Welcome to the BASC0016: Environmental Sociology Class Blog!
All of your individual blog sites are linked to this class blog. In Week 1, you should explore UCL Reflect and practice creating blog posts.
In Week 2, you will watch a documentary about the ‘Limits to Growth’ debate. 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 formal summative assessment (the mark will not contribute to your overall grade for the module). The key point to bear in mind when producing a blog post, is that you are communicating to a lay audience – this is not a piece of conventional academic writing.
Your blogs should be written in an engaging style, appropriate for communicating ideas and concepts from environmental sociology to a lay audience.
Your formative blog should discuss three reasons why societies have failed to act on warnings from science about immanent and catastrophic environmental change and relate these to your own personal experiences and behaviour. Once you have written and published your ‘Limits to Growth’ blog, you should download a pdf of the post and submit it to the Turnitin Formative Blog assignment at the bottom of the ‘Assessment’ section of the BASC0016 Moodle course.
Summative blogs will be set in Weeks 6 and 9. You will have one week to reflect, write and publish your blog posts and they will be marked and returned before the next blog is set. This will ensure that you have had feedback on the first formative blog before producing the first summative blog, and feedback on the first summative blog before you submit the second one. These blogs should be submitted to Summative Blogs: “Reducing my ecological footprint” & “Environmental Sociology: my takeaway messages”, Turnitin assignment at the bottom of the ‘Assessment’ section of the BASC0016 Moodle course.
Your blog should be illustrated with appropriate images and provide hyperlinks to relevant internet sources, which can provide additional information for readers interested to learn more about the topics you discuss. You must cite clearly the work of others (including any images) using a recognised referencing system (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).
Assessment criteria: BASC0016 Reflective Blog Assessment Criteria.
Word limit: 750 -not including title or final reference list.
Submission deadline: Monday 19th October 14:00 hrs
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.