English 2223 writing a learning journal

English 2223
The Page and the Stage
February 2008

Learning Journals

writing a learning journal

So what kind of thing constitutes a learning journal? I said back in the course introduction that at some point I would ask you to begin writing a regular learning journal. What I said was:

Every week you'll need to spend a half hour or so identifying and explaining the most important learning you've experienced in the preceding period, and the people from whom you learned it, and how. The learning journal entries will "count" toward your commitment to the course, like other assignments, and by their nature (like many other assignments in this course), there's no way to do them later. So one of the things you'll need to do is budget the time to do this every week. I set up a program to "harvest" them (copy them to a storage area) automatically every Sunday night (after midnight; in fact, at 2 am). I think you'll find it more than simply a task to get done: in my experience, this kind of log is the best possible way to make you feel more confident about your own learning.

Now's the time to begin that process. You should budget a half hour or so every week -- it doesn't matter when, but if it's the same time every week you'll find it easier -- simply to think back over the past week's work (in this first case, it'll be more than a week, and you might want to budget a bit more time) and write -- for yourself, for others in the class, and eventually for me -- about your learning in this course. To help you think about it (it's not easy, I know, to think for yourself about what you've learned, especially when everything about your educational experience has suggested that that's somebody else's business), here are some suggestions for things you might know, understand, or value now that you didn't before you began this process (some of these may seem irrelevant to what we've been doing so far, but I include them here because they're issues I hope you'll be having opportunities to think about in the next weeks):

Start by just listing what you've done in connection with the course for the week: what you've read, what you've written. Then think about what you learned in that process.
You may have learned some things about scripts, by reading them, by reading what other people had to say about them, or by listening to and reading what a task force has had to say.
You may have learned some things about how people's experience of reading is shaped by their expectations, or how people's experience of theatre is shaped by what they know and expect.
You may have learned some things about what sorts of information are most important to certain uses, and why.
You may have widened your range of what you might expect from theatre, from reading scripts, from hearing about them.
You may have found some new or different research strategies.
You may have come to a different understanding of how writing can be used, how it might be valued, what kinds of things make it useful and interesting -- or useless and boring.
You may have learned some things about how you learn, or how others learn.
You may have learned something I haven't even come close to anticipating here; if it's about reading, writing, seeing plays, theatre, or learning, talk about that.

One thing you need to bear in mind is that every time you state a generalization you should try to connect it to something specific. Phrases like "for instance" or "for example" are your best friends. Visit them often.

Each week, you'll need to add a new, dated entry at the top of that file (so that entries are in chronological order, from the most recent down, like a blog -- which, really, is what this amounts to).

Formatting

Your learnlog.htm file should have the following format:

Top left: your name
Learning journal for English 2223

Date (of the most recent entry)

Text of the most recent entry

Date (of the entry preceding that one)

Text of the entry preceding that one

There is an example in my engl2223 folder; you can see it with this link:

people.stu.ca/~hunt/engl2223/learnlog.htm

By the end of the day today your learnlog.htm file should exist. By Sunday night (specifically, before 2 am Monday morning) there should be a date line and some thoughtful and reflective text under it.

To the list of prompts for "The Page and the Stage"
To Russ Hunt's Web Site