MSc E-learning Dissertation Festival

Hi All

Are you aiming to hand in your dissertation for the 31 August deadline? Do you want a chance to talk through your ideas?  Perhaps see how other people are tackling their dissertations?

Well, we thought it would be fun and useful to throw a dissertation festival.  This is a chance for folk handing in soon (or even mid-way and wanting to get some extra input) to share their ideas, issues and inspirations with each other.

The festival idea is in it’s early stages, but we’re imagining it running throughout the week of Monday 8 August.  Festival events would include:

1.   A poster display in Second Life

Posters are a great way to re-imagine your argument and draw out the key points you might want to drive home in your write up.  There’s also a great way of giving folk a handy overview of your work.

So, we think it would be fun to have posters up of each folk’s work.  They can be as creative or ‘elegantly simple’ as you like!  All you have to worry about is creating a jpeg or pdf or the like, we’ll take care of mounting the posters in SL.

To add to the creative spirit, we’d like to try experimenting with haikus describing your topic (check out  http://dissertationhaiku.wordpress.com/   for some great examples)

2.  Synchronous sessions in Second Life and Wimba

Second Life Champage and Q&A:  We’ll start the festival off  with a champagne gathering among our lovely Second Life posters, along with a question & answer session with some of the MSc team staff about the final stages of the dissertation process (though folk just considering the dissertation are welcome, of course!).

There’ll be a mechanism for folk viewing your posters and haikus to leave feedback.  We’ll also have links from the posters to the synch sessions we’re planning – so the posters will be a handy ‘taster’ for your dissertation presentation.

Wimba dissertation presentations: We’ll then run a few sessions in Wimba.  Each session will last about an hour and include 2-3 student presentations (10 minutes of presentation, 10 minutes of discussion).  The presentations will be grouped according to topics.  Again, any students, staff or other interested parties will be welcome to attend and the events would be advertised via the Hub and student email list.

So, do you want to join in?

If you’re about to hand in, or even part-way through and wanting to take advantage of this opportunity, do get in touch with me.   (clara.oshea@ed.ac.uk)

Let me know your topic, your availability for synch sessions (i.e. preferred UK times and days), and if you are up for creating a poster and haiku.

Also – let me know if you have any other bright ideas for what we could do with the festival idea.

For those who aren’t in the throws of the dissertation – I’ll be emailing/hubbing out closer to the date with dates, times, venues and topics.  Do come along – you’ll get fab insights into the dissertation process, inspiration for your own dissertation and I’ve no doubt you’ll have handy insights for folk tackling this all important part of the MSc.

Cheerio

Clara