INF1-CRISP: Weekly Blogs
Overview
Throughout the course, you are expected to keep a blog to record your learning and document activities to reflect on later. What you write in each post will not be directly assessed, but you will need to link each reflection to at least one blog post as evidence.
Requirements
At a minimum, we recommend writing one post every week. These can be short—a description of your progress on your course project, a photo of what you produced during your lab, with a few lines of text describing the activity. It will be much easier to write these posts while the activities are fresh in your mind than to wait until the week before your assessment to write all the posts you plan to include as evidence. However, you will not be penalized for writing more than one post a week, or for having more total posts than we recommend.
What you write is up to you. However, any post you use as evidence for your assessment must clearly describe an activity that is relevant to that assessment’s learning outcome. This should be easy to tell at a glance—ideally within the title, or from skimming through the first paragraph or two.
We understand that it can be intimidating to plan blog posts to support an assessment you haven’t written yet. If you’re not sure where to start or which activities to write about, read through the guidance below.
Accessing your student blog
The link to your personal course blog can be found on Learn, under “CRISP Weekly Reflections” (visible by the end of Week 1). For help writing posts and customizing your blog, see the UoE Sharepoint "How to Guide".
Please bear in mind that your blog is online and visible to others. The University has some resources to help you ensure that your posts are accessible and give appropriate credit to any content you want to include but that does not belong to you.
Advice for writing a reflective blog
1. Be strategic.
Keep the learning outcomes (LOs) in mind when you decide what to post each week. If you really enjoyed a guest lecture that helped you think about Informatics more broadly (LO1), but you’ve already written a blog post about Lab A that you think will be enough evidence for your LO1 reflection, consider writing about another activity that will help you address a different LO instead—or write both! As described in the assessment instructions, activities you can blog about and use as evidence include:
- A lab or tutorial session
- Work you did on your course project
- Engagement with a lecture or panel topic
- An extracurricular activity, like a volunteer role or participation in a student society
Remember, you can use the same blog post as evidence for multiple mini-essays, even across different learning outcomes. For instance, a blog post about Lab A: Informatics Collage might be sufficient evidence for all three questions in LO1, as well as one question each for LO2, LO3, and LO5. However, it's unlikely that you can successfully relate a single activity to every question on every learning outcome—the more blog posts you have, the easier writing your assessment will be.
You may wish to tag each post with the learning outcomes where you think it could be relevant or add a sentence at the top or bottom of the post describing which parts of the assessment it relates to and why. This is fully optional but will make writing the assessment much easier later on in the course!
2. Use the blog to practice reflection
Making a record of what you’ve done is already a useful reflection. Reflective learning can be thought of in two parts: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Reflection in action involves noticing things in the moment—your thoughts, feelings, decisions, and their consequences. Reflection on action requires you to look back after the fact, recognise what happened, and reconsider.
At a minimum, your blog will help you to write down and remember your reflection-in-action, giving you something to look back at when it’s time for reflecting on action, as you write your assessment. However, the blog is a good place to practice reflection-on-action—if you like, you can go beyond just describing what happened and start to ask questions, take on new perspectives, and learn from the experience. You’ll still need to reflect as you write your assessment, but you may find this comes much more easily if you’ve already begun to find meaning in the experience while writing it up for your blog.
For guided advice on how to reflect, see the University’s toolkit.
3. Write posts that support your learning
Ultimately, these blog posts are designed to help your reflection—not just on course topics, but also about yourself and the ways you learn best. Do make sure that you have blog posts that clearly engage with each learning objective, for the sake of assessment, but, beyond that, write blog posts in the way that is most useful for you. They can be short or long, and they can sound like a personal essay or more casual, like a journal entry. You can include photos and screenshots. You can write reflectively, as practice for the assessment, or jot down exactly what happened and leave it there. Finding out which writing habits are most useful for your learning is a valuable skill for your time at university and beyond: use this blog as an open space to explore different approaches.