Welcome to the FGPE course blog area

Finance and the Global Political Economy
PO534044A and PO71040B

Course Blog— —provides a platform for student engagement with the lecturer, other students and the wider blogesphere also, it provides a digital repository of content and ideas. Students are expected to contribute to the course blog in two ways: (1) weekly blog entry (250-400 words) reflecting on the further readings, this can be only text but students are strongly encouraged to use incorporate an array of different visualisations (you want an entry that ‘pops’); (2) students will share their group project research and collaboration on the course blog in the form of a learning journal. 

Provides a platform for student engagement with the lecturer, other students and the wider blogesphere also, it provides a digital repository of content and ideas. Work, debates, and discussions in seminar will also (when possible) will also be published. The course blog provides a platform for student engagement with the lecturer, other students and the wider blogesphere also, it provides a digital repository of content and ideas. 

Students are expected to contribute to the course blog as a way of 'writing to understand' the weekly readings and to communicate individual ideas about the readings to inform seminar discussion and group project preparation.

(1) design blog entry as their seminar preparation -  Each week students must read both required and essential readings as well as web content on the VLE, student can choose to either do a 500 word reflection on the general topic or a specific reading by Monday evening, so that it can be read before Tuesday's mid-morning seminar. These blogs are a way of facilitating seminar discussion because it demonstrate how the class is engaging with the readings. These will help develop essay writing skills for the final assessment. When writing blogs, students are strongly encouraged to use more then just text by incorporating different visualisations and hyperlinks to for key pieces of information that can be explained with additional content. 

(2) Share group 'learning journals' as a record of group work and progress to the final submission. Please see group section for further details; this aspect of the blog is to provide details on group project progress for monitoring by the lecturer.

This 'course blog' element of the module is voluntary and non-assessed. It is here as an extra resource to help facilitate students learning and writing skills. Learning blogging as a skill is important because it an essential employability skill, therefore students directly benefit from participating in the course blog because it will help them learn how to craft interesting and engaging post. It takes effort to learn how to use and visualise complex data and information in a succinct blog post, however students benefit from rising to the challenge. 

The reason we have a course blog is because it is a useful teaching tool that gave students an outlet to become familiar with how to craft interesting and engaging argument by producing blog entry. Creating a post challenges students to use and visualize complex data and information in a succinct blog post. In terms of academic skill development, students are given an opportunity to learn how to dissect dense text and write a short summary, giving them an opportunity to write in ways that are not assessed or confined to an essay structure. Other more mundane benefits of giving students the opportunity to learn by doing, improving their practical IT skills. Some first year students came to university without the necessary IT skills to make a blog post, but they left it know how to. These practical skills are important, we need only look to how much of academic life is about engaging with digital media, to appreciate the benefits to students looking to enter the workforce.

The Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) re-posts excellent student blogs as part of the #mypoliticaleconomy network, reaching a wide audience of academics, policy makers, and third sector research organisations. Make an effort and you too could be re-published on the perc site.