Some Observations on Postings
From the Faculty
1.) Please post by Sunday. The faculty generally plan to come in at the first of the week and respond to student discussion topics (“posts”). If they are not there, we end up doing revisions and fussing to make sure everybody has posted.
2.) Please give a descriptive title that conveys something of what you have done or found out to each post. Don’t just write “Week 2” or “Journal.” Use your great brains and make it interesting and useful.
3.) Expect to post a three-part discussion topic (week summary, journal, and reflection) each week at week’s end. But if you have something exciting happen on Monday and can’t wait to hear other people’s response, do not hesitate to make another entry whenever the urge strikes you.
4.) Remember we are not looking for snippets of your journal, but full extended entries that provide an attempt at a coherent account of some incident, event, place, or interview.
5.) Feel free to use Reflections section of the journal and online posts to deal with emotional or more personal responses to situations described in your journal in addition to responses to ideas, books, and themes. Here is one rule of thumb about recording this data. If the emotion is something that you experienced at the time - fear, excitement, greed etc. - then it is appropriate to include it in the journal account. But if you reflect on the incident and want to think more about the its emotional content that is appropriately done in the reflection section.
6.) Take some time to read many entries in other research groups in order to get a sense of how people are documenting and reflecting on their work. It is a good idea to do this sooner rather than later.