Blog Blog post 4 a critique of Blogs and summary so far.
I find the format of WordPress blog posts very difficult to work with and a little out of date: when I was a student 10 years ago we had to submit assessments in the same format and I really struggled with the inability to change the order of posts, manipulate images and fonts and the imposed linear structure that is difficult to edit. Similarly to when I was a student this has meant that I have produced all of my work separately to the blog and then collated it last minute to fit into the blog structure. I am not very good and have never been very good at fitting ideas into a codified Learning Outcome unit orientated structure Addison, N. (2014), as I mainly work with text that meanders, cuts through itself and exists continually rather than in broken formulaic chunks: Originally Blogs 2,3, case studies 1 and 2 and the observations were a continuous text that I formulated whilst teaching, attending workshop sessions and conversing with peers. This felt more like an actual Blog as it mapped the ‘Journey’ Macfarlane, B. and Gourlay, L. (2009) of my experience and research rather than now where bits have been broken up and edited to try to fit into a more Checklist structure. Moreover, whereas normally I am predominantly a visual communicator, the stilted way to use images on the blog has meant that I have found it very difficult to use images fluently and so have used far less than I would normally.
It is ironic that the pedagogical principles we are encouraged to use with our students don’t seem to have been taken into account for the method used for assessing our own enacting of those principles.
I apologise if that was a bit of a rant.
I have enjoyed many aspects of the PgCert particularly meeting so many others and the peer to peer feedback, exchanging of ideas and observations with colleagues have been truly enlightening to my teaching practice.
References:
Addison, N. (2014) ‘Doubting learning outcomes in higher education contexts: from performativity towards emergence and negotiation’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 33(3), pp. 313–325. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jade.12063 (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
Macfarlane, B. and Gourlay, L. (2009) ‘The reflection game: enacting the penitent self’, Teaching in Higher Education, 14(4), pp. 455–459. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510903050244 (Accessed: 19 March 2025).