That's it!

We have now reached the end of the course, and the final deadline for our blogs and end of semester written course work is here. To sum up the module and its assesments I would firstly like to admit that I have been proved wrong. When first reading through the module guide for this course I was under the impression that old fashioned essays and traditional exams are much more valid in order to judge ones abilities rather than blogs and web pages. I was also a little worried about my computer knowledge, or lack of it rather, and because of that I did not think I would be able to keep up with my colleagues in those kind of assesments. I was lucky enough to end up in a hard working group though, which I have truly enjoyed swapping thoughts and working with. I have also through my colleagues learnt a thing or two about computer related things that I did not know before.

The blog have been very helpful as well, and I was surprised when I saw that I had a few comments to my posts which were not made by Dr Hardman. Especially when I saw the two posts written in Chinese/Japanese! Would also like to mention here that I would have replied to those, if it was not for the fact that I do not know Chinese/Japanese!

Apart from that I would just like to say thank you for reading my blog and hope you enjoyed it!

End of Semester Written Work.

My group is now in the middle of putting together our end of semester written course work which is, like our presentation was, dedicated to inequality aversion in animals. The articles which we are covering are fairly straight forward and very interesting. I was at first worried that we were going to be asked to base our coursework on articles which were using calculations with numbers in order to explain their findings, but it is instead articles written in words, which I find a lot more fun. I am also an animal lover, so I find the subject interesting on another level as well as on a psychological one. I have finished a suggestion for our introduction, but I am now stuck with the same problem as I have been before on this module: The writing of course works, the preparation of presentations and the researching of topics = not a problem at all. How ever, what I do have a problem with, is getting my work up on our wiki pages, our slides, or even (at first) this blog!

My knowledge about technology, or anything to do with computers to be more precise, is so poor that I have struggled a bit at times taking this module. Luckily, my colleagues in my group have been happy to meet up with me to show me how it is done. For now, I have e-mailed my colleagues a suggestion for an introduction to our piece for them to read through and give me some feed back on. Since it is three days left until our deadline today I am not at all worried, but I do think that if I had known a bit more about how those things work, I could have been getting a bit more involved in lay outs of our projects. But having said that, since it is a psychology module after all, I am hoping that the written work is far more important than visual presentations.

Presentations.

The final two weeks of our teaching in this module were dedicated to presentations. Performing them as well as observing them. I have learnt a lot from doing both. My group was the first one to go, which I was pleased about since that meant being able to watch the others and actually being able to pay attention while doing so instead of nervously going through my own piece in my head repeatedly. The first challenge we came across as a group was the extended length of our presentation. After timing ourself a number of times when rehearsing, we realised we needed to leave out some of our material. And even after doing so, we still went over the allocated time by about four minutes. I would have liked the room in which we had our presentations to have a clock on the wall which you could keep an eye one as a reminder of how quickly the minutes do pass in that situation. I also think that it would have helped to get started on looking up, out in the room, and at the audience. I was very nervous but I found that my colleagues listening to my groups presentation were very helpful simply by showing up and listening actively. The way this presentation differed to the other more informal ones was that everyone listening seemed to be doing so more actively which made it more fun I thought. Also, another point about extending the 10 minutes which was the set limit for our presentations is that since most of the other groups talks were a lot longer than ours, it made our presentation seem short and not as detailed as the others. Again, I think a clock possibly would have prevented that.