Even people who are deaf from birth are capable of developing symbols for objects and actions – I would suggest that it’s our innate intellectual capacity to use symbols to find abstract solutions that’s important, rather than the exact form these symbols take.

This blog – particularly this first post – is rather old now… very much at the start of my learning journey about blogging, social media and learning. The project culminated in a shot video which you might find useful… hope so anyway! http://lindsayjordan.edublogs.org/2009/05/29/blogging-with-students-how-and-why/

Jo

Yes – it does mean something to me. Further to my response to your comment on the previous post, I am beginning to feel strongly that rigour is at the heart of effective reflection – note that this happily also encompasses the question of honest reflection – and the input and involvement of a number of other parties naturally makes for a more rigorous evaluation of theory and practice.

I think what you are getting at is that there is not much point in sitting around reflecting on stuff unless it results in some sort of change.

You’re probably right. And if my ultimate goal is to improve my own learning and my students’ learning, then we’re not just looking at some kind of open-ended reflective process – it also needs to be teamed up with the usual requirements for achieving change – a long-term goal, a timescale, some short-term goals, indicators to measure whether those goals have been achieved, and a clear and reasoned method for how they are to be achieved.

I guess that this is the root of the dilemma of assessing the reflective process. One school of thought might suggest that the success of a reflective process is measurable by the degree of change, or improvement in practice, that has been achieved. Another school of thought would claim that this way of thinking discourages true, honest reflection and encourages the misuse of ‘reflective’ journals and reports to paint one’s achievements in a favourable light. Therefore they would claim that the reflective process should be assessed entirely separately to the degree of change/improvement apparent in a professional’s practice.

However, you then might return to the point that there is little worth in a reflective process that does not result in useful change, and, although we know that dishonest reflection is less effective, honesty does not guarantee effectiveness. Therefore assessing the actual reflective process is possibly a total waste of time. You might say that if a student or professional has been able to demonstrate positive change in their practice, it’s likely to be partly down to effective reflection, but at the end of the day does it really matter how they did it, if it worked?

So, now that this initial stage of seemingly aimless contemplation is coming to a close, I’ll at least be coming up with some goals and action points for facilitating change in my own practice as I am writing up my assignment for Understanding Learning and Learners, which – here goes, I shall commit to a timescale – I am intending to submit in draft form on Monday January 5th.

You say at the outset: “I see blogging primarily as a tool for reflective learning”. I tried a form of blogging with Jack’s Monday group back in the early 1990s when attempting to progress my dissertation – a sort of intellectual navel-gazing in the library (’reflection’) followed by the spasmodic publication of offerings (’blogging’) for consideration by the group. The final account contained the following realisation about why I wasn’t learning anything new.

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Roderick (1986) helped me to uncover a further possible reason for my lack of movement …

“…. The Enlightenment view, brilliantly expressed by Kant of the rational subject as an autonomous and self-dependent agent who was to examine and judge everything in independence from authority and tradition by means of reason courageously employed…”

In my search … I was assuming that a paradigm shift … was to be completed by the simple employment of pure reason in a rather more courageous manner than usual. But I was treating myself as my own object of contemplation … My dilemma was that I had an incomplete awareness of my ‘real material life processes’ … above all I was still regarding myself as an ‘object of contemplation’ rather than as a ‘field of action’. I had placed myself in the position of a person who grasps themselves firmly by the hair and tugs hard; and then is surprised not to find themselves rising off the ground.

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Blogging seems to me to often be an essentially one-way process; how can you make sure that, despite the new media, you are managing to avoid my earlier problem of being your own ‘object of contemplation’ rather than a ‘field of action’?

- Pete

I think that one of the last points you make:

“… I probably need to bear in mind … that existing models of reflective practice … have focused on reflection as a solitary activity rather than a collaborative one [Birney].”

frames an answer to the question you ask at the start i.e.:

“… What should I be doing in order to reach the deeper levels of reflection and therefore gain the most educational benefit from my blog – what kinds of questions should I be asking myself about my thoughts, feelings and ideas?”

My ideal is to live (i.e. have my practice/life) situated within a collaborative community of practice. Reflection takes place within dialogue / dialectical exchange which is the means of discourse used to generate new knowledge and understanding (as each member offers descriptions and explanations of their practice).

Hope this doesn’t sound too jargon-ridden and that it contains some meaning for you. Care to discuss?

- Pete

However, in the process of trying to type a response to your comment, I realised the value of planning what you want to say before you try to say it – something that people tend to do more when writing by hand (because they have to) than when typing (because they can edit as they go). So, in this respect, I think you have a point – because typing does allow for easy editing of drafts, we are getting lazier about planning what we want to write. However, I suspect that this often has a negative effect on our efficiency, rather than a positive one!

There are bloggers out there who claim that typing spontaneously helps them to clarify their thoughts. I wonder whether they would reach an even greater degree of clarity if they mapped out their thoughts first before starting to type? The answer is probably yes in some cases and no in others. The writer’s perceptions of their audience will also come into play – some writers will need to be totally satisfied with the eloquence of their writing in order to feel comfortable about committing their ideas to the screen, whereas others will feel that they can benefit from the process regardless of how coherently they feel they’ve communicated their thoughts.

(At a personal level, a friend of mine posits that being a vegetarian is a relief when it comes to buying food in a restaurant or supermarket, because it narrows down her potential choices to a manageable level!)

As someone who in a former professional life made a living from information management, I would make a distinction between overload of DATA and our relationship with INFORMATION. For me, information has a structure and a context, whereas data can be an uncontextualised mass, difficult to process without such an organising principle. In essence, I’m reinforcing your point on methodologies for structuring and processing – I just demonstrate my age and academic milieu by using a different analogy – a librarian or archivist doesn’t necessarily know every item of information in their repository, but they have a structure or signposts for finding it.

Thanks Ellie!