Your Friendfeed Account

There is more to academic success than attending lectures and practicals and handing in coursework on time - important though these are. Successful students are able to take charge of their own learning and development, and demonstrate their ability to think critically, independently and creatively. Reflecting on your studies can help you to become a more independent and effective learner by:

Providing you with the tools you need to take charge of your own academic progress and development.
Giving you the chance to think about your strengths as a learner and identify the areas you can improve on.
Enabling you to identify the practical steps required to achieve these improvements.

Reflection is also highly relevant to your life after university, helping you to enhance your employability and future career prospects:

Helping you to identify opportunities for enhancing and developing your employability.
Discovering resources to help you represent and articulate to others (including employers), your learning, skills and achievements.

Friendfeed is like Facebook for Science

You will be using Friendfeed to reflect on your learning. Your contributions to Friendfeed will contribute 40% of the marks for this module. We will assess (via your Friendfeed account) whether you are completing this task successfully and will give you feedback on your activity via Friendfeed. Please note that for this assessment your activity on Friendfeed will be marked over the course of the term, but your mark will not appear in the Blackboard gradebook until the end of this term. Later in the term we will tell you about other ways we would like you to use Friendfeed, but your task for this session is to create a Friendfeed account and get started.

Be Professional!

You probably already have a Facebook account. Keep that for your friends and your social life. Make Friendfeed a professional space which is another part of your University life.

Instructions:

Go to Friendfeed.com and start a free account. Read the online help and come to the help sessions (see Timetable) if you have any questions.
Choose whether you want your account to be public or private. In Friendfeed, go to: Settings: Private Feed and set your account up the way you want it.
you must accept it - if we can't read your Friendfeed postings, you will get no marks.

Public or Private?

Your Friendfeed account is a chance to represent yourself online as a professional. Our experience has been that students who have public accounts form larger networks and are more successful than those with private accounts, but the choice is yours.

You can use Friendfeed in a variety of ways, all of which will count towards your mark at the end of term:

Status updates: Go to Friendfeed and type in an update reflecting on your learning. Examples might include work your are currently doing, feedback your have received on previous work, career planning and employability-related actions you have carried out. To count towards your mark, a status update must demonstrate some insight into how this activity has affected your learning.

Share External Links: Use Friendfeed to share useful links which are relevant to your studies. To count towards your mark, each link must be accompanied by a short commentary explaining how and why it is useful. We highly recommend that you install the free Friendfeed bookmarklet in your browser to make it easier to share links from sites you visit. You can also do this on CFS - ask in the Help Sessions if you need assistance.

Subscriptions: There are two types of subscription on Friendfeed:
Services you have subscribed to - these are usually RSS feeds. Add as many services as you wish to your Friendfeed account so that you have something to write about.
People or Groups you follow on Friendfeed (equivalent to Facebook "Friends"). We encourage you to follow other people on this module and to conduct helpful and reflective conversations with them via Friendfeed.

Likes and Comments:
"Likes" are a way of bookmarking content on Friendfeed to help you find it again, and to signal to others that they should look at that item.
Comments allow you to have conversations with other Friendfeed users and to add information about items you have posted - probably the best way to earn marks for this assessment. We encourage you to leave helpful and reflective comments on other people's postings - these will earn you marks.

How do I decide who to follow ("Subscribe to") on Friendfeed? - see the list on Blackboard
- It's up to you, but we suggest you don't try to to follow everyone on this course.
- We suggest you aim to subscribe to between 30-60 people from the list on Blackboard, e.g. people you already know (but remember this isn't Facebook) and especially people on the same degree course as you.
- Make sure you follow the staff and at least some of the Peer Mentors from the list on Blackboard - they will help you get the best out of Friendfeed.

We will give support and feedback by joining in conversations on Friendfeed, or using direct (private) messages where appropriate. Marks will be awarded as follows for your activity over the entire term:

An average of four or more contributions each week with suitable reflective content: 100%
An average of three contributions week each with suitable reflective content: 75%
An average of two contributions week each with suitable reflective content: 50%
An average of one contribution each week with suitable reflective content: 25%
An average of less than one contribution each week and/or no suitable reflective content: 0%

Come to the Help Sessions (see Timetable) if you need any assistance.