Week 5 - Resource based learning

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This week’s lecture was focused on the usage of resources in order to improve one’s learning process. If someone was to be effective when he is studying it’s imperative that he has to use as many resources as he can. The resources that can be used in such a way can be categorized in: Textbooks, hand-out materials, open-learning packages, libraries, journals, computer-based/audio-visual resources, e-mail and the Internet.

There was an in-class discussion about the usage of resources in learning and we tried to understand what each and every of us uses in order to improve our own learning.

Personally, I am fond of using the Internet and online libraries in order to find more resources for my studies or any essay I have to write. Although, I have to add that I am not extremely fond of using more “classic” or old-school methods, like going to the local library or searching through journals.

Most of the people in class used a similar way of resource usage and in my opinion this will become even more common in the following years. That is a fact that will lead to the eventual abandonment of the traditional resources and we will see a turn towards more “IT” resources. If such a thing occurs only time can tell if that would be the best choice. </FONT>

Week 4 - Note Making

This week’s lecture was about something that is extremely common and at the same time extremely underused, Note Making. The art of keeping notes is about writing down the things that we consider important during lectures, quotes from famous personas or even our own ideas. The main reason of keeping notes is the fact that we as human beings have a tendency to forget so that’s one way to avoid forgetfulness. Besides that, a reason for keeping notes is the fact that when it comes down to big amounts of information the most effective way of actually learning anything is to write down the important parts and focus on them.

One of the most important parts of the lecture was breaking down how the memory actually works. The memory process has two stages, the first one is called encoding and is used for saving the information, while the second one is the retrieval part which is about retrieving the stored information.

In general, what I learned during this class was already known to me and I always tend to keep notes in order to improve my studies, however I found the lecture quite interesting and I was introduced to some Note Making styles that I could adopt, like making a circle in the paper and entering the main theme of the lecture and from this circle to start drawing branches of the main themes and so on.

The conclusion that I reached after the end of the lecture was that no matter how basic one might think of Note Making it actually is not. Note making is an art that needs to be refined and perfectioned.

Week 3 - Academic Misconducts

Week 3 – Academic Misconducts

This week’s lecture was about the nature of Academic Misconducts, and more specifically about cheating, plagiarism and collusion.

For starters, we were introduced to the penalties of such actions and it was apparent to use that no matter what one might gain from plagiarism and/or cheating the risk is much higher than the gain. Also a fine point made by the tutor was that during our Academic studies in the university we should strive to have the most proper mentality and to be ethical, since this will affect our ongoing lives in a degree.

After this introduction, we talked about some things to keep in mind in order to avoid these misconducts. More specifically:

- During examinations we must be 100% sure that we use only authorized material and even if there is a case where we are not sure of what is authorized and what is not, then we should ask the invigilator for advice. Better safe than sorry I might say!
- About Collusion, we should be extremely careful when reading an assessment’s guideline and we should also take care to whom we lend our essays/notes. Also we should take care so that our essay is not available to certain people.
- In order to avoid Plagiarism, one should have at least a basic understanding of the use of references and about how to use bibliography.

The next part of the lecture, was a more in-depth discussion about Plagiarism, since it seems that Plagiarism is the most widespread Academic Misconduct in worldwide level. Plagiarism is the act of presenting words, ideas, images etc. as our own when they are not. The most “impressive” fact about Plagiarism is that around 30% of the students worldwide have used Plagiarism on every written assignment they undertook!

(www.plagiarism.com)

The next thing we talked about was the penalties of Plagiarism, and we were also given some real life examples that made us (at least me personally) to understand that Plagiarism is something not to be looked down upon even outside the university life.

Lastly, we were given some guidelines in order to avoid Plagiarism (intentional or unintentional even) such as: the usage of our own ideas and thoughts, giving credit for copied, adapted or paraphrased material, avoiding the use of other people’s work with only some cosmetic changes and to be aware of the “common knowledge”.

After the lecture was over, I must admit that todays theme was interesting, because it allowed me to become familiar with a term that ,unfortunately, was not very well known here in Greece. I will recite a fact about my earlier years during my studies in the Technological University of Athens, I remember a professor asking us to do a research about the evolution of Windows, and everyone was just copying paste information found around the Internet without any changes and without references. So I must admit wholeheartedly that todays lecture might be the most important one I had until this part.

G.

Week 2 - Reflective Writing

In this week the topic of the lecture was about “Reflective Writing” and we also had some more in-depth talk about the importance of PDP.

We learned about what is Reflective Practice beforehand and about Gibb’s Reflective Cycle before talking about Reflective Writing. Afterwards, we defined Reflective Writing as a process that : a) by the usage of reflective cycle and writing one becomes better at learning, b) its primary purpose is learning and c) gives a transformative nature in writing.

The next part of the lecture was about the distinction between essay writing and reflective writing. The main difference between these 2 categories was that essay writing is more likely to be 100% subjective while reflective writing not necessarily. 

In addition, we examined sentence structure for variety and the features of reflective writing, in order to become more apt in organizing our thoughts in text, to improve our creativity when writing, to train our analytical skills and to develop critical thinking. 

After this part, there was some in depth analysis about Prewriting (Invention). The Prewriting process was composed by 3 steps: 1) Analyze the title in order to explain and to show “how it differs from”,  2) do an analyze plan of the title and 3) to draw a mind map of the concepts.  We also become familiar with the six finger approach when mind mapping, a process that can summarize the meaning of the title of the essay by using six simple questions.

The last part of the lecture was about proper essay structure. A well made essay is composed by 3 parts, an introduction, the main body of the essay and the conclusion. The introduction part ideally should introduce the general topic of the essay and contain the writers thesis statement. When writing the main body paragraphs, the writer must keep in mind that the first sentence of each paragraph is always the most important one and that he should make proper use of supporting sentences. The concluding paragraph is the signal of the incoming end of the essay, it should remind to the reader the writers main subtopics in short and to leave the reader with your final thoughts on the essay topic.

That was the end of the lecture, and I must say that I found this lecture quite of note for many reasons. Mainly, I found the lecture interesting not because I learned something (I was already familiar with almost everything discussed) but because it allowed me to point out some minor flaws that I had in reflective writing. I honestly hope that by organizing a bit more my reflective writing and eliminating the flaws I have to be able to write way better essays. Another thing, that I would like to mention is that one thing I also learned today is that no matter how good we are at something we can always improve and there is always ways to improve our knowledge on certain matters/topics.

G.

Week 1

 

This is the 2^nd blogging “course” since the start of my studies in the BCA
College of Athens. The first time was certainly quite the experience for myself, since I was unaccustomed to blogging and hopefully this semester (with my experience) I will be able to improve my PDP – Personal Development Planning – skills and of course my blogging capabilities.

I would like to state that before the actual lecture started, I was very interested in this specific module since I consider PDP to be an essential skill in our day and age and every module or lecture that allows me to polish such a skill is more than welcomed, in addition this is the second time I have the chance to study under the tutelage of Mr. Vaios Koumaras. In addition there was an in-class talk about the new policy considering the absences for this semester, something that will probably won’t affect me since I tend to not miss any lectures at all. 

The 1^st part of the lecture, was a short description about what a PDP stands for and what it actually is. After that we were introduced in a in depth lecture about “learning”, what does that word means, what is its importance and how we can effectively become able learners. Learning does not have one definition only, but the most common terms to describe it are the following : 1) a quantitative increase in knowledge, 2) acquiring information or knowing a lot, 3) it can be also called/defined as memorizing, 4) as acquiring skills and methods that can be retained and used as necessary, 5) as making sense, 6) as interpreting and understanding reality in a different way.

The next part of the lecture, was about the fact that learning has many different approaches and we were introduced to the three most known and more famous approaches.

• The 1^st approach was Kolb’s Learning Cycle, which consists of 4 steps. The first step is called “Concrete Experience” and is all about doing and/or having an experience, the second is called “Reflective Observation” which is, as the title suggests, about reviewing and reflecting on the experience, the third  step is “Abstract Conceptualisation” and is about concluding and learning from the experience, and the last step named “Active Experimentation” is all about planning and trying out the things that have been learning throughout this process.

• The 2^nd approach that we talked about was Peddler’s Learning Cycle which was a much simpler procedure than Kolb’s one. The 4 steps included here were: 1) Something happens, 2) What happens? 3) So what ? and 4) Now what ?
  
  
  

• The 3^rd approach was Ramsden’s  “deep approach” to learning versus surface learning. Before the actual explanation/definition of this approach it was made clear that although learners might be categorized as “deep” or “surface”, one person may use both approaches at different times. The main difference between deep and surface learning is the motivation of each learner. To be more specific, a surface learner is a person whose only motivation might be the fear of possible failure, while a deep learner will be motivated to learn more since he finds the whole experience gratifying and challenging.
  
  

Finally, after explaining the three different approaches to learning the lecture ended, and I have to admit that although I considered myself familiar with “learning” I actually now feel that I have a way better understanding of it. Also, I would like to add that from the three different models presented above I can’t pick one for myself as an ideal learning method but if I was asked to choose one I would go for Ramsden’s deep approach since I always try to challenge myself when it comes to the actual learning part. I also have to say that I found the lecture extremely interesting and that it felt good to see that there are still many things, skills and knowledge to gain from this module.

G.