WEEK 6- The course is really starting to move ahead a quite a pace now. This is down to the fact, deadlines are fast approaching, along with the first written assignment based on the given case studies. I actually found the first assignment quite an interesting proposition and feel i did a good job of analysing my chosen case study, lets just hope my mark reflects my confidence! Back to today's lecture and we are now working on our final presentation posters for the collaborative section of the course. Today i learnt that getting good marks for a poster does not always mean its the most eye catching one, and that the information it has is just as, if not more important that pretty pictures. This was due to the fact we were given the opportunity to see some past students work, along with the given grade. funnily enough the most aesthetically pleasing poster was actually awarded a FAIL, however another piece of work which at first seemed less appealing actually got graded A. Lesson learned!! With the knowledge behind us that we were actually expected to produce an academic poster, as opposed to something a lot more basic, me and my group got hard to work on our presentation. Believe it or not our biggest struggle as a group was finding an appropriate program to even start to produce our poster, this was down to both our lack of knowledge and experience in using such programs, and also i feel our high expectations of what we actually want to achieve. After fumbling around for a couple of hours we finally decided on an appropriate program and got hard to work. My distinct role on this project, is based around what information we would like to display on our poster, as to date i think this is coming together pretty well, and from what I've seen the presentation is starting to look nice. Lets just hope we can publish a finished project that meets not only ours but the tutors high expectations!!

WEEK 5- This week the course was focused around health and safety, and the idea of developing a health and safety plan for our group products. This week we were pretty confident of our abilities to perform this task well, as we had been through the pain of looking at the health and safety act in our previous year in the CAT course. Saying that, from my point of view it actually happened to be reasonably interesting as we were now actually looking at putting the act into practice, which actually held some relevance with me, and this time i could actually see the benefit of looking into what makes up the health and safety act. Given the nature of our project, we actually managed to come up with a pretty comprehensive list of potential risks for our workshop environment, in one way this made the task a lot easier for us as we actually had some information to work with. Our knowledge as a group of working in a boatbuilding workshop environment actually worked in our favour as we had the general idea of a lot of the safety measures we would need to follow. its always nice to have a bit of a headstart!! This week a couple of our group members(including myself) were pulled up for some aspects of our presentation skills, mainly with regards to reading from a piece of paper. Although i felt this was a little harsh as i was required to state our companies health and safety policy, having only had an hour to work on it! however i can understand sylilas concerns and hope to improve this by next week!!

*please note i have had some issues with regards to Internet access over the past few weeks moving house, so my log has been kept manually over that time, with the past few weeks all being uploading together.