Project description
PERSONAL REFLECTIVE DIARY OF SEMINARS ATTENDED<br />
<br />
Writer must assume that he/she was the one that attended the seminars, to be able to effectively write the Reflective Diary.<br />
Four seminars were held on the following dates by the following people<br />

NOTE: Two references from each entry date to be used, making it a total of 8 references.<br />
<br />
1. 23 Jan, 2014: Seminar on Mining and Development, by: Gavin Hilson<br />
2. 30 Jan, 2014: Seminar on Agriculture and Development, by: Steve Wiggins<br />
3. 20 Feb, 2014: Seminar Presentation on Disaster and Development, by: Terry Cannon<br />
4. 27 Feb, 2014: Seminar Presentation on Rural Finance and Microfinance by: Howard Jones<br />
How should the diary be structured?<br />
<br />
An introduction, <br />
Section that lists your diary entries<br />
Conclusion. <br />
Each diary entry should be clearly identifiable with use of a sub-heading. The sub-heading should show a date (as you would do with a personal diary), and can include a reference to the content of the entry. <br />
For example:<br />
14th February 2013: Steve Wiggens’s talk on agriculture”<br />
OR<br />
14th February 2013: So what is all this fuss over agriculture anyway?”<br />
How should the diary be presented?<br />
The diary will need to be in word-processed format and presented in the normal manner (cover sheet, 12-point font size, double-spaced). Please display the word-count on the front of your submission.<br />
The 2000 word count is a guide meaning that this is all you should need to complete the exercise. <br />
A few hints/tips to keep the word count to a minimum are as follows: <br />

Write succinctly<br />
Use summarising statements/tables/diagrams where possible (although note that tables are included in the word count)<br />
Use of bullet points is fine<br />
Include diagrams and or ‘mind-maps’. However, please keep the appendix to a maximum of three pages of A4.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Should I include references?<br />
<br />
You must at least have two references from each speaker/entry date. That makes a total of 8 references<br />
<br />
You should include references in your reflective diary although, as this piece of work is mainly about your own thoughts and feelings, I wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be as many as in a more formal piece of work, such as an essay. References are very helpful in developing your arguments and backing up what you are saying. When you bring significant ideas into the dairy that are not your own, then they need to be properly referenced. Otherwise it is potentially plagiarism.<br />
<br />
Example of how the Personal Reflection Diary should be structured /worded:<br />
<br />
Example 1<br />
As stated in my previous entry (dated 6 Feb), Phillip Goodwin’s talk about his work as CEO of the NGO, TreeAid, left me in no doubt about the importance of participatory approaches to development. As he stated, participation helps to ensure that poor people’s views are adequately represented in development projects (Cernea, 1992).

Based upon my experiences working as an agricultural extension office for Oxfam GB, I’ve always assumed that participation is mainly something that just NGOs ‘do’ with communities at the local level, and these ideas rarely permeate into the world of ‘big business’. I was struck today therefore by Emma Raven’s presentation about her work at the international consultancy, ERM, as an Involuntary Resettlement project manager. Emma argued that adequate participation of the population being moved is a crucial element of any resettlement project, and that these issues are often discussed openly in the boardroom or private sector agents whose activities are inadvertently displacing people. <br />
<br />
Example 2<br />
If Emma is right, then it does indeed seem that participation has come a long way since Chambers urged us to ‘handover the stick’ in development projects back in the 1980s (Chambers, 1982). Perhaps this is something that I need to look into a bit more, using some of the more up-to-date material from leading international journals, such as World Development. I might also need to cultivate a more open attitude to the activities of large multinational corporations in sub-Saharan Africa. During my undergraduate degree in Social Development, it was often to stress by our lecturers that the extractive industries in developing countries tend to do more harm than good for local populations (see also the argument by Brown and Rosendo, 2010). But perhaps things are not as bad as they were portrayed. This is an issue that I will hopefully learn more about in Fletcher Tembo’s talk on good governance on 6th March.