I enjoy attending conferences, whether I am making a presentation or not. You get to meet interesting people, hear interesting talks, and see how other people give their presentations. From the point of view of watching and learning from other people, the TCUK09 Conference was enlightening. I was grateful for some positive feedback from my own session, but I was aware that I was doing my presentation in a pretty conventional way. Mainly text, with bullet lists, numbers and percentages, some graphs – you get the idea. I took great care not to put too many words on each slide, and not to read the slides but to use them for the main points or for key quotes and to talk around them. But still, I reckon it was a pretty routine presentation, and quite a few of the other presenters I saw were not much different. Good content, well presented, but lacking in … something. Read more
Tag teaching
Some places still available for distance learning MA courses in Communications
I am told by my colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University that there are a few places still available for the distance learning MA programme in Professional Communications for the autumn session which begins in September.
The programme offers four courses of study, each with a slightly different emphasis, and all with some shared modules:
Corporate Communication, focusing on communication within organisations, including corporate image, ethics and public relations, looking at both theoretical and practical aspects of the communications process;
E-Communication designed to give you a thorough understanding of human and digital communication, and the growing importance of the web and other contemporary technologies as tools of corporate communication;
Professional Communication a flexible award in terms of the option modules combining theory and practice, and including document design, persuasive communication and communication strategy;
Technical Communication focusing on the means and methods of disseminating technical information and instruction to varied audiences, looking at the role of the technical communicator in a wide variety of industrial and corporate contexts.
I am an Associate Lecturer for the Technical Communications MA course, as well as a graduate of the course myself. I’d be very happy to answer any questions about the course.
Distance Learning at SHU mentioned in "The Independent"
Last Thursday’s (10th July 2008) “Independent” newspaper carried an article about the impact of distance-learning postgraduate courses, Distance learning is helping workers’ careers – and their pockets, too. The article spotlights the growing popularity of distance-learning MA courses for people trying to get ahead in the workplace, where an undergraduate degree is often no longer enough.
One of the students interviewed in the article is a graduate of the Corporate Communications MA course at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). The student said she was “more confident knowing the theory that underpins what I’m doing every day”, which is a key reason for undertaking academic study related to one’s professional life. Corporate Communications is one of the four streams in the MA Programme in Professional Communication at SHU. The others are e-Communication, Professional Communication, and Technical Communication. I am of course, an interested party – as I may have mentioned before in this blog, I am an Associate Lecturer for the Technical Communications course.
Wikipedia in Academia?
Someone recently asked me what I thought, as a university lecturer, of students who quote from Wikipedia in their academic work. Surely I wouldn’t allow it, they suggested, as Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at anytime, and is therefore bound to be inaccurate.
I surprised my questioner by saying that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Wikipedia as a source. I also suggested that something that is subject to review by a very wide audience, and that can be edited quickly by many different hands, is probably more likely to be accurate than inaccurate. The problem with using Wikipedia in an academic assignment lies elsewhere.
The accepted practice on the course I teach, and I imagine that this is pretty much a standard practice, is that all sources must be properly referenced, and for online sources that means giving the access date as well as the URL. If a student were to cite a relevant Wikipedia entry, properly referenced, as part of their research, that would be fine by me. But it has to be dealt with in the same way as any other reference, which means that it has to be relevant to the argument, critically assessed, and properly referenced. And it definitely can’t be the only reference that a student cites for a particular point.
In fact, a Wikipedia article is probably no better and no worse than an article form any other encyclopedia. The fact is that encyclopedia articles are rarely much more than a general introduction to a topic. As a tutor I expect students to research relevant books and articles from peer-reviewed journals, rather than quote from encyclopedia entries. We supply bibliographies, and university library services are there to support students in their research.
Some students find it difficult to adjust to the fact that academic work requires some effort on their part. It is not “instant”. Tutors expect to see evidence of research, and analysis, and above all, of independent thought. Being able to share the latest “viral” video with twenty-sevn thousand “friends” in 0.176 seconds is not enough. So by all means read Wikipedia, and quote from it if you must. But don’t expect me to accept it as true, or as relevant to your assignment’s argument, just because it’s something you found online.
