Blog Post Portfolio Essay

You will write an essay in the form and style of critical blogpost on a

topic from the course. This is an opinion piece, though your opinion needs
to be grounded in the science studied during the course. This assesses all
3 learning outcomes:

1. Systematically understand how human brain research is used

to study cognition
2. Critically evaluate controversies about the use of functional
brain imaging
3. Devise arguments to produce accessible, scientific writing

Topic: Can scientists use brain imaging to read people’s minds?

Use language accessible to a university-educated reader with no

technical knowledge of brain imaging.  This is really important –
not easy to do, but a key part of this assessment as well as a useful
skill for various things you might find yourself writing in future
outside ‘the academy’. We will talk about lay writing in class, too.

Remember too that being 'critical' does not mean just imply

pointing out weaknesses of the sources you are writing about. It
means making a coherent and reasoned judgement of your own.

The recommended number of references is 2-5 - but use your

judgement and cite the key sources. The aim is to allow your
readers to check any major facts or findings or details if they have
the technical knowledge, but without assuming that your readers
have that knowledge. Please feel free to link to websites too (as
Turnitin doesn't recognise hyperlinks, you will have to approximate
this using numbered footnotes which contain the relevant url).

Please note that this assessment does NOT require formal

academic referencing nor APA format. Formal referencing will lead
to your work seeming more academic and less lay-accessible, and
will be marked down. You should refer to sources as a journalist
would - see the examples of excellent blogs given on the week-by-
week class topic pages.

The idea here is not to do a lot more reading – in this interactive

course you are expected to do most of the reading as you go along.
You also do not have to have a completely novel view, the key thing
is to make it interesting and make it your own.
No abstract is required. You may include one box - for example for
definitions - this should not include a substantial amount of text.
You may include pictures, but as this is not an academic paper style
essay, do not include legends.

Your blogpost essay should be no more than 2000 words but it is

very likely that the best ones will be shorter than that. 

Here is some more information about the assignment.

Each of these features is a criterion that I will use to assess your blog
post.

Content: You should focus on the information that you think will allow you
to write the most informative, accurate and interesting piece for your
target audience. You have two options:

(A) You can go for breadth, by including material from multiple aspects of
the topic; OR

(B) You can go for depth, and include only material from 1 specific aspect
of the topic.

Note: In both cases, the length of your blog post would be the same.

Audience and style: You are targeting University students with no

specialised knowledge of neuroscience – in particular those in the early
stages of their education. This is REALLY important! This blog is not like a
standard essay or lab report. A key part of this assignment is to avoid
jargon where possible, explain key terms where these are essential, and
write engagingly. ‘Wordiness’ will be marked down.

Note: Tips for writing clearly for a non-specialist audience will be given on
Canvas.

To demonstrate originality, please include information from at least 5

sources outside of the assigned readings (using the additional papers you
found and read each week is fine; recommended readings are OK, but your
own are better). In some blogs, one source might be the main focus, but it
should not be the only source.

Empirical evidence: All the claims and suggestions you make need to be
directly related to scientific evidence related to the course, which should
be properly cited.
Note: The citation format used on the blog is a bit different to standard
APA style; you should use numbered footnotes instead.

Pictures: The blog post should be readable and visually appealing. You
must include two pictures in your blog post: these can be taken from the
internet, or photos you take, or hand-drawings. They work best when they
are relevant to the content, but should NOT be scientific figures, and
should not have legends.

Title: Please think of an engaging title to attract readers! It also needs to

fit your particular content.

Format: Type your blog post in a Word (or similar) document, and copy &
paste the pictures into the appropriate location in the text.

Note: If you wish, you may include up to 2 boxes containing text. But
these inclusions should play an explanatory role, rather than adding
length, and must not take the word count over the maximum.

Length: Your blog post should be UP TO 2000 words long, but I

recommend aiming for 1,200-1,500 (not including the references, but
including any text in boxes).

Note: Longer than 2000 really will be too long!

Online resources:
There’s a good MVPA methods lecture on Jody Culham’s
fmri4newbies website ( (Links to an external
site.)http://www.fmri4newbies.com/lectures (Links to an external
site.)). The details of how to do the analysis can be skipped over for
purposes of this course, but you can get a first sense of it from
Culham’s walk through the first MVPA fMRI study, by Haxby et al.
(2001) (also to be covered in the lecture).

Some concerns about what MVPA is detecting, discussed by

Neuroskeptic: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/201
4/06/21/fmri-mvpa-crack-neural-code/#.VtmZ6-bFhGJ