Making Connections

Apart from becoming rather bogged down with information - or should that be blogged down? - my reading about blogging in tertiary eduction is starting to make some connections. For our Advanced Directing paper, a large proportion of our grade was for a reflective journal. We were supposed to make frequent entries into this journal but were not given much guidance about what these entries were supposed to look like. This was a conscious decision on the part of the lecturer - and a decision I actually agreed with - since she did not want us to just copy an exemplar. However, as a student, such a decision does not help the student. We were looking for concrete guidance and were not terribly interested in the dogmatic philosophy behind the assessment. On the other hand, we were not given any guidance - in the form of articles to read - on why we were doing this assignment and what we were supposed to be getting out of it.

This journal was supposed to be a record of our learning throughout the year. Since such a large proportion of our grade rested on it, however, the lecturer checked it once during the year. This was the only feedback we received before the journal became due. There was little incentive for us to share our journals - or entries from them - to get an idea of what our peers were doing. Also, because we were not encouraged to share the journals, many of us fell into the trap of not writing in them frequently but rather back-dating a lot of entries after we realised that months had gone by without writing anything.

It seems that a blog would have been an ideal solution to this problem. Not only would this have provided us with more guidance from what our peers were doing but it would also have fulfilled the spirit of the exercise more fully since having a public record would have kept us honest about our posting. These blogs could have also helped increase our collegiality - particularly important since there were only 5 of us in the class - and increase our number as we became part of a much wider community.