Learning & Professional Development

Week Ten

LPD

The end of term is fast approaching which means it will be LPD ACW1 deadline day before I know it! This blog post concludes the blogging task that was item 4 – keeping a record of current progress as part of the coursework portfolio. I won’t lie, it will be a relief and yet a strange thing not blogging next week as I have got quite used to it. I’m not entirely sure how much of what I have written in these ten blog posts will be thoroughly read or analysed but I hope it might bring in some insight to someone as to how exactly I go about my work.

We were reviewing each other’s CVs this week in what felt like another productive seminar session with Alicia. I completed my CV last week and have now written a brief but hopefully effective cover letter to accompany it for a web development job at the company where my father works. I was never sure what to include in cover letters but have now learnt after researching, and being taught, what exactly it involves. I used a paragraph to present myself and explain what job I was applying for, a paragraph to re-iterate my skills listed in my CV and a concluding paragraph thanking the employer for the time they may take to read it and how they can get in touch.

I also realised I was missing a couple of documents for self-assessment one that I had to complete on skills and interests. I completed these quite quickly.

Non LPD

I have another piece of coursework due in the day after LPD, which is Applied Website Design & Management ACW2. The task seems quite simple and could potentially involve a lot less work than ACW1, yet it is worth 25% compared to the previous 15% of the last coursework. As it is worth a quarter of the unit marks and doesn’t seem as much work, I’ll have to be careful to not become too relaxed and not put in as much effort! I found out that I received 81% for ACW1 which I was really happy with, given the time and effort I spent on it. There were few things that I could have done differently to gain any more marks, and Richard had given me comments of “Excellent standard of work” on my feedback sheet which was very pleasing.

Outside of university coursework I have been constantly scouring job websites such as prospects and totaljobs, keeping my eye on any web development or website design jobs that crop up. I have seen quite a few now in recent weeks, the only thing that puts me off is that some don’t have the salary or location of the job listed. It is likely that many don’t post the salary to deter people who will only apply to high salary jobs, as at the end of the day employees want the best pick of the designers out there.

And this is it! Thank you for the time taken to read my blog.

Week Nine

LPD

This week we finally had a proper lesson after weeks of no lessons or a presentation instead. We found out it was because Bob Glass has been ill which is a great shame. Luckily the department have provided a seemingly excellent replacement, Dr Alicia Prowse. We had a small seminar session on Thursday that covered a lot of what we were unsure about regarding the coursework portfolio.

Outside of class I have continued to work on my coursework. I had already written a CV a year ago tailored towards a web development or web design job, but this obviously needed some editing to get it up to date. I was unsure as to how to write a cover letter, so left that until later when I’ll be better prepared to tackle that task. For now I focused on updating my CV and taking in some advice that Alicia gave me on it. It was generally well written, just formatted slightly illogically. The dates of my education were listed on the left, and the details and grades were listed on the right. Alicia advised me to swap these around as English people read from left to right, so they should really be seeing my degree and university before they see the years that I have been studying towards it.

After changing degree route in September I also had to update what course I was on. I took this time to edit my hobbies and interests with some fresh new ones.

Non LPD

This work I continued to work on my Digital Libraries coursework as the deadline was fast approaching. The topic of cloud computing that me and my two other team members are focusing on is a very broad one. We decided to split the presentation down into several sub-topics – definition, introduction, advantages, disadvantages, security and examples. I took on the task of researching the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing. I found it quite interesting which is always good as it allows you to write a lot and not get distracted or demotivated.

Francis Johnson explained to us when we were sat working in the MRL that the individual report that compliments the presentation is a more wordy, expansion of your lecture notes rather than a complete separate report. This seemed a lot less daunting as it allowed me to write plenty about the disadvantages of cloud computing, which is turned out there was a lot of published material on. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough solid references to backup my work, but managed to find some interesting graphs and relevant statistics on a few educational and official websites that I could drop in there.

Aside from Digital Libraries we got our mark back for our Human and Financial Resource Management report back that was ACW1. I got 65% which is a 2:1, and given the effort I put into it I was very pleased with my grade. Another solid coursework exam next term and I could be set to achieve a good grade in this unit.

Week Eight

LPD

This week in LPD we were not in our usual seminar sessions spread out throughout the week as we had a guest lecturer. The guest was called Dominica I think, she was from AXA Insurance as a graduate trainee. She was giving us very useful advice on how to apply for similar graduate schemes, her experience applying and being one and how it can benefit us over jumping straight into a job.

Outside of class I have been continuing to update my blog although ran into a few technical problems. As I was hosting the blog on my own website, using WordPress, I had a problem after I changed the URL structure on the blog posts. Originally they were displayed as the date and time, such as mikey1090.com/lpd/20111012/ for example. I changed them to include the post title in the URL to make it more search engine friendly. Because of these changes I lost a few of the posts I had already made. Luckily I had them backed up on my hard drive as Word documents, so from now on I’ll definitely blog on my computer and put them online nearer the time.

I’ve also been working on the assessed coursework portfolio. I realized I had missed out item three about generating career ideas so decided to get that done, it seemed like a small task as it was only worth five marks. I registered to the prospects website and completed the self help assessment on their site which was useful.

Non LPD

This week I had to finish my Human and Financial Resource Management coursework. I completed the person specification quite quickly originally as I already had a draft copy of it. However I realized that I had not included any selection methods for each essential or desirable criterion. I had to change the layout of the table to fit in the extra column, and go through each criterion and pick out potential selection methods for them. I then went ahead and started to write the interview schedule. This was not an easy task as I wanted it to be long and detailed enough, but without going over the two page limit that had been set in the coursework brief. Each question had to include prompts and probes to keep the interviewee on the right track and get as much of a detailed answer out of them as possible. I was constantly checking back to the person specification to look at each criteria for the most ideal employee that I had written down, and tried to generate questions, prompts and probes that would allow an employer to identify whether the interviewee would be suitable or not. I panicked on the last day as some other classmates had written between ten and twenty interview questions and I had only done four, however Rachel Delbridge said it was more about the quality of the questions and whether they were fit for purpose rather than the quantity of them.

Week Seven

LPD

This week we again had no class in LPD as Bob was ill. I didn’t mind as it gave me further time to write my coursework for LPD and for other subjects.

This week I completed the decision making task as part of item seven in the portfolio. This task took a lot longer than I initially thought it would do, mainly because it involved producing a rather large table. I did the work on Microsoft Word on the mac which I was quite unfamiliar with so it took a little longer than it might have done at home on my PC. I listed three jobs that I am interested in pursuing a career in – Web Developer, Web Designer, ICT Consultant. I then went and listed both positive and negative aspects for myself if I took these jobs, and said how desirable they would be and how likely they would be to happen. I then listed the positive and negative aspects for each job relating to how they would affect my career in future. For example being an ICT consultant would benefit me as a person as it is well paid, but it may not benefit my career as I may lose touch with the web design industry, and forget a lot of the skills that I have learnt up until now which would be bad if I decided to switch career and become a web developer later down the line.

Non LPD

This week myself, Kyle and Martin decided to make a start on the Digital Libraries group work. We had decided to do the presentation on cloud computing so began to research around the subject as we definitely needed to expand on what was mentioned in class. We submitted our names and choice of subject to Francis to check it was okay.

This week I submitted my website design coursework online via FTP. The finished website looked nice and I was pleased with it. It’s the first time we have had the chance to be creative individually on a personal website, as the previous years projects all had a specific assignment brief such as making the Geoffrey Manton Conference Centre website. My finished website was blue with a good choice of fonts and usable/accessible navigation. I’m hoping to get a good grade for it and I’m confident I’ve done enough to achieve a 2:1 or a First.

This week I have also been doing my Web Application Development homework. This isn’t part of assessed coursework but is essential to allow Steve Smethurst, our unit tutor, chance to check that we are progressing and have a good understanding of the work. We have a class test at the end of term so I’ve been attending all lectures in order to do well in the exam, as it is my strongest subject so it would be a waste to not aim high and try and get a First in it. If I did it would definitely help me on my way to my overall graduation goal of getting a 2:1.

Week Six

LPD

This week was reading week so there was no formal LPD class this week. My flat mate was away visiting family in France so this gave me an excellent opportunity to crack on and get a good bit of this portfolio done and out of the way. I also thought that keeping up with this blog each week would definitely benefit me nearer the coursework deadline. Writing this 500 word blog post only takes a small amount of time in one or two days of my studying week. To leave all or the majority of the blog posts up until closer to the deadline would be a very silly idea indeed as that would require writing 4000 words, much of which was on what happened a long time ago on weeks like this! I also have a lot of hand in dates in December and several class tests so the more LPD portfolio I get out of the way now, the less stress I will have in the run up to Christmas. I decided to make a start on some of the later tasks such as researching careers which is item number five. I have researched many web design and development jobs over the past few weeks since summer so this task was fairly straightforward. For extra help I used a few job adverts that I found on the prospects website. I wrote around 600 words, answering a paragraph or two for each question on the template. I’m hoping this will be sufficient as it was detailed without stringing it out too much!

Non LPD

After working on more LPD at the start of this week as I mentioned above, I was starting to get bored and decided to take a break from LPD. I really needed to crack on with my Human & Financial Resource Management coursework. As we have studied in detail about person specifications now I decided to get this part of the report started. The report had to be three pages long, but the person specification only had to be one page long. It has to be based on Alec Roger’s seven-point framework, which splits down the essential and desirable criteria for the ideal person for a job into seven different sections such as physical attributes, general intelligence, working circumstances and special aptitudes. This seemed easy at first as it was based on a job description for an information officer to work in the MRL. However on closer inspection I found it hard to think of criteria for what would be required for a person carrying out this job. I had to do a lot of research on the internet and read a few books in the MMU business school library to understand the seven point framework a little better and what categories each criteria would be placed in.

Aside from LPD I also continued with some web design work which wasn’t for university. I felt that developing my skills and trying new things will help me when applying for web design jobs.

Week Five

LPD

The previous week in LPD we had a guest speaker. It was a nice lady over from the Careers and Employability department in the university. She gave us a good talk on how we can become more employable. She discussed the services MMU offer which sound very useful – workshops on how to improve your CV, how to write a good cover letter, how to succeed in interviews and a few others which don’t spring to mind at this moment in time! Outside of class I continued to work on the LPD portfolio. I had my meeting with Jonathon Wilson on my progress so far in my degree and how well I am coming along in order to achieve a happy result next summer! He explained that I am currently on a 2:1 which I feel is excellent for my time here at university. After the meeting I was now aware as to how hard it would be exactly to achieve a First in my degree, which I wasn’t sure whether to take as motivating or de-moralising as I realized what an uphill battle I had. After the meeting I went home at the weekend and in my spare time completed the Self Assessment 2 form where we had to summarise basically what happened in the meeting and how we were going to work towards the goal that Jonathon had set for us. I emailed the form to Jonathon and will wait for him to review, print and sign it.

Non LPD

This week I decided to have a good look at exactly what was involved in the coursework for Digital Libraries. I was aware that it was worth 50% of the marks available for the subject, so it certainly isn’t something that I can push to the side and leave until nearer the deadline. The coursework involves choosing one of the six or seven subjects that we are studying in class. This made it essential to visit the lesson each week to know a little about each subject before making an important decision on whether or not to use it for my coursework. Geoff Butters gave an interesting lecture on cloud computing which was certainly more pleasant to listen to than some of the other subjects that had been covered up until now. I decided to use cloud computing as the subject for my coursework as it was such a broad topic and Geoff only had time to summarise some if it’s key points. This was perfect as the idea of the coursework was to expand and critically analyse the topic in greater detail, and from what I had seen in class this is definitely possible. We have to work in teams to give a presentation that is worth 25% and write an individual report to further detail and critique the subject that is also worth 25%. I decided to work with Kyle and Martin as they are my friends who I have worked with before. I can rely on the two of them (hopefully!) to make a good presentation.

Week Four

LPD

The previous weeks LPD session had been a small informal group discussion with bob about the benefits and the problems of social networking when applying for jobs. It was said that it can be beneficial for employers to look at things like your facebook and twitter account to gain a further insight into both your professional and personal life. As this is certainly something that would happen in the IT industry which is where I wish to get a job, Bob told us to be alert of what exactly we post or do online when social networking. Things such as potentially abusive rants at other people or companies could harm us when trying to get employed as it could show seemingly untrue sides to our personalities that we may have shown when lashing out at someone or something.

Another thing Bob told us to consider was to be careful with the photos that we have available for viewing on facebook. Particularly as students like myself have many photos taken when I’ve been out socializing both during the day and at night that involve alcohol consumption. Any photo that an employer may see can allow the to judge you unfairly if the photo(s) in question are particularly unpleasant to someone who does not know you or was aware of what was going on at the time.

Bob also advised us to register for LinkedIn, which is a social network with a more professional edge to it, as it can be used to showcase your portfolio and communicate with job agencies and employers and send them your CV.

Non LPD

This week in Human And Financial Resource Management, Rachel Delbridge – our unit tutor – explained the assessed coursework for the Autumn term which was worth 25% of the total unit marks. The coursework had been set the week before, however Rachel had not had time to go through it properly. The coursework involved two sections to be completed to make up a three page report. Compared to essays we had had in previous years which involved a subject or choice of subjects and a word count, this was the first time I’d had to write a report where only the length of document mattered and not the words written or the references, books and online sources used. The marks were mostly given to the content of the document, and the accuracy of the material written – whether it was based on industry best practices – such as using Alec Roger’s seven point framework for the person specification. At the time the coursework seemed a daunting task, as it required us to produce a person specification and an interview schedule – neither of which we had covered in class yet.

Other coursework was given to us in Digital Libraries by Francis. The coursework was to choose one of the seven topics covered over the Autumn term in class and give a presentation and individual report expanding on the subject. The coursework was worth 50% of the total unit marks

Week Three

LPD

This week in LPD we had quite an informal lecture. The previous two weeks lectures had taken place in the lecture theatre. Week one had introduced us to the unit and got us focused on what was to be required of us for the autumn term. At first the coursework was introduced to us and seemed quite an easy task, yet upon closer inspection it was apparent that this project was to take many more hours than initially realized – which is acceptable considering it is worth 50% of the total Learning and Professional Development unit marks. The first self assessment task had us analyzing our strengths and weaknesses and that of those sat next to us in the lecture. This is always interesting as we never like to point out each other’s weaknesses, and it can often be seen that we are bragging about what we feel we can do best.

The second week we had a talk from Bob about personality types. This involved some group activities that were amusing to say the least. We also watched some YouTube videos that helped us self assess our personality types, and helped to conclude on what personality type we were, how that could benefit us in life and in our future careers. I made a start on the LPD portfolio by starting to complete some of the first self assessment tasks, listing my skills and figuring out what type of working style I had. From the results it can be said that my working style is people orientated.

Non LPD

This week was certainly interesting outside of LPD. We were given coursework briefs for several other subjects including Applied Web Design & management and Human & Financial Resource Management.

The assessed coursework for Applied Web Design & Management certainly interested me! Making and designing websites is one of my best skills, and this was reflected last year when I achieved a first in both the website design class test and a first overall for the subject. The coursework involved making a personal website which would be hosted on the university servers and accessible from the information and communications section of the MMU website. The website needed to include a homepage with introductory text about yourself and an optimized picture of yourself. There was to be an about page listing your key skills and more information about yourself, but this was later removed from the assignment brief. The website also need a portfolio page to list future web design coursework and any previous projects that I had completed. The final two pages of the website were a contact page and a blog section. The blog page included two blog posts – one detailing how we went about tackling the coursework and built the website. This included technical aspects and generally how we manage such a project. The other blog post was to discuss how we made the website accessible and usable for different people with varying computer hardware, software and any disabilities they may have such as being visually impaired.