It is a vital part of your practice as a designer to develop the ability to think back on the process of your learning and consider what has gone well or badly, how this came about and what could be modified in future to change the outcome. This may appear to an obvious and instinctive thing to do - for most people - with the assessment usually taking place subconsciously. However this exercise is designed to get you to consider one way of making this kind of thinking visible.
To complete this task you will need to find some student-written blogs that demonstrate that the student writer has been looking back over their design and learning process and considering what has happened and how they can alter their approach in future. This type of thinking we call reflection.
You will need to tag the blogs you find, adding some notes that explain what you found particularly significant about each and then share your results with me and your peers.
On completion of this learning event it is anticipated that you will appreciate the potential of using a blog to reflect critically on your learning.
If you have a del.icio.us account then skip to the next step.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where users
share websites they find with others with similar interests. Creating an account is
straightforward and you can add a plug-in to your browser that makes it very easy to mark
sites as you visit them.
This video offers an explanation of Social Bookmarking and del.icio.us in particular.
Part of the social aspect of del.icio.us is the ability to mark sites and then add them to the collections of other users in your "network". Select the "your network" link at the top of your main del.icio.us page and add the user "andrewsides" to your network. When you bookmark pages you will now have the option to add the bookmark to my collection. You can of course add as many users as you like to your network.
This is the difficult bit. You need to find blog postings written
by students in Art & Design where there is good evidence of reflective thinking
taking place. Where do you look? You could try
googling of course but it might be
better to look for colleges of Art & Design and hunt through their student work or
you could even look for appropriate tags in del.icio.us.
For the purposes of this learning event four different examples will be sufficient.
When you've found a good example of a reflective blog posting then
add it to del.icio.us. During this process you will have the opportunity to change the title of the page, tag it
and add some notes. Tags are useful when it comes to finding the bookmark again so you should
choose words that fit the content. For this learning exercise you must add the word
(tag) LEreflectblog to each of your blog bookmarks.
The notes panel is the place for you to add your comments on the page you are
marking. Take this opportunity to say what it is about this particular blog posting that makes it
good example of reflective thinking. This is an essential part of the learning exercise. There is
a very limited space to do this (255 characters) so choose your words carefully.
Just before you save the del.icio.us bookmark click on "andrewsides" and anyone else in "your network" you think might like to see it.
To see examples of blogs found by other students engaged in this task "subscribe" to the "LEreflectblog" tag by using the "subscriptions" link at the top of your main del.icio.us page.