation.
• How and why different writing is structured.

What I still need to learn:

• How to edit better.  I am not a completer finisher and usually lose interest by this point. I try to write correctly the first time with a minor edit.
• How to structure a sentence better and more to the point.
• I know there is loads more but I can't think of it.

My recommendations:

• It would be great if there had been a general statement about the marking of the assessments, so that we could ascertain how we had done against others.
• There was a lot of information given that didn't relate to the content of the course, for instance the readings and resources on deep ecology.  I still have no idea why I wasted my time reading these.
• Many of the lesson materials referred to an earlier assessment topic information.  It would of been more useful to be from the current paper.

I am not sure if this was the best way to spend summer but it certainly was a useful way. I am off to the beach until the next semester starts.  Over and out.