So, over the summer, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I pulled myself together and completed my next assignment for my Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice. This had to be a research project. A key issue I was interested in, and is of interest to many academics in the UK, is the increasingly diverse student cohort, especially international sojourning students at postgraduate level. The appalling experience of students at London Metropolitan University at the start of this academic year shows what a political hot potato this is. It cannot be ignored that by mecause these students pay the full fee for their course we do need to attract more overseas students to balance the books. And this puts pressure on staff. Occassionaly the response to this is almost racist. So, these were the sort of issues I thought I'd deal with in my assignment.
So you can read the marker's comments I've converted it into a PDF you can download from my Google Drive here. The other part of the assignment I had to do was an annotated bibliography. I'd never done one before and actually found it really useful. I'm now recommending my dissertation students do it as a step on the way to having a literature review. In the spirit of sharing, you can all have a look at this as well, here.
A project I worked on did something very similar to an annotated literature review using WordPress (blogspot would do just as well). For each paper we created a blog post, with title, citation and summary. The useful bit was being able to tag/classify by theme or issues addressed in the paper, so that it was easy to pull out all the papers on some topic. Also, of course, there were advantages of putting our work on public view, the way you do here. Disadvantage is lack of integration with tools like endnote. Always thought it might be an interesting thing for students to try.
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