Welcome to the AMER0049: Political Ecologies of the Americas Class blog. Your individual blog sites will be attached to this page.
In Week 2 we will watch a short video in which political ecologists share their ideas about what they do, responding to the question: What is Political Ecology? Your first blog will be to reflect on the content of the video. However, this will be for practice purposes and formative feedback rather than part of the summative assessment. The summative assessment reflective blogs will be set in Weeks 5 and 6 (the week before and the week after Reading Week). You will have one week to reflect, write and submit your blog posts and they will be marked and returned within two weeks. This will ensure that you have received feedback on the initial formative blog well before producing the first summative blog and feedback on the first summative blog before you submit the second.
You should write your blog as if talking to a general audience. This is not an academic essay.
You should illustrate your blog with appropriate images, referenced to source and include hyperlinks to online resources that your readers can consult, should they wish to explore political ecology further. You may also want to cite some academic works and should reference these in the usual way: e.g. (Robbins, 2012: 12) or with a numbered footnote eg. “Robbins suggests that we think of political ecology as a community of practice1.”
1 – Robbins, P. (2012). Political ecology: a critical introduction. 2nd ed. Chichester, U.K.: J. Wiley & Sons, p.12.
There should be a reference list at the end of your blog, acknowledging all sources (images, web pages, scholarly texts – see UCL library guidance on References, citations and avoiding plagiarism. Please note that plagiarism is a very serious academic offence that will not be tolerated (see UCL Guidance on Plagiarism).
Once you have written and published your blog in UCL reflect, you should download a pdf of your post and submit it to the relevant assessment submission point. You will find instructions here regarding how to generate a pdf from you blog posts, which you will submit to the relevant Turnitin Assignments in the AMER0049 Moodle Course.
Submit your first formative blog here and your two summative blogs here.
Blogs will be assessed against the AMER0049 Reflective Blog assessment criteria and rubrics.
Maximum word count for each blogpost is 500.
You can find how-to guides about a number of options for editing your blog here.
All your blogs have three plug-ins activated for printing the posts in PDF so you can submit them – the documentation for the Pring Post and Page plug-n can be found here and for the Print Friendly and PDF plug-in here (the print button from this plug-in is already added to the bottom of your posts).
For the third plug-in (Print My Blog), you will find the settings once you go into the Dashboard under Settings. Keep the option in printing to Paper and once the PDF is generated you can use and PDF printer you have installed on your computer to print to PDF.