Personal Blogs

I've been in education both as a student and teacher for many years and believe that reflection is an important aspect of both.  Being able to reflect on one's learning develops strong independent learners and being able to reflect on content promotes deep learning and real understanding of a subject.  Reflective practice helps a learner build a much clearer picture of their own strengths and weaknesses and to develop strategies to improve.  However, as Moon (2001) suggests this does require some training to help the learner develop good reflective practice, including clear and constructive feedback on their work to inform their reflection.  As Moon also suggests, explaining the value of reflection and providing examples is also important.  On two modules I teach for the OU students have to do a 'self reflection' of 50 words at the end of their assignment on a specified aspect of the experience and this enables me to guide their reflection a little.  In H808 reflection is a large part of the module activities and assessment. Blogging is a useful way to reflect and I've started adding a weekly post to the blog on my eportfolio about how I'm feeling about the module so far and where things have gone well and why things haven't gone so well.  Moon made a very good point about emotion in reflection which I believe is thoroughly underestimated in all learning theory.  Much of my learning and work does involve quite bit of frustration and anxiety, as well as pleasure and elation at times, and I intend to also explore my emotions with regards H808 as well.  My reflective blogs remain private however as I think that if I know they can be read by others then they won't be true reflections as Crème (2005) suggests with regards assessed reflective activity.

References

Moon, J. (2001) ‘PDP working paper 4: reflection in higher education learning’ (online), The Higher Education Academy. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id72_Reflection_in_Higher_Education_Learning.rtf [Accessed 23 September 2012]

Crème, P. (2005) ‘Should student learning journals be assessed?’, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 287–96. Available from: http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602930500063850 [Accessed 23 September 2012]