Thursday, April 14, 2005

academia

I had to submit a copy of this blog to be marked for a music history class, yesterday. It was so ironic, but when I first started doing this, it was just because I thought it would be useful and fun. Then my supervisor suggested I keep a field journal (for obvious reasons) and this bacame it. But trust chance to work like this: suddenly we were required to keep a research journal for class, and it's to be marked! how do you mark this stuff? certainly not for spelling and grammar, or I'll fail. my spelling is atrocious. For relevance? even that won't work really well, as I have a lot of stuff here that I won't necessarily use. It's quite a personal thing, even though it's work. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait and see...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Nicol, read your Course Outline! It tells you that the Journal is "an account of your own research journey - a place to dump ideas... moan... note names & addresses... talk about breakthoughs etc... assessed [note] not for content or quality but for the way you engage with issues of your own research". It was also "not for circulation".

choirgirl said...

Perhaps the question is rather 'how do you assess that engagement?' if not via content or quality, and if the journal is an account of the research journey, how does it substantively differ from the final write-up of the research, which, in order to be really academically thorough, or sound, should at least indicate the journey. Yeah, I get what you want, but I do not envy you the task of having to mark them, or justify why the mark given for them impacts on the attainment of a degree. what is done in this journal impacts on the degree to the extent that it impacts on my research, so why, and how, does it get to count again. I'm certainly not complaining about my mark (100%, for anyone interested), I'm just somewhat bemused by the system. And a very small voice in the back of my mind is wondering whether I really would be better of studying further in the USA than in a place where my work will be purely researched based... I thought the 'not for circulation' bit was to assure us that we didn't have to worry about what we say being distributed without our concent. Certainly anything I'm happy to be marked on, I'm happy to 'circulate,' and if I wasn't, I'd be very concerned about what I had written.