Task 3

Analyzing other participants' Task 2.

For this analysis I selected randomly five blogs from the participants' list:

• http://maarjapajusalu.wordpress.com/category/nie2010/
• http://kerstitoming.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/self-observation-and-analysis-of-creating-a-study-plan/
• http://reimoverse.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/task-2-activity-plan-fall-2010/
• http://argoimke.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/task-2-self-observation-and-analysis-of-creating-a-study-plan/
• http://marupada.blogspot.com/

What elements, components, etc. have been used by others to describe their activity?

In my opinion I found three group of students and their strategy for selecting courses for this semester.

The first one would be students with work and family life. The most important factor was there the ability to fit the course into their time schedule. For example Argo could only attend evening ones or online courses.

The second group would be perhaps younger students with more free schedule, who only focus to fill the curriculum and take as much courses as possible - including free electives with subjects that interest them.

The third group is mainly last year students who are staying abroad (like myself) and only are taking those few courses that is needed for graduation.

So in general the most important components for everyone would be time and relevance to curriculum. Also in fewer cases the form of the course - online versus class lectures. 

What level of detail?

Most people described there decision making quite efficiently. In my opinion it is a bit hard to judge, because the process itself is mainly quite automatic. Ofcourse most of the students are IMKE students and as I have different background then I don't really know how many courses are offered there in the beginning of the year. For example in Baltic Film and Media School the amount of courses offered is basically the same what you have to take, so the part where you can make a selection is rather limited.

What structural aspects are showing up in their descriptions/visualisations?

In my opinion all visualization and description have the same structure. It all start with the person taking into account time, relevance to curriculum, form, amount of credit points, etc. Also the schemes of visualization have the same structure - mapping their thoughts according to their needs.

What is missing?Pros and cons of different approaches?

As for me the reading of other people blogs was basically the same. They all described same "mind-mapping" with same tools, including my own. Maybe for me it was missing a little bit more background information about the courses from what they could actually make a selection (as i pointed out before - my background seems to be completely different, so it would be nice to know how the system works in a different school). 

And maybe the reading of blogs would not be so repetitive, if people would have been using more original approach to differ from others. Therefore as the ones I was reading, did not differ so much from each other then it is also hard to list pros and cons. The good side of everyone's description was that all of them managed to explain themselves more or less clearly and it gave a good overview how the student minds are working. The main problem for me was that they were too similar, so when reading them it felt very repetitive. 

(I do not want to harm anyone's feelings and I make my selection based on pure randomness so I could have both female and male versions of study plans. And I did not read all of them. Also my own was rather poor and boring.)