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:

• Begin by summarizing what you've done so far in the term, to remind yourself and to give a context for your reader.
• List one or two examples of things you've learned through doing it that are more or less concrete -- for instance, if you'd read something about what happened in 1660, or what was happening with theatres, or who the main playwrights were, you might quickly summarize that.
• List an example or two of things you're beginning to come to understand, or connections you've made with what you already know -- for instance, you might, by reading the reports of other people, have come to a clearer understanding of what technologies were around and developed in the period, or what kinds of plays were dominant, and why.
• The most powerful demonstration of learning you can construct is the sort that shows you're able to do something or understand something that you didn't before; so, for example, you might apply what you learned to something new, or explain how it changes what you knew before.
• In all cases, you should write, if you can, about the process by which you came to learn or understand those things.

Posting a learning reflection

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

• Click on the link to "Learning Journals" on the main course page.
• Click on "New blog post."
• For "Title" it would be best to give a reader a hint of what you're going to say (your name, the fact that it's a learning journal, and the date are all given anyway).
• Paste your composed text into the editing window.
• Edit your text to make sure it's formatted as you want it.
• Click "Add blog post" down at the bottom.

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.