Course Notebook

We request that you designate a paper or digital space as a notebook for this class. We will provide some prompts each week for personal and/or metacognitive reflections, and we will ask you to share the kinds of notes that you collected at the end of each week, but the bulk of this meaning making and knowledge building will be in your possession and under your control. Discussion posts and social annotation tools are wonderful ways to share our ideas, but not ALL thinking and writing needs to be shared publicly.

We are all readers and writers today. But at the same time, it can be difficult to marshall the focus required for academic reading and writing activities like the ones assigned in this course. As you set up your notetaker, take some time to also think about what you need to be able to fully engage in this class. Is there a certain time of day where you are usually better able to focus? Are there times in your weekly schedule that you can set aside for work on this course? (We recommend 5-7 hours a week.) Do you prefer to read and write via screen and keyboard or hard copy? What do you need to do to set the conditions for a fruitful learning experience?

Considering these questions will not only help you plan and organize your time and tasks. It also gives you a window into the kinds of strategies that you rely upon to engage in focused intellectual work. Some of these strategies we do so automatically, we don’t think to share them with students. When we take time to reflect metacognitively on our own practices, we can get valuable insights into our own “expert blind spots.”