By Jodie Black, Fleming College
Go to this page and play the song Soft Place To Land, by Kathleen Edwards to play while you read this post and consider the task at hand.
If you’re thinking of parachuting into the Open Learner Patchbook, we want to help you find a soft spot to land before you start your journey. As a contributor, you are free to write any little thing about how you go about learning what you need to learn. But when things are so flexible, it’s hard to grab on to something to write about. That’s why we’re trying to feed you some general ideas.
Here’s what came to mind for me as potential topics to write about. See if any of these nuggets are something that gets you going.
Procrastination – how does it happen? Why does it happen? How do you get back on track? How do you prevent it?
Paying attention – Do you ever drift in class? Fall asleep reading a textbook? When does it happen? What could you do differently? What could the teacher do differently? What could be different about the classroom?
Managing multiple deadlines – Calendars? Prompts? Colour codes? Show us your system. Why does it work? What did you try that didn’t work?
Dealing with tech distractions – how to you manage social media, cell phone use, Netflix, or whatever when you’re in class or studying? Oh and have you watched the latest Black Mirror?
Studying – coffee shops? libraries? Show us where you study. Why does it work for you? What straetgies work for you?
Bouncing back – How do you bounce back after academic disappointment/incident/mistake? How did you regroup and show you resilience? Maybe a bad grade, a challenging group work situation, a missed test, slept in for class, plagiarism?
Group work – the good, the bad, the ugly. What do you do to make group work work? What tools/tech/strategies do you use? How do you resolve conflicts when things don’t go well?
Get your reading done – how do you read to remember? What reading strategies work for you? Do you read the table of contents, make notes in the margins, read out loud, divide and conquer?
Memory – how do you remember all that you need to remember? What memory tricks work for you? Do you use different tricks or strategies for different types of remembering – ie. how do you remember your keys vs. how do you remember all the bones in the human leg?
If you choose one and want to add a “patch” to The Open Learner Patchbook, email Terry Greene [email protected] and he will get you the access you need to add your piece. Safe landings!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Photo by Jordan Stambaugh on Unsplash
Featured Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
