Self-Reflection Lecture Notes

Page 1 Reflective Essay XXXXXX Swinburne University Online COM10003: Learning and Communication ELA:XXXXXXX XXXXXX Page 2 Self-Reflection is an important part of learning and self-development and commencing a new degree online has changed the way I approach study and learn. This subject has provided me many tools to help me identifying and better understand the types of learning and communication by challenging my past knowledge and life experiences. This self-reflection provides an opportunity to review the subject learning outcomes and goals that have been set throughout this subject. This will be done by being critical of oneself and providing an insight into how the theories and learnt resources have help develop better skills or assisted in progressing towards achieving unit and course goals whilst reflecting on those self-experiences. Managing your time can come easy to some. My life and career have forced me to be good at time management. Online learning has challenged this skill as I thought that studying late at night would be easy. Through metacognition knowledge, I have identified the best times of the day that enable me to learn and process in a more effective way is in the morning (Livingston, 2003). Learning how to put metacognition into practice has saved me time as I better retain the information and have less distractions in the morning (Chew, 2015). Examples of this are setting SMART goals each day to ensure that the tasks are completed in the set time whilst being able to measure my daily achievements, stay focussed on my time and study plan (Cengage Learning, 2020). At the beginning of the semester, I was overconfident in my time management skills but soon learnt that I needed to review this skill by drawing on the earlier modules, resources and study plan. This changed again after completing week 6 modules where I further learnt about the use of time periods, integrating short breaks and having smaller blocks of study. I became efficient in time management and not feeling overwhelmed with the course content by using the Pomodoro technique (Foz, 2017) and between week 2 and 6, my skill awareness changed and improved from what I had always been used to and will enable me to be better prepared, mindful of my study habits going forward, including the best utilisation of my time. I commenced this subject with a preconceived confidence and arrogance that this subject would be easy. I had over 40 years of learning and communicating so this confidence gave me academic self-efficacy (Ferla, Valke & Cai, 2009). I had been in senior management roles and more recently in family law. All of these roles have required a high level of learning and communication. I became aware that I had created a cognitive barrier that I was not going to Page 3 learn anything new because of my knowledge and I was proud of my style of communication, which was mostly a formal style due to my professional roles (Baldovino, 2020). At the beginning of week 2 module, my academic self-efficacy was still high after completing the language register task as it confirmed my register style. My self-efficacy changed as the module tasks brought to my attention that I did not know everything about this topic and there was more to learn if I started to be more flexible and let myself sit in the leaner’s seat, learn new things and problem solve my closed mind (Bridgers, 2014). Having worked in law previously, you can allow problems to cause you stress or create emotional barriers because time can be of the essence and put you under pressure. The Coping Circumplex Model (CCM) provided me insight into how I can turn the barrier into a challenge, problem solve the issue and not let the barrier prevent me from achieving the task (Stanislawski, 2019). By being flexible and allowing myself to learn, my self-efficacy improved with increased knowledge in the discussion board tasks, quiz results, the positive feedback and the grade in assignment two. I was able to draw on the feedback and feel positive about what I had learnt. My past study had been on campus, so studying and communicating online with others is a significant change to the way I learn. At the commencement of this degree, I had concerns of how I would manage, but I kept an open mind to a new way. The way we learn had not crossed my mind as my normal way was face to face learning, taking notes in lectures, completing task in tutorials with the lecturer controlling the interaction and passing of knowledge. Interaction and communication with other students was often hard as the groups were large. Studying at Swinburne changed my whole style of learning, and my learning is being driven and controlled by me at my own pace. In particular, this subject was allowing me to use my previous knowledge, exploring what I did not know, testing my ability and through the collaborative learning, becoming a better reader and listener. In week 3, I learnt the types of learning with transmission being what I had always been used to and constructivism was the new style I was experiencing with Swinburne. I was really enjoying it and found my interaction with others was helping me understand what I was learning by communicating with others that had a similar passion to learn and we all had a voice to share via different platforms online (Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Having a better understanding of the way I was learning, the combination of interacting with others with the same passion and common goals gave me inspiration and confidence that I Page 4 was not alone by learning from home online. It allowed me to reflect on this new way of learning and that it was not going to be as hard as I thought it would be. During previous university study, I found the Harvard style difficult and lacked confidence using it. Since commencing at Swinburne, I have been challenged with a new style that I have not used before, so I have set a unit goal to learn this style of referencing and become proficient at it. The American Psychological Association, seventh edition (APA) referencing (American Psychological Association, 2020) was my new goal to learn. Since completing my Law degree, I have not used Harvard referencing because you refer to judgements differently. I was able to draw on my long-term memory as the baseline by having some knowledge about plagiarism and referencing. I was able to use my retained learnings and feel some confidence that I could learn APA (Benson & Rebello, 2012). With the help of week 3-5 of this subject, including the sample referencing tasks, I was able to apply my retained knowledge with the weekly learnings about referencing and felt confident completing assignment 2, which was the first test of my goal, and it also paved the way for me to understand the relevance of a reliable source using the Metzgner’s criteria (Metzgner, 2017). The Studiosity response and the comments received back on my assignment were all positive with some minor mistakes. Overall, I was very pleased with my first real test of my ability to refence with APA and it built confidence in my referencing ability towards my goal and identifying reliable sources. When I commenced this subject, I discovered that I needed to be better at online social interaction with the discussion boards as my previous profession precluded me from doing any type of online social media. My degree will require me to interact with my eLA and other students online, so I identified this as a course goal I needed to set and become better at it. Each week I was eager to get ahead in order to allow more time for other things, but I would stop at the discussion task. I questioned my online social interaction and became worried about what others thought of what I wrote or posted. I tended to come back to the task late in the week and read others posts before I completed my own post. I understood this to be a barrier and needed to find tools to overcome this. As I had looked ahead at the modules, I recalled that week 8 module had ways to assist me with my online social interaction, which were the 7 Cs of communication (Mind Tools, 2015) Page 5 and the learning videos (Mind Tool Videos, 2018). These tools provided me a step by step approach of how draft my response when posting in the online forum. The 7 Cs provided me the guide and the confidence that I needed to logically construct a response to the task. The response I received back from my eLA and other students has slowly built my confidence that others would not be laughing at my posts. I can confidently use the discussion board in other and future subjects. My confidence will enable me to meet my course goal. This subject has changed my mind about learning anything new in this subject generally. My previous skills and knowledge have either been put to the test or expanded on to provide me a better understanding of who I am and how I do things. Each module has enabled me to learn more about the way I process and retain information and the style and manner in which we all communicate. This certainly was not the outcome I had expected from this subject In conclusion, this self-reflection has been useful for me to look at my experiences throughout the subject and through the identify of some key learning outcomes, I have been able analyse and reflect through the theories this subject has covered. The reflection has identified how I have changed, and my skills have improved. Additionally, I have realised that you are not too young to keep learning new theories.