Self Directed Learning

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to talk about here. I mean, I’ve skimmed through the readings I’m supposed to do (they’re big and scary) and I’ve found some charts with items that can potentially be called “skills” related to this topic, but I’m not quite sure how to approach discussing them. Most of the items remind me of things that I would see on a rubric for a high school project. “Students identify, determine, and articulate their own learning goals”…what am I supposed to say about this? “Yes, of course I identify, determine, and articulate my own learning goals, professor. Every good, focused, and determined student does this on a daily basis.” No, of course I don’t say this. To be even more honest, I don’t think I even do this kind of thing for school. I basically follow the format of “this is your assignment, learn this then do that”, in which my learning goals are articulated, determined, and identified already for me.

Instead of going through every single item that I found in this huge PDF file and complaining about how much it sounds like a high school rubric, I shall list them all for you here:

• Students identify learning tasks to achieve the goals
• Students chart their learning processes
• Students challenge themselves and set the standards for the achievement of their learning goals
• Students formulate questions and generate relevant inquiries
• Students explore a range of possibilities and make sound decisions
• Students self‐plan and self‐manage their time
• Students critically reflect on their learning and initiate gathering of feedback from teachers and peers to achieve their learning goal
• Students apply what they have learnt to new contexts
• Students utilize the skills that they have acquired to learn beyond the curriculum contents

See what I mean??? High school all over again! But now that I’ve taken a second to read over the items again, I realize that I do this on a daily basis (when I have school work to do) without stopping to realize that I’m ACTUALLY doing it. Let’s see if I can apply this idea to the blog post I’m currently writing.

1. I was told to write a blog post about the skills I possessed regarding self directed learning. (There’s my learning goal, articulated, identified and determined)
2. I realized that I didn’t know what skills and attributes were associated with self directed learning (I’m going to shorten this to SDL) so I conducted some online research. (That would be me identifying my learning tasks)
3. I started writing a blog post in hopes of communicating the skills I have regarding SDL. (Here I set the standards for achievement)
4. As I was writing the post, I started wondering exactly what I was writing about. (Formulating questions and generating inquiries)
5. I began to think what would happen if I just wrote down exactly what I was thinking, as per most of my other blog posts…and here I am doing just that. (Exploring the range of possibilities, making decisions)
6. I currently have nothing to do for two hours. Seems like a good time to do some school work. (Self – planning and self – managing my time)
7. It has come to my attention that my classmates have been reading my blog posts. If you read this post, please come talk to me about it. I have no idea what I’m talking about, and I want to know who was in the same boat. (Gathering feedback from peers to achieve my goals)
8. I’m actually having a lot of fun making blog posts. I think I might start up my own blog in the future. (That’s probably as close as I can get to utilizing the skills I’ve acquired)

Well, perhaps that made sense. I know it at least made a little sense to me. I think I went off topic approximately eighteen times, but who’s counting? So I guess, in some kind of conclusion, that if we’ve all made it this far, then we all possess some degree of these self directed learning skills. Especially in a course like this, we have to know how to learn on our own.

 

RANDOM OFF-TOPIC MOMENT (#19 I guess?)

I jumped out of a plane on September 30th. It was freaking awesome. When I get the video I will post it so I can share my experience with you. It was definitely life-changing.

BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED SIGN-OFF

WHITE TEXT MOMENT

Signing off in 3…2…1…

*click*

Time Management

 

Well, I was afraid I would have to talk about this at some point.
TIME MANAGEMENT

It’s something I like to pretend I’m good at, but I’m really not very good at it at all. I’m not even going to try and give my own advice this time. This is going to be purely taken from this website. Whoever wrote it seems to know what they are talking about.

Apparently the first and most important thing to do is prioritize your tasks. Well I can safely say that I suck at this. I got through five episodes of Community (it’s a good show!) before I even remembered that I should be doing blog posts. The best way to do this is to develop long term time management plans. This sounds like it would be a good idea, but my brain says that this is too much work.

When I was reading through the webpage the next bullet point raised my spirits a bit. A good method of time management is to complete the small tasks first. I’m actually really good at this because I have no issue getting small little tasks out of the way. It doesn’t take much time, so it doesn’t matter as much to me.

Another good time management skill is to break the boring stuff into sections. Quite frankly, I’d rather get it all out of the way as quickly as possible, which it what I usually try to do. Which completely counteracts the next good time management skill….

Don’t try to complete an entire assignment all at once. Oops.

So to sum this all up. I’m not very good with time management. Since I had an easy and laid back fifth year of high school, I think I lost the small fraction of time management skills that I possessed. Regardless, I still get everything (mostly) done on time. Now that I’ve started University, I REALLY should learn how to better manage my time. It’s not really going so well at the moment though. I guess that could be one of my goals for the year: work first – watch Community later.

White text for nice spacing. I really need to learn how to fix this.

Signing off in 3…2…1…

*click*