Reference no: EM132660245 , Length: word count:2200

Blogs are a useful tool for yourself to keep track of activities you have carried out, to keep a record of your learning, and to nurture your writing and reflection skills. When published, blogs can also become powerful communication tools that enable you to share your experiences and learning with your stakeholders and the wider community. This assessment enables you to practice your practical blogging skills.

For this assessment, you are required to regularly record your weekly activities in the form of a blog. Blog entries need to be time stamped and demonstrate regular engagement with blogging tool THROUGHOUT the term. Students who do not engage with the regular blogging activity and attempt to retrospectively write up their thoughts in one go at the end of term will lose out on important marks. Blog entries MUST NOT BE EDITED - if you wish to add or change something you wrote earlier, please write another entry instead of editing and outline what you would change.

You should make sure your blog entries are reflective in nature, rather than merely describing the activities you have carried out - a template will be provided in Moodie to help you with this and students will be encouraged to use some of the timetabled workshop time to record their reflections. The fact that you are recording your activities and learning on a weekly basis helps you develop your group presentation (assessment 2), as well as your individual reflective report (assessment 3). You are strongly encouraged to add photographs, images, videos, reading material, or other supporting material that may help you reflect. There is no prescribed maximum of entries or words per entry as experience showed that many students find this a useful learning exercise that they want to utilise to its full potential. However, the absolute minimum is 8 time-stamped entries spread across the term. It is best to write at least one entry per week and each entry should be no shorter than 150 words. The blog component of assessment 3 is part of the assessment requirements and markers will check it for completeness, suitability as a communication tool, and reference material for your reflective report.

Reflective report:

While the blog is built throughout the term, the reflective report is to be developed towards the end of the term, as it requires you to present a critical self-analysis and reflection of your learning as a result of experiencing Design Thinking activity within this unit - the report is NOT a weekly repetition or summary of the blogs. Instead, it is an overall self-analysis and reflection of your own strengths and weaknesses in terms of: (1) your knowledge of Design Thinking and related topics; (2) your Design Thinking skills; and (3) your Design Thinking mind-set. It is recommended you seek to reflect on these elements during your weekly blogs to facilitate development of the report.

As a conclusion, you are to develop an action plan of specific key events and activities that you can undertake over the next 6 months to acquire any knowledge, skills and mind-set changes that your report identified as being weak. The reflective report should be submitted as a Word document with a length of 2,500 words (+/- 10%), excluding preliminaries, tables, figures and references. Your reflective report must make reference to appropriate academic literature and theory in a critical way. Moreover, the report MUST explicitly reference appropriate evidence in your blog using a clear cross-reference system. The reflective report must make use of at least 10 high-quality academic references (APA style).

Assessment (SPA);
You are required to fill in an online questionnaire, evaluating yourself and the peers you worked with for assessment 2 according to various team working criteria. This SPA questionnaire will be open for two weeks at the end of term and you will receive email communication about it. You are required to provide candid and fair evaluations of yourself and your group mates and - in controversial cases - you may be required to provide additional evidence to back up your evaluations. Please note that there is NO extension to the cut-off point for this SPA questionnaire and late completion is NOT possible - students who fail to fill in the SPA by the given deadline will receive a mark of 0 (zero) for this component of assessment 3.