Weekly Learning Reflections

Objectives

These reflections are a personal reflection about what you’ve learned over the week, and serve as a way of tying together different readings on a similar theme.

Basics

  • ~600–800 words (a broad range because some days you’ll have more to say than others)
  • Make sure they make it clear you’ve read the assignment
  • Free of typos and basic grammatical errors
  • Posted on the discussion board by MIDNIGHT on FRIDAYS (unless otherwise noted on the syllabus)

What you need to do:

There are two facets to these posts; you should address BOTH about equally in your posts.

  1. Address the question(s) on the syllabus for that Friday based on the readings for the week.
  2. Describe your own learning experience with the readings for the week. You might write about some combination of the following:
    • What ideas from the readings did you find most interesting? Why?
    • Conversely, what was least interesting to you? Why?
    • What challenges did you encounter with the readings?

If you’d like, you can divide your post into two halves, one for each facet. However, you can also blend everything together if you find it easier to relate your own opinion of the readings while you’re answering the syllabus questions. I suspect some weeks it will be easier to separate the two facets and other weeks it will be easier to mix them up. Maybe it depends on your mood. Or how tired you are. Or how interesting you thought the readings were. Just do whatever works for you as long as you’re addressing both aspects of the assignment in roughly equal proportions. And make sure it’s obvious from your post that you’ve done the reading!

Reflect more than summarize

For both parts of your reflection, I’m much more interested in reading about YOUR PERSONAL TAKE on the questions and YOUR LEARNING EXPERIENCE than reading a summary of the readings. Of course in addressing the questions or describing what you found most interesting, you’ll end up restating some ideas from some of the readings as a way indicating what you want to talk about. When I say “don’t summarize”, I mean that the bulk of your post should be your own thinking and analysis, not just restatement of what’s in the article.

But this exercise is NOT about just regurgitating the readings or identifying the “most” important points—everyone will learn something different from them and have different opinions. If we all do this, we can learn a lot more from skimming through each others’ posts, which is a very efficient way of getting different takes and new perspectives on the readings.