Reflection on tma

The T171 course consists of four Tutor Marked Assignments (TMA's). After the TMA has been marked, you can read the tutor's comments. This is a very effective process to help you to reflect, where you are going wrong and to learn by your own mistakes. The feedback that you receive from your tutor can be applied to future assignments. I have chosen my second TMA here to provide as an example of the sort of mistakes that I made.

TMA02 was in two parts:

Part 1- Creating an individual page for a group web channel

This assignment was marked as an individual piece of work, but was linked to the work that I did in a group in the Tutor Group Activity, (Creating a web channel). I produced a web page covering Global Warming with a set of links to five web sites relevant to my subject. For each link, I wrote a paragraph or two reviewing the site. I also created the group channel. In this first part I did reasonably well, and the only part that my tutor pointed out was that my reviews were not detailed enough.

Part 2 - Reflecting on Module 1

In part 2 of this assignment my task was to produce a word processor document in which I had to reflect on what I had learned about: Computing with confidence and the group work involved in creating the web channel. I made quite a few mistakes here and did not use enough detail again in my answers. Below are some examples from my TMA:

Describe the way your group worked in producing a web channel

I believe that for those of us who contributed to the magenta group that overall we worked quite well together. However, it did take some effort to get things going at the start. Nevertheless, once we started communicating we were able to help each other, and make good use of what experience the group had to produce our web-channel.

Tutor comments:

Was netiquette used or not?

In my opinion, I would say that some of the netiquette principles that we learnt were not used in the first group I was in. For example, I had arranged a meeting and no one turned up and no one even sent me an e-mail saying that they would not be there. However, in the magenta group I believe many principles were used to good affect throughout the group.

Tutor comments:

Ok, but what did you do about this did you remind them that it would have been better to at least let you know? Which principles were used to good effect?

After receiving the feedback from my tutor I realized, where I was going wrong and I made sure that my next TMA's would be descriptive enough.

Tutor Comments:

Liked the overall group channel (for which there were no marks here, but was an important part of the group work, and should give you some info. for later work (ECA). Have all the group members thanked you for doing it? Its obvious that some didn't even bother to send the most basic details to you.

Your own global warming- graphics start the page nicely, not OTT, just relevant to get the reader in the mood. Simple explanatory graphics presented, so the reader could get some idea before going to one of the links- a good idea. Links all ok apart from the skeptics site, which I couldn't get into. But that's probably because they are skeptics! Good variety of sites, but there are specific sites where global warming is shown 'to be a fallacy'- not just the skeptics.

Commentaries about the linked sites could have been more detailed- though the basics are there. A bit more on their structure, whether they a very graphics intensive and downloading times.

Qu. 2 comments in the text. Not enough detail. I will try and put some general info about this in the conf. over the weekend.