Meaningful experience
Will Richardson, a pioneer in using weblogs in educational settings, writes:
To me, the process of blogging is, most of the time, an ongoing series of steps: 1. Find and read material that is relevant to your life. 2. Capture the essence of this relevant reading, give credit to its source, and synthesize those ideas into a piece of writing that advances a personal, perhaps greater understanding of that topic 3. Publish that writing for response and for perhaps pushing someone else’s thinking on the subject. 4. Read some more. It’s a process that I think teaches and practices a great deal of critical thinking, information literacy, research, collaboration and composition skills that on one level I think may be difficult to replicate with any other writing instruction. I know traditional expository writing instruction comes close, but rarely is there the personal interest in the writing that blogging provides. And it is that personal interest that I think helps writers really own the process and make it real, which in turn leads to some real learning.
‘Relevance’ is the key term here. Surface learning is either a memorization of facts and information for the purpose of regurgitation, or it’s carrying out a series of mental actions to simply finish a task (like pulling an all nighter to write a paper). Either way, what is ‘learned’ doesn’t stick around for too long. Deep learning, however, is a search for meaning that involves exercising the intellect and developing cognitive facilities. On the subject of using weblogs as self-reflective learning tools, Sebastian Fiedler has written about the importance of conversation in personally meaningful learning. I think Will’s ‘ongoing series of steps’ outlined above is hinting at this. When we converse, we always talk about what we *want* to talk about. We don’t spend too much time on boring topics. If our learning is to be deep and lasting, it must be personally meaningful.
So….I would like to add something to Will’s first step. As an alternative to starting with reading material that is relevant to one’s life, I think it is wise to also consider starting with a meaningful experience. It could be a physical feeling, an emotion, a dream, or something interesting that happened recently or in the remote past. This way, we start with what’s REAL to us. By doing so, we provide authentic reading material that others might easily relate to (being human too!) and reflect upon for their own development of awarenss. In formal education, I think we tend to place too much emphasis on products of the intellect rather than what’s happening at the physical and emotional level. After many years of this type of conditioning, we tend to lose touch with what’s happening *now*, resulting in a mild (or in some cases severe!) disassociation with reality.
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