Thing 5: Reflective practice

I'm not managing very well to keep up with CPD23 (work! family!) but as I've almost finshed marking my portion of some reflective e-portfolios it seemed like a good time to blog about reflective practice. The first year students have to reflect on how their concept of Information Management has evolved through the module (that I co-teach). In case you are interested the criteria we mark to are: "Narrative clearly expresses how the student’s understanding of Information Management has evolved"; "Statements made in the narrative are substantiated by evidence"; "Presentation and organisation of portfolio"; "Quality, quantity and scope of evidence"; and "Spelling, grammar, syntax and reflective style."

We have a few assignments that are mainly about reflection, and also students always have to hand in a short individual reflection when they do any group work (that is actually a University requirement). Therefore one of the things we have to do is support the students in learning how to write reflectively, which is a hard thing to do (I mean writing reflectively is hard, but teaching it is hard too!).
At the Second Life educator's meeting last week this came up during our discussion, and a number of us agreed that a reaction from some students in the US as well as in the UK is (at least at the first year level) that it is challenging and they don't like it. So we know we have to get people into the habit of reflective writing, and provide guidance, we can't expect people just to do it (though of course there are also some people who do just do it).

My colleague Barbara Sen sets a reflective journal assignment as part of the Management module on our MA Librarianship course. The main post on reflective practice on the CPD23 blog has some excellent advice & readings, but I will add Barbara's powerpoint that she gave at LILAC last year Reflection: improving information literacy practice. Learning from the past, developing for the future, becoming a reflective practitioner and also the article (not open access, I think) Sen, B. (2010) "Reflective writing: a management skill", Library Management, 31 (1/2), 79 - 93.


Anyway all this is not saying much about my own reflective practice, except that since I am supposed to be teaching other people about it, I have to know what it is.  In terms of my teaching, I do always think about what I might have done differently and what I might do better next time. I don't think I ever do anything exactly the same twice running, because you can always see room for improvement: and of course every learner is different too.
It's probably best when I'm teaching collaboratively with someone I trust, because then you chew things over as you go along and get a different perspective, but with encouragement and you share the OMG moments as well. Obviously I aim to get the learners' perspective too. I suppose the most challenging reflective part is balancing these different perspectives with the desired outcomes for the session, class and programme to decide what to do next.

I think what I'm less good at is reflecting on my practice more broadly and worrying away at the bigger issues there. Also, I don't do that much reflective writing, although I do try to note down "improvements for next time" in teaching. One of the reasons I joined in with CPD23 was to do a bit more of this, including some things I might have got complacent about.
Being reflective about not keeping up with CPD23: at the end of the day I'm following CPD23 for my own benefit, and I can't see any point in beating myself up over not having "kept up to date" so far. The online presence and networks parts are issues where I do want to do something (to summarise, I have a lot of online presence, but it needs tidying up a bit). SoI think my "action" will still be to blog and take action when I feel alert and with some time to do something about it, rather than trying to get through the posts as quickly as possible.
The first photo was taken at the Creating Knowledge conference in Copenhagen in 2006 (it's not my handwriting, it must have been a break out group I was in). The second one is me reflected in a sculpture in Kristianstad when I was at another conference. I chose it over some more picturesque reflection pictures, because it had the "different perspective" in it. As you might guess, I just did a quick search through my photographs on "reflect".

Thing 4: Storify

I'm not keeping up with my cpd23 work at the moment, as I've too much to do at work, and also had to pay an unexpected visit to my mum, who wasn't feeling too good (she's 90). However, I spotted something I haven't tried out yet as part of Thing 4, so I spent a little recreational time this morning trying it out and working out whether I might use it.
This is Storify which makes it easy to pull together postings from various social media and add some headings and text. I was a bit disappointed that you couldn't edit the layout more, but now looking at other people's stories (some just one tweet long!) I realise I was thinking too much about "information" and not enough about "story". Still, here's my first attempt, on Information Overload. I've embedded it in slideshow format as that seemed a bit more manageable, this is the actual link: http://storify.com/sheilayoshikawa/information-overload.

I mostly thought about how I might use this in teaching. Even though my story is too much of a "resource" I think it it still could be a valid way to pull together some opinions and information, as a bundle of material to stimulate discussion in a class. I like the visual element.
I think it would be even better as something to use with students, getting them to tell their own stories with Storify about (for example) information overload. We have a first year class where sometimes we get students to find Flickr images to do with "research" as a way of getting into conversation, and using Storify might be an even better way to get people to reflect on what a particular concept meant to them. You could also pick a controversial event and pull together a story which illustrated the different ways in which people dealt with it, and the information literacy implications. The only issue (as with all these tools) is that you are telling students to sign up to something, i.e. give up some of their personal data to a 3rd party, which always gives ethical pause, but this application doesn't seem too intrusive.
I had some minor gripes, apart from the restrictive layout e.g. it seemed like you couldn't check what the links on a Twitter post were without actually leaping out to Twitter (which I wanted todo before I added a tweet).

Professional development in SL

One of the most regular professional events I attend is the Virtual Worlds Educators Roundtable (VWER) that takes place every Thursday at 7.30pm UK time in the virtual world Second Life (SL). It lasts an hour, and usually looks like this, with us sitting round and discussing education in text chat. It's a magic table,: as soon as a new person sits down it generates an extra chair, and you can expand the table a click.

Most of the people are from the USA (e.g. California, Montana), including Grizzla from Gwinnett College, whose students interacted with my students in SL last semester. A couple of other people are from the UK too. I'm the one with teal blue hair and a maxi dress. This week's topic was "What will YOU do in Virtual Worlds this summer (or winter)?" and people talked about some of their plans and projects, then the conversation deviated into whether people actually HAD a summer break and what encouraged or prevented people from getting things done. We also got into talking about students and what we experience of how they really react to using new technology, with useful books and websites mentioned along the way. Since some of us are regular attenders or know each other from other SL activities there was also some moaning about our workloads etc, some feeble joking and a lot of typing errors (nowadays I never seem to spell "the" correctly first time round).

As I said at the start, this is one of the most regular "development" type events I attend, which is why I'm mentioning it on the blog, as I thought I'd try and note things I'd call "development". Although we are in SL, people talk about other issues to do with teaching, as well. People are pretty honest about their experiences, and although some of the conversations seem to come round again and again, it's also one of the reassuring parts of the VWER meetings; you feel you can relax, and if you do a little bit of wandering off the point it isn't dreadful. It's interesting to meet with people dealing with education systems in different countries, and learn where their experience is the same and where it's different (a lot of the time it's pretty similar).

SL seems to have got rather unfashionable (despite the fact that virtual worlds keep popping up in Horizon reports) but it really has been somewhere where I've been able to discuss and reflect on my teaching, in particular.Also, I do like the quirky visual side of things e.g. seeing what Grizzla will be this week (this time a yellow crash test dummy).