Looking Back on the Blog Assignment

Today marks the final day for this reflective blog assignment and, as such, this will be the last entry in this diary. Over the past nine weeks, I have written about various topics, ranging from the software and tools I was using to complete other projects, to my thoughts on articles and reports read as research and my general thoughts on the MA programme content. Now that this exercise is concluding, I believe this last entry should reflect on what I have learned and gained from completing it.

I have never been overly comfortable with journaling my thoughts. I did not keep a diary as a child or teenager, nor do I tend to spend much time reflecting on my academic performance and learning. I tend to finish assigned work and immediately move on to the next task. Consequently, I initially found this blog to be somewhat of a challenge. I had difficulty determining subjects for entries, and it was a struggle to force myself to seriously consider my feelings about my progress through the course material. As the weeks progressed, this process became more natural as I gained experience. I chose to write one entry each Monday, and a second on Friday. I found that this approach was an effective way of keeping myself motivated and consistent. I think it also helped me to ensure the topics remained varied, as the Monday post could, in general, focus on lecture material and the Friday writing could deal with more practical concerns.

An interesting aspect of this task was that there was no prescribed word count to which we needed to adhere. I feel that this was a positive decision. It allowed me the flexibility to have some longer entries when appropriate, while simultaneously ensuring I did not need to pad the material with meaningless points to meet a minimum length. In practice, I set a personal target of 500 words as a guide, but this was primarily a theoretical target, and some entries may not have extended to this number of words.

Writing reflections has likely improved my writing style and technique. I was much more a technical-minded writer at the outset of this project. This characteristic is likely as a result of my background in computer science. Learning to express my thoughts on my performance and describing what I was learning was a new experience, but one which I feel has been of great benefit in terms of adding another element to my writing “toolkit”.

I found the experience of producing these reflections to be thoroughly rewarding. As outlined earlier, this is not something I have done previously. Taking time each week to consider my work, analysing difficulties I was having and how I was working through them, considering the prescribed reading materials for modules on a deeper level – all of this has been both an enjoyable and useful undertaking.

So much so, that although this project is ending, I have decided I will continue writing weekly entries in a private blog relating to the rest of the MA and during my summer development project. I believe this will be particularly helpful when it comes time to write my final report for the summer project. Also, I feel it will be of personal benefit in continuing to make me take regular time for introspective thought on my work. I hope that doing so will help me identify weaknesses and means of overcoming them.