When the pieces finally begin to fit ....

Luckily for me, this week is that start of my much anticipated month long break away from work! (however other work will be taking place during this time! "The home straight!) For now I am feeling relatively calm about the whole thing which is what I am going explain below, along side where I currently am in this whole process.

On Wednesday this week, myself, Lauren and Megan had a really good Module 3 lunch time session with Paula. Firstly we discussed where we were up to in the whole process and again going back to the image of the arrow, and what stages we were up too. We were all up too around stage 4 having completed research and onto bringing it all together and analysing our findings. However Megan made a really good point that she keeps going back to stage 2 and is still looking through literature, I am also still doing this, and that's okay. I am quite a logical person, and sometimes I find it really hard to go back to places as I feel that once I have ticked it off the list it is complete. This is a skill that I have definitely developed through these modules - it IS okay to go back and re - visit and look it to things further.

During this session, we also spent quite a bit of time looking into the word that I have been dreading up until now ....... the artifact!! I do believe that Paula has put the slides of her presentation up on her blog, but she gave us some really good examples and explained that the artifact MUST be to our audience, and we must be clear on what we were presenting and who we were aiming it at. e.g. fellow practitioners etc. We each had a turn at "rehearsing" what we potentially may like to do for our artifact and how we may present it. Only a very very rough idea, but again it highlighted the importance of drafting and re- drafting work.

A really good point that Paula made that when you think about it is so simple but so easy to forget! - put EVERYTHING in your bibliography, even if you haven't necessarily used it in your academic writing. It maybe a documentary that you have watched or a newspaper article you have read that may have given you some thoughts and ideas along the way.

So where am I up too. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, due to term dates and holidays etc my main focus up until now has been research! getting it carried out and sorted. I can now carry on and work my way through analysing this and getting it written up (Saturday afternoon job with a cup of tea!) but this week I have had what you may call an epiphany! (maybe a strong word, but I am going to go with the flow!) My analogy for this whole process is a jigsaw puzzle. You sit for hours and hours with a 500 piece jigsaw of the world and get frustrated as you don't know what goes where and you are all over the place. Then suddenly, after sometime it clicks and the pieces begin to finally come together!

Now I am not saying at all by any means that I have completed my jigsaw however, I do feel that I am well under way and under control with completing the puzzle. As many of you will know especially module 2/3 this feeling could change at ANY given moment, but for now I am going to enjoy it, embrace it and as we say in Yorkshire - "Grab a brew and crack on!"

Would love to hear how others are getting on what ever module you may be.