Prison Voices: The Evaluation

If truth be told, the blogging aspect of this Prison Voices module initially filled me with dread. I had no previous experience of writing a blog and I felt that other students who had this experience would make my work stand out (and not in a good way!). Writing for a public audience was nerve-wracking, especially when it came to promoting my own work on social media such as Twitter and sharing my work as part of the collaboration element of the module with my peers on Canvas, as I normally lack confidence in my own academic work. I was unsure about sharing my work to such a large audience.

In addition to this, I had never used resources before like the digital archives of the Old Bailey Online and the Digital Panopticon; I usually gather my resources from books and articles so learning the skill of online research (yes, technology!) was really interesting. I will definitely use this skill in future assignments and modules, as it really does open up a whole new world! I found that it can be much quicker to locate particular resources because you can search exactly what you are looking for, rather than reading through reams of information.

I quickly became used to the blogging style and I found it refreshing to write little but often in a weekly blog rather than a tedious essay at the end of the semester. As I wrote more and more blogs, I could see that my work was improving every time and I was almost cringing reading my first ones back! This just shows the progress I’ve made whilst studying this module and it stands out even to myself. On other modules, where we write a single essay at the end of the semester, we don’t have the chance for this self- reflection and the opportunity to re-visit our work at various points throughout the semester.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with a group of other students, praising and critiquing each other’s work accordingly. Initially, it was quite difficult for me to criticise and recommend changes to the other students’ work. I felt like it wasn’t my place because we are all on the same level, so this was a good exercise to prepare for careers like teaching and marking after university.  It is an essential part of English Literature. This exercise can be utilised in the ‘real world’ and this is an essential skill for the future. Lastly, this module  has encouraged me to share my assignments for other modules with my peers, as I found it really useful for fresh eyes to look over my work and recommend any improvements in order to reach my full potential. It is often easy for me to overlook grammar errors or ‘waffle’, so having a group of students read over my work was really helpful.