English 2783
The Art of Fact: Contemporary Literary Journalism
Prompt # 4
16 September 2010
 
 

Learning Journals

It seems to me time to begin keeping learning journals (as explained in the introduction to the course).

My suggestion about doing this is that you should budget a half hour or so at some regular time every week to write your reflection. I suggest writing it with a word processor, saving it, and then posting it on the learning journal blog. Here are some instructions for doing it the first time.

Composing a learning reflection

What to write? How to write it? The reflections will be public, so soon you'll be able to see what other people have done with this challenge. In the meantime, here are some suggestions:

Take a half hour or so to compose this.  Don't dash it off as a perfunctory note. Save this as a file -- Word, whatever -- before you post it.

Posting a learning reflection

Like much else in Moodle, this is surprisingly straightforward, but may not be a familiar process. Here are the steps.

That's it. Next time, you do exactly the same thing, and your new post will appear above the old one.

Reading learning reflections

As people post their own, there will be a pulldown menu at the top, that will give you a list of "Visible individual" blogs -- that is, everyone who's posted a journal; you can read any of them by clicking on the name.

I'll remind people regularly to read other people's learning journals (I'll put a table of links directly to them from the main course Web site). What other people say counts as learning may be a surprise to you, and you may discover that things they say suggest, or remind you of, kinds of learning you hadn't thought of. This is intended to be a process whereby your definition of what constitutes learning grows and changes. That's part of my intention in all my teaching: to help people become more aware of when (and what) they're learning. It's not about accumulating factual information.

Deadlines

You should do this once a week. I'll count them as done once a week, as of 2 am Monday morning (that's Sunday night). So any time between one Sunday night and the next will count as an entry for that week.


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