Teaching and Professional Fellowship Report 2004/5 : Improving reflective practice through learning journals and virtual learning environments.

Abstract

This paper describes work carried out within the Fellowship with the intention of increasing student achievement by improving students’ abilities to reflect, evaluate, and act upon their evaluations. I also sought to improve communication across a large Course. Previous external verifiers have recognised the lack of evaluative practice within Foundation Courses as a national issue. My work since 2002 has involved the introduction, implementation and development of new learning tools. These tools have evolved from the very simple: An A5 pre-printed journal, written into by students, called the Thinktank, to more complex virtual learning environments (VLE) within the University’s Blackboard site. A survey of students’ final major project portfolios indicates that students who use these tools effectively are more likely to achieve merit & distinction grades in their final examinations. To create the VLE I built and activated a Foundation Studies Blackboard site. I have found that both the Thinktank and Blackboard have merit and have attempted to combine their use across the course. I piloted a number of Blackboard-specific assignments to encourage on-line peer group learning through the use of asynchronous discussion boards. I observed a number of advantages in using discussion boards, which facilitate a combination of live, (slowed) discussion, and personal reflective practice. The use of discussion boards also brings more benefits for learners such as flexibility of time and place, more time to engage in an online debate, transparency, a certain levelling of different language abilities, automatic archiving: (students can revisit the discussion at any point). Taking discussion board ideas back into live studio debates produced a high level of student engagement. A more open-ended pilot, the moblog, allows students working on an expressive, selfdirected project to send SMS messages to a webpage within the Blackboard site. With this pilot I was interested in exploring the potential of the mobile phone as ‘sketchbook/ journal’. Students were positive about the pilot and despite the limitations of SMS messaging, quickly established a recognisable 'voice' and the beginnings of an online communit