Why a Student Journal

Teaching and learning is a person-to-person activity. We aren't really teaching, now, in the time of Covid-19; we are simulating teaching. But before there was recorded video, or even the idea of recorded video, people wrote to one another. Writing for a single reader, which we used to call "letters," is also a person-to-person experience. We can use it, not just to simulate teaching, but to approach, however socially-distantly, the real thing.

The essays are polished, edited writing, intended to resonate your voice and your ideas at their best. Your journal is another way you and I write for one another. Unlike your essays, which are ideally intended to be read by others, and which are a product that is ultimately yours rather than ours, the journal is private, but shared. For me the purpose of the journal is to know how you are learning, and how I can help your process. For you, the purpose is whatever you say it is, including perhaps that it doesn't work well for you at all, and that you want your journal to be as minimal as possible. But it can also be to tell me how I can help you, and to give me a place to try.

Below are the instructions to set up your journal from a template. The template is minimal: an empty topic., with permissions set to be readable only by you and me, with a comment box. The simplest mode of use is just to type something terse in the comment box whenever you do course-related work, describing what you've done: it will be signed and dated automatically by the comment builder. So you can make a diary of all your entries, one below another, with no additional effort. But you can also edit the page anyway you want, making a more complex or different form out of the journal. Anything you do is fine with me, so long as—from your point of view—it records what you think it is valuable for me to know about your experience of this course that does not meet.

I will read your journal each day, if you modify it. If you ask me a question there, I will answer it. From that point there are no settled expectations and we can experiment.

How to Create the Journal

1. Make sure you are logged in.
2. Create TWikiGuest's Journal