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Reflection in an Always-on Learning Environment: Has It Been Turned Off?
9/16/2005
The issue is not just about providing time to reflect, but recognizing that reflection for the purpose of learning is a skill that needs to be taught, possibly through an apprenticeship model. For example, at Middlebury College (VT), lecturer Barbara Ganley (mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/) has incorporated blogs (a web application that contains date and time-stamped posts, weblinks, and commenting features on a common web page) in her creative writing courses. In asking her students to make their thoughts public and open to commentary, to share their works in progress, and to be exposed to their peers and class community, she realized that as the instructor she also needed to engage in the same activities and risks she was asking her students to take. She did so by blogging on her own growth and evolution as a humanities and writing teacher integrating technology into the classroom. For both faculty and students, blogs have the potential to encourage reflective thinking and community building through "blogging-as-conversation" rather than just "blogging-as-monologue."
Another example of how reflection can be reframed for today's students is through such tools as electronic learning portfolios or e-portfolios. Reflection is an essential component of an e-portfolio and is inherent both in the process of portfolio creation (selecting which artifacts to include and juxtaposing learning experiences in a digital space) as well as the actual portfolio product (through annotations on individual or groups of artifacts which can then serve as a concrete context for reflection with an advisor or mentor). At St. Olaf College (MN) (www.stolaf.edu/depts/cis/web_portfolios.htm), students in individually-designed majors create e-portfolios in web pages. They use hyperlinks to illustrate the connections they have made among their courses, jobs and internships, clubs and organizations, studies abroad, and research experiences. The opportunity to create a rich representation of learning experiences while incorporating various media-photographs, documents, video, sketches, music-can be intrinsically motivating for students. At the same time, the public nature of e-Portfolios can enhance or otherwise alter social interaction and communication by facilitating the sharing of experiences and increasing occasions for dialogue and feedback among students, faculty, prospective employers, and the larger community.
The conceptual framework of the Learning Landscape, co-developed by Tracy Penny-Light of the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) and David Tosh of the University of Edinburgh (UK) (www.eradc.org/blog/archives/learning_landscape2.php), is one approach to thinking about the varied domains that comprise students' lives - academic, community, and workplace - and the overlapping areas that offer the most potential for integration, transfer, and re-use of knowledge in other learning contexts.
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