Building SDI Journal Posts

Your SDI journal provides documented evidence of your experience, skills and understanding of:

• project management
• communication
• project implementation
• research
  
• In other words the journal provides formal evidence supporting the four criteria for the course.

To achieve your desired final award it can help to structure journal posts so that they include four components:

1. Description
2. Analysis
3. Reflection
4. Connection

1. DESCRIPTION

• What have you been doing?
• How did you do it?
• What resources did you require?
• Who did you need support from?
  

2. ANALYSIS

• What were the results?
• How did it work?
• Which research does this relate to?
• What pattern or trend is emerging?
  

3. REFLECTION

• How do you feel about what has happened?
• Have the results met your expectations?
• What have you learned? What has surprised you?
• What questions have emerged?
• What planning, knowledge, skills, resources... do you need for your next step?

4. CONNECTION

• What connections have you made with people, organisations, theories, ideas...
• Reply to comments others have made on your post (come back later and check).
• Comment on other journals in the SDI class - or journals/blogs/forums related to your project.
  

Don't forget to include pictures, graphics, screenshots, video clips, audio, links to relevant sites to enhance your post. If you don't have any multimedia clipart such as the one in this post can help illustrate a point as well as make your journal more interesting for the reader.

Not all posts will include all these elements but over 2 or 3 posts you should cover most of them.

Heather and I will make comments on you posts to help you - and you can comment on each others posts to do the same :-)

Elluminating Presentation?

I decided to try using Elluminate to record a presentation.
Students - check your email for the link to week 7's presentation.

Elluminate is really for live online presentations so I wonder if the class would like to try participating in a presentation online one week. That would give the freedom to choose a time so that people could join from campus or from home - remembering that not everyone has broadband at home.

I wonder if people would interact more or less online - because you can use chat and voice.

Coaching for Success

Cognitive coaching is about helping a person get to where they want to be. It isn't about helping them get to where you think they should be - that's teaching or consulting or parenting or bossing. It's more about listening - active listening.

I'm doing an 8 day course in cognitive coaching - and although I'm only half way through I better understand how to ask questions that help people to help themselves - an ideal skill for Student-Directed Inquiry.

In fact the official description of cognitive coaching is

to produce self-directed persons with cognitive capacity for high performance both independently and as members of a community.

You couldn't get much closer to the aim of this course!

Cognitive coaching is about 3 types of conversation - planning, reflecting and problem-resolving. In those conversations the coach does a lot of active listening and uses a range of strategies to help the person being coached to use their own skills to think through an issue to reach their goal.

The second half of the course begins in June - in the meantime I need to practice what I know. Lucky students! :-)

While cognitive coaching is designed for face-to-face conversations I think I can also use it online - in the comments I write on journals. I have already begun to use my new training when writing comments and I'll be interested to see how the responses compare with those of last year's students.