Reflective Activities Materials

[mrtimbones]

Activity 4.0 I found relatively straight forward. Only last week I was scouring the web for fresh resources for critical thinking, and more specifically ‘reflective practice’ and ‘ideas generation’ resources for my design students. Reflection forms a large part of the design process at various stages. I like my students to embed it into their practice as means to help them discuss/learn about their assumptions, findings, concepts, etc, and to get them to pause, take stock and refocus project direction. I already have a reasonably good repository of materials on this topic, so I thought I’d utilise this activity to build on the back of what I’ve been finding.

I’m familiar with some of Merlot’s resources as I am with the HEA’s. I have not used LearnHigher before, and was surprised that I had not come across it before. The resources were easy to find and are accessible enough as introductory and supplementary materials. Link: http://learnhigher.ac.uk/Students/Critical-thinking-and-reflection.html and more specifically: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/videoresources/criticalthinking_student/

Next I searched all three resources: Youtube, itunes U and TED. We were to look for resources in one of the three, however, after about 20-25 mins of searching Youtube I couldn’t find anything that I’d really want to show my students that I felt would switch them on to the topic, due to either being too dry or too vapid. I’m sure that if I spend longer I would discover a few gems. I found the following video was not specifically for design students but I like the fact that the information is coming from students: Reflection in action. I found this presentation on reflective writing interesting, but I know that my most of students would glaze over in seconds with this type of material.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say that much of what I find on TED I feel is overrated.

Though not about reflection as such, I am very much sold on this presentation about ‘Where good ideas come from’, particularly the highly visual form of presentation. Very engaging. Possibly good with highly visual people.

iTunes U I signed up to, but could not find anything I wanted within the short time I allowed myself for browsing. However, I have sourced some great resources on itunes podcasts from University Arts London. These are “a resource for developing sketchbooks and reflective writing practices” and are great. I confess that  I knew of these before and have used them with differing degrees of success in terms of encouraging reflective activity.

How could you incorporate this resource into your professional practice?
As educators there is an expectation that we will purposefully reflect regularly and I already use such materials as reflective prompts for CPD.

Are there any limitations to the use of your preferred resource for your learners (e.g. copyright licence; login requirements)?
Not to my knowledge. I never really get the intricacies of copyright! If in doubt I tend not to use or distribute.

Would your own students agree that the resource you prefer is accessible?
I would think so as they have demonstrated that they can successfully and purposefully engage in reflective practice, albeit somewhat reluctantly, and even then this reluctance is simply due to the act of reflective writing being a process that is quite alien to most of my students.

[GraphDesProject]

Hi Tim, You seem to have been more succesful than I was. I wonder if I was too narrow in my search – I was looking for something to help learners understand (and use) design thinking, that did not some direct from a tutor but rather from professionals who are “out there”. I found TED and YouTube by far the best for this, but was kind of sorry that I couldn’t find something revalatory and worthy!!! Your Where Good Ideas Come From sounds like it’d fit the bill for me better than some of the things I did find (tho I foud a good TED talk by Marion Bantjes).

[PeterHartley]

I think you have both highlighted some of the issues in finding ‘good resources’ which you can immediately use with students. Unfortunately I don’t think there is an easy answer to speed up searching for the ‘gems’. Maybe there will be some suggestions on this coming out of the webinar.

[CharlotteAbbott]

How easy was it to find a relevant resource?

I chose to access the Open University’s OpenLearn resource area not really knowing what I was looking for but my attention was soon drawn to a History of Art free course. The links from the introduction were interesting but I found I was going off at tangents and losing my way. To recover I found myself going back to the homepage and starting again. By taking this approach, I discovered new pages that I’d previously missed. This was valuable but time consuming. I then accessed the iTunes site and found what I was looking for via the search box. This was much quicker but less informative.

 

How could you incorporate this resource into your professional practice?

The visuals on the OU’s OpenLearn source were useful in attracting immediate attention but following the links led to text heavy pages, which in our institution would possibly distract initial enquirers.

 

Which source did you find more useful (and why) – the ‘official’ resource bank or the open search?

The OU was more useful because it offered a range of information when I was unsure of what I wanted to find and attracted me to return for a second visit.

 

Are there any limitations on the use of your preferred resource for your learners (e.g. copyright licence; login requirements)?

Not that I was aware of.

 

Would your own students agree that the resource you prefer is accessible?

No, I don’t think they would agreed as signposting wasn’t as clear as I would have expected, a view reflected in comments posted onto the feedback page. However, I did note that queries were responded to quite quickly.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Tim,

I’m a fan of Y0uTube and there is some very good material there but like you I find lots of stuff that I have doubts about sharing with students. I show some videos in lectures. In one case the session is on thinking about and planning the final year pr0ject. I’ve found videos from the Stride project very good and I link to them from our VLE and I use one video in the lecture. However, my students are undergraduates in criminology, sociology and behavioural science,whereas the students talking about their projects in the Stride video are postgraduates in education (and often older students too). But the great thing about using them in a lecture is that you can explain this to the students and even stop the video to explain a point or recontextualise it for the different disciplines.

[Author]

Posts