Reflection is what I do in my professional environment as well as in my learning environment and not to mention during life in general. For me it means taking a step back and take a critical look at what it is I am doing and if necessary trying to change things.
Reflective Learning is quite a new experience for me. As a student, back in the old days, I experienced more teacher centric approaches than student centric approaches.
I think of reflective learning as a student centered approach: students are somehow more in control of their learning than when I was a student at university.
In this stage of my life, reflecting appears to be all about connecting the dots. Thinking about how everything is linked together. Reflective Learning might be able to help me to connect the dots. In H800 I experienced the connections as well. The various articles and assignments we had to do were all connected together and in the ECA it all came together (which was a nice Eureka-Moment!). During the course we were asked to use our Blog as a mean to reflect on what we were doing. The reflective activities were not as detailed and as specific as they are in H808 so far.
The H800 activities provided the opportunity to use (web 2.0) tools for learning, rather than using them as reflective tools, which we have to do more of in H808. From that perspective H800 was a very valuable course for me. It helped me to learn how to use my Blog properly and now I am benefitting from this.
For me blogging is an excellent tool to write down my reflections. It proved to be very useful in H800 (and H808) when I was reading back over what I had written about specific articles. I found out that my opinion of certain tools, articles and the H800 course had changed over a period of time (ie. I had changed from being an individual learner to a collaborative learner using collaborative tools).
It is good to have proof of this learning process in my blog.... I tend to forget things easily at my age!!
Reading other’s comments on how to use reflection in learning; it strikes me that it is not that easy to do. There seems to be other factors or issues in play as well: the student’s personality, the student’s writing style, the technical skills and so on.
All of this has to be taken into account. Reflective learning sounds very interesting and very useful too, but needs proper guidance as well.
Reflecting on your own learning can be a bit daunting. It is not always clear what is expected of you and what you are supposed to write. I had not been taught how to write reflectively and I’m sure I am not alone in this, so therefore I would argue that activities need to take this into account.