Who would have thought a duvet cover could inspire?

Earlier today I stripped my bed and put a load of washing on. I’m one of those people who have to make the bed straight away or I would regret it when it comes to later on when I just want to crawl under the duvet and fall asleep. I gathered clean pillow cases and a bed sheet, but when I looked for the clean duvet cover, it was nowhere to be seen. This was an impossible scenario to me; if it wasn’t in its rightful place, in the wash or out to dry, where on earth could it be? How could a duvet cover be misplaced?

Several head scratching minutes later, I noticed pile of clothes in the spare room and there, peeking through, was the missing duvet cover! That was the moment that it hit me – my approach to study has well and truly changed…dramatically!

Until today, if you asked  how I approached study, I would have told you it was exactly the same as when I was at school, university and two evening courses I have studied. I would have been lying to you - “new Caroline” has replaced “old Caroline” without me even noticing!

“Faffing” was my best friend – “Faffing” is procrastination. When it came to studying, old Caroline would do everything but study and thrived on the adrenaline of the night before a deadline. Until the assignment or exam was less than a week away, I would find every excuse not to study. It’s funny how around exam time, I needed to hoover, polish, clear out my wardrobe, do the dishes, clean the bathroom...anything but study! This is why the duvet incident is so significant to me ; the old Caroline would never have let a pile of clean clothes gather up while there was study to do, this was an opportunity to “faff” staring me right  in the face! I know the reason for this change is time pressure. So many things eat into my time, so time is precious. If I have a core text to read that I know should take 30minutes, I could “faff” before settling down to it, but this would result in it taking twice as long and missing out of 30 mins that I could spend on other things.  New Caroline has the ability to realise that H808 is part of life at the moment, but not my whole life.

"So i say thank you for the music..." – When old Caroline was revising for anything or writing an essay, I had to have noise in the background, whether it be music or the TV on in the background. I couldn’t work in silence as my mind would wonder. The last time I studied was a year ago and even then, I did always have music in the background. Now for some reason, I need silence (although it’s quite ironic as I have music playing as I write this). This again is something I’ve just realised. The reason for this change isn’t as clear compared to why I no longer “faff”.  Has it something to do with the subject – could it be because I am really interested in the topic, I want to give it every part of my attention so I can absorb it all? Did my mind previously wonder as I was interested, but not as interested? Am I able to listen to music at the moment as I’m not concentrating as such, but reflecting? Is it just age and it’s harder to concentrate? Regardless of why, the fact is new Caroline needs to study H808 in silence.

Do what I like first, do the not so nice things at the very end – Old Caroline would look at the overall task, pick out what was comfortable to do, do it, and leave all the “horrible parts” to the end to stew over and complete the night before when the adrenaline would kick in. New Caroline loves nothing more than ticking a task as complete before moving on to the next.  If I know the next activity I need to do is quite challenging, or not as interesting as I’d like, I realise the motivation for me it knowing that if I do it and tick it off, it means that’s it over and done with and I can move on to the next task. Now, if I left it (as I previously would have), it would act as a de-motivator. Again, if I reflect as to why I now work like this, I think it ties into the procrastination again and realising I don’t want to always have in the back of my mind that I have to do something that  I don’t particularly want to do –this is something I can control. New Caroline’s carrot for the H808 journey is ticking each activity off and feeling good about it.

So I’ve evolved in how I study, and it was the duvet cover that made me realise this. As I study H808, be prepared to come to a messier house if you’re calling in for coffee, and if that’s an issue for you, best that I come around to your abode until next February!

There's no "we" in REFLECTION, only "I" - my student guide to reflective writing:

When I look at my reflection in the mirror, I see things I am happy with and then things that I want to change.

I look in the mirror now and think my hair is sitting well and I like the jewellery I have chosen for my outfit. However I notice I’ve put on too much blusher and my shoes don’t go with my jeans. So I’m going to change my shoes and tone down my make up, which will make me happy (as I can be).

This is the same as using reflective writing to learn from our experiences, both personal and academic. It’s only when we hold them up in the mirror that we see what worked well and what we have learned that we can do differently next time.

The gird below can act as a framework to help you write your reflection. As an example, I have used it to reflect on my last holiday. Notice the use of "I" and not "we", as reflection is based on our personal perception.

1. What was your experience and what did you hope to gain from it? In June, I spent a week in Portugal with 2 of my friends. I went on the holiday to relax and completely switch off. I wanted to soak up the sun, have great fun, not worry about anything and create happy memories.

2. Putting yourself back in the experience, how did you feel? (think about your senses: what did you taste, smell, touch, see, hear) When I think back to the holiday, I associate it with bright colours as it was sunny, full of laughs and at night, the place was lit up with various lights and colourful cocktails! During the day there was a contrast, as I felt relaxed as it was peaceful, calm and serene by the pool.

3. How would you mark the experience on a scale of 1-10 (10 being absolute success) and what contributed to this score? I would give it 8 out of 10. I loved Portugal, I loved the company, I loved the weather, the food and the cocktails!

4. What would you do next time to increase this score by 2? Next time I would definitely stay for 2 weeks as I felt a week was too short. As I would stay longer, I would think about doing more excursions and seeing different parts of Portugal. I would go at the same time of the year as I liked the climate. The accommodation was pretty basic and there was no air con, so next time I would check this, as it was uncomfortable at night.

Blogging...good, bad or ugly?

Blogging conjures up loads of very happy thoughts and times for me. It “found me” in 2007 when I started travelling. I knew I wanted a permanent record of my time away which wouldn’t get lost, or become unreadable and could be shared with others.

 I have always loved the idea of keeping a physical diary to, but I knew I would struggle to keep it up for the 9 months I was away. Probably every Christmas from the age of 7 -17 I got a diary, and every year, my resolution was to keep one. If I could place these diaries now, I guarantee I would be able to tell you what happened on the 1^st and 2^nd of January from 1990 – 2000, but from the 3^rd January onwards the pages would be blank!

I have found this blog to be a totally different experience to my travel blog . My  travel blog was to serve as a record of the events I wanted to remember, I would say more than the emotions I felt. It also acted as an “online postcard” to those at home. Even the days that I felt were “insignificant” or “nothing in particular happened”, I wanted to reference as these could trigger many more memories later on, which they did. I still love going back to it and how reliving the memories. In some ways, I now also see how it was quite therapeutic in making me feel connected to home as I was letting everyone know what was happening.

This blog is more focussed on reflecting, sharing my opinions and challenging my ideas. In terms of the usefulness of blogging for reflecting, I think it is a very valuable means of doing so, but in the same breath, I stress that I find it valuable to me. As eluded to in this blog, I am a computer person, writing something down physically is not how I do things. In fact I know if I had to write this on paper, it would take me twice as long and I would suffer writers block. Having a space that specifically forces me to consider my opinions towards a subject provides me with the focus to reflect.

I can see also relate to how blogging could terrify people. The fact that it is public, there are so many blogs out there to compare to and people can openly critique them is daunting. This can also pose another issue that blogs, specifically used for students to reflect, are used to write what the student thinks someone want to read or what they are being assessed against, rather than what they actually feel. They may use it as a “tick box” exercise rather that what is true to them. Experiences may be exaggerated or also played down, with sometimes the biggest fear not being the public’s opinion, but their peers and how their thoughts compare to this group.

In summary, my attitude to the usefulness of blogging in aiding reflection is it’s a tool that works for me. As with any tool, it won’t suit anyone, and that’s why there are various ways and frameworks available to choose from. We are all different, so a “one size fits all” tool for reflecting would be liquid gold!  It is the role of the elearning professional (with or without the “e”) to find what works best for their students when it comes to reflecting and also base this on the purpose the reflection (is it personal/public, to be assed or not etc).  In the same way different learning styles are incorporated into the classroom, should different reflecting styles be included to?

It’s not “win or lose”, it’s “win or learn”!

I was delivering an “Assertiveness” training course last week and used a phrase ”win or learn”. I have no idea where it came from; perhaps it was something I had heard before and filed away for a rainy day, or perhaps it was a “caroline-ism” that was coined in the heat of the moment. Whatever its root, it turns out the phrase made an impact to one particular person I was training, as it dawned on them “even if something goes worse than I thought, I can still use it to learn how to handle it next time”. Could this be a snippet of reflection in the training room? Was I promoting reflection, as defined by Dewey,“to enable students to learn to learn from experience, or to make greater use of learning where there is no formal guidance or teaching.”? 

If you asked me this time last week what my attitude to reflection was, I could have answered from my personal perspective and from the a learning context. From studying this module, how I view how I reflect hasn’t changed, but I have been awakened to the learning context and to be honest, challenged in my use of reflection.

Firstly, looking at myself, I would definitely describe myself as a reflector. I have always been to some extent, however I would say it has very much come to fruition over the last 2 years, having dealt with a series of unpleasant personal experiences. In some respect, I see now how reflection has shaped and strengthened my coping mechanism. In the context of problem solving, I “mull over” problems to help find a solution (I might also put this down to my stubbornness and determination to prove that for every problem there has to be, an often simple, solution!). I also know that the best place for me to reflect is in the car on the way home, often from work. This has reaped far more answers for me, compared to "dwelling" on the issue at my desk. Reflection to me personally is best defined as

“..a form of mental processing…that we use to fulfill a purpose or to achieve some anticipated outcome. It is applied to relatively complicated or unstructured ideas for which there is not an obvious solution…” (based on Moon 1999):

When it comes to the learning context, I would have said I see it as quite integral part. I suppose I’ve always been in the Kolb train of thought (have an experience, reflect on the experience, learn from experience then try what you have learned). I would say I do promote reflection inside the training room, however this module is challenging me to think “do I promote it outside of the training room?”

Most of my training sessions start with a time of reflection (which I’ve just realised). An example of this would be for “Time Management” course where I pose the questions at the start “Tell me a time you would have liked to better manage your time. How did you feel during the experience? How did you feel after? What would you have preferred the outcome to be? What would you have done differently to achieve this outcome?”

At the end of a training session:
Yes I do ask all to share how the new learning’s will make a difference.
Yes I do encourage all to use their new skills/behaviours and seek opportunities to put them into practice.
Yes I do let them know that in 3 months time I’ll send them an evaluation to complete so I can measure the return on investment of the training.

But do I encourage them to step back at different stages, to pause and reflect on how they are getting on? To celebrate what they have acheived or learn from what they think could have gone better?

No I don’t think I do.

Now to me, the reality is reflection is almost as important as the initial learning as this is where the development continues and the maturity in that subject.

The million dollar question then is how to instigate a “reflective culture”? I think this is something that will be reflected on in my coming car journeys home!

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 (last accessed 8 June 2011).

Reflection 2.2

This week was our first collaborative group exercise, in which we had identify the drivers of eportfolio developments.

To be honest, when I first looked through the group exercise I wondered what relevance it would have to me and my development to know why UK, USA, Europe and beyond are driving eportfolios. As I journey towards becoming an elearning professional, what I found more relevant was understanding what eportfolios are and their benefits and limitations. This is the focus I tend to, and need to take on a daily basis, as it allows me to reflect what the impact will be of eportfolios in my workplace. I feel after all the core reading, I am in a better position to do so.  


The skills needed to work together in an online group are quite different to a face to face class, where you have a class at specfic times in the week. What is difficult about distant learning is by nature, it is flexible. For example I knew that the week was going to be particularly busy time for me, with limited time to log on, so most of my time was spent offline, reading and making notes. That’s why at the start of the task, I posted on the forum suggested groups of who could take on particular regions, so that I knew where to focus my reading,

Apart from that example, I don’t feel I was particularly proactive in leading, informing, or motivating the group, as the limited time I had online was mainly spent making sure I had uploaded all I had to, understanding how to set up a wiki  and having a look through the posts. I suppose I was also still “finding my feet” and getting used to this new way of studying. This is something I want to change in the future, as I know I can lead, inform and motivate “offline”, which I am comfortable with, so want to transfer these skills to “online”.
On my part, there was very limited additional discussion in the forum. My focus was more on getting though the core reading to update the drivers template. I suppose the fact that we came up with a template that everyone agreed on meant that we were all on the same wavelength to some extent? There was discussion in the forum of which I tended to agree and that's what I voiced.


Overall I feel the completion of this task is most relevant to my research competency due to the vast amount of core reading that has definitely increasde my knowledge of eportfolios by 600%! There was also a touch of technical skills in terms of wiki set up of how to set up wikis (as mentioned in my previous blog).

What I know this week that I didn’t last week…

You can learn a lot in a week…although in the same breath, it can feel that you forget a lot in a week too! It is simple to reflect on what you have learnt in the past week if it was something significant. I think it is easier to pick out these “eureka” moments from childhood – last week I couldn’t ride my bike, this week I can; last week I couldn’t tie my shoe laces, this week I can; last week I couldn’t count to 10, this week I can. As I get older, these “significant” learnings tend to be replaced with the question of how my knowledge in a specific area has grown within the week.

I suppose in the context of this course, I can clearly identify two area that I didn't know as much about about this time last week, and they are eportfolios and wikis.

I mentioned in a previous blog that when it comes to technology, at times I realise that I have been using something or have awareness but never realise what the proper term is – I feel this is exactly the route I have gone down with eportfolios. I knew what a portfolio was, and as per my first blog , I know what an “e” in front of something means, so by putting these 2 facts together, I worked out that it must be some sort of online/electronic collection of evidence. From all the reading and research of this week, I guess my instinct wasn’t far off.

As for wikis, I do use something similar to a wiki in work, but again I had never heard it referred to under this name. I just refer to it as a “shared document” or “an online document to update”. In the first week of the course, I had updated one so I am comfortable with how to edit (which is very similar to your standard Microsoft tools). I wasn’t aware this time last week how to set one up and that’s why I shouted for “help” in our group forum. So now I can set up and edit a wiki as if my life depended on it. It may not look pretty or glamorous, but thankfully at this stage, that’s not the point of it!

So that’s what I have learnt this week, I’m sure the coming weeks will have lots more learnings!

Technology and me - do we go together like a horse and carriage?

It’s my dad’s 60^th birthday today. He had never switched a computer on in his life until 20^th May 2007. I remember the exact date as it was the night before I moved to Sri Lanka for 6 months.  I basically set up an email account for him and showed him step by step how to write and read an email. From that day on, I think I got an email a day!  5 years on he can navigate around the World Wide Web, he still has his moments (asking me about “microwave office”) but he gets by.

I’m using this entry to reflect on my technical skills. I would say technology and I have a similar relationship as my dad has with the internet – I get by. I tend to be a quick learner, and when it comes to technology, I learn my doing. I like to keep it simple and learn what I need to know about it and then as I use it more, I experiment and build upon my skills. I find that if I am first introduced to something technical by listening to what people have to say about it or reading it, then my head converts it into something far more complex, so I prefer to dabble in it myself. The realisation then is either a) its not too bad b) o is that what it is, I’ve used that but never knew it was called that, or c) yes I still don’t understand it, someone talk me through it in very simple terms!

At the moment, Wiki, google apps, eportfolios are all a foreign language to me, however I know as I start to investigate them and use them, we will hopefully develop a great relationship!