Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Final Projects

Please send a comment to this post indicating whether or not you intend to do a final paper or presentation and, if you are doing it as a group, who will be the members of the group.

N.B. We decided in class (11/13) to skip the lesson of May 15th as you have projects due for Dalziel and Busà that week and to have our last two lessons on May 8th and May 22nd from 10.30 to 12.00.

Project Description

The aim of the final project/presentation for you to stop, sit down and reflect on what you have done in this course in the past 10 or 20 weeks. Knowing facts and being able to repeat them is only a small part of the learning process. Learning to learn, knowing what you have learned and what you still need to learn are aspects that are rarely considered in formal education but which are fundamental for your personal and professional development. You’ve been very active in this course, you’ve worked a lot, done a many e-tivities and now it’s time to reflect to consider whether or not you have actually gained new competences, linguistic and not.

Here are some examples of steps you could take to start your reflecting.

- Go to the course syllabus and look at the course description and aims. Do you feel that for you personally you have met these aims? Maybe not all of them? Why or why not? If you think you have, what makes you think you have and vice versa if you haven’t. Think about reasons/examples that demonstrate what aims you have or have not achieved.

- Make a qualitative evaluation of the course. What did you enjoy and/or find useful and what not? Remember, we’ve all done the course so we don’t need a description of the tools used. This is all about considering the process (what you’ve been learning and its meaning for you) and not the product (the e-tivities).

- What do you know now that you didn’t know before you started the course? What helped you learn what you learned?

- Think about the future. What has this course given you that you think will benefit you in the future. What did you not learn that you still feel you need to learn? What role do you think social software has in learning and could potentially have, or not have, in your lifelong learning process after you graduate?

Here are some indications from my Master’s course (therefore, in Italian) on why you should reflect.

Perché riflettere
§ Perché, come sostengono Bereiter e Scardamalia, la competenza professionale non si sviluppa soltanto tramite l’esperienza, ma attraverso la capacità di ragionare criticamente sui problemi.
§ Perché il processo di apprendimento che conduce all’acquisizione di competenze presuppone:
- consapevolezza circa la necessità del cambiamento,
- autovalutazione della propria condizione e delle aree di miglioramento,
- sperimentazione e pianificazione di obiettivi
- miglioramento assistito da feedback (Boyatzis, 1999)
§ Perché la professionalità è definibile come la capacità di controllo e direzione del processo in cui si è inseriti ed ogni processo si sviluppa attraverso “movimenti interni e non necessariamente compiuti, nè tanto meno lineari, monodirezionali, univoci o in qualche modo definitivi, conclusi, nè immediatamente visibili” (Pascucci, 2003). La professionalità pertanto, così come la competenza e il sapere professionale, va letta in chiave evolutiva, non è data una volta per tutte, ma è sottoposta alle dinamiche del cambiamento e sente l’emergenza di fondersi con pratiche proprie della ricerca.

Come riflettere
Attraverso quella che Donata Fabbri definisce “strategia di distanziazione”, un cambiamento di prospettiva che consenta di osservarci da una certa distanza e dunque di definire e definirci : “C’è un luogo dove si fanno i mattoni e un luogo da dove ci è permesso di guardarci mentre li facciamo, e questi sono due aspetti complementari dei processi di apprendimento: il saper fare e la consapevolezza del saper fare” (Miorandi, 2001). E tra “consapevolezza” e “saper fare” ci aggiungiamo anche il “far sapere”.

If you’ve got questions or doubts, write a comment to this post. Your peers might have the same ones ;-)

Sarah

10 comments:

Alessandra said...

I'm going to do a final paper.

Alessandra P.

alex said...

I'll do the paper as well :)

alexandra

ilaria said...

I'm going to do the paper,too

ERICA said...

Dear Sarah,
for our last task, I would like to make a final presentation of the course.
There are some things I want to ask you in order to start working on it as soon as possible and, moreover, in the right way!
- How long does this Power Point presentation have to be?
- Do we have to send it to you or post it in our Wiki or just bring it to university, for example, using a USB driver?
- Do we have to write there what we will say or just report there the questions we will then answer orally? I think this is important to know.
Thanks for your attention!
Erica

Ale T. said...

I prefer to do the paper!

Alessandra said...

Dear Sarah,
I have some questions about the paper.

-Does it have to be structured like an academic paper, introduction/main body/conclusion? Does it have to be formal?

--When you say "three pages long", do you mean interline single, 1.5, double...? (It might sound like a stupid question. I'm asking because last semester you said "the paper should be about 5000 characters", I did 7000 and then your feedback was that it could have been longer...)

See you in class,
Alessandra

avalonne83 said...

Dear Sarah,

I'll do the paper.

Alida said...

Dear sarh,
I'm gong to do the paper as well!
hugs
alida

Erica Buzz said...

Dear Sarah,
I'm going to do the final paper as well!
Cheers,
Erica

Elena said...

Dear Sarah,
I'm going to write a paper!
Elena