Week 2: Frustrations and Achievements

What a nice idea it was to offer us running a blog as a reflective learning tool! I’m so happy I have this private space, where I can write what I want without aligning my texts with the rules and common sense considerations. I do not mean that I mind rules – no, just on the contrary I view our rules as a guarantee of success and I do not think it would be right to abuse other people’s time with lengthy and sometimes off-topic comments I wish to make. Keeping them to myself is not the best way either, because (1) writing or speaking helps me to figure out better what is going on in my mind, and (2) my reflections can be useful to someone, who is experiencing similar problems and is looking for solutions. Thus, a reflective blog is just perfect for the purpose of reflective learning. 

So, our second week is coming to the end. It has been much more effective, I suppose. I was about to mess it up at the beginning, but I stopped early, and now the learning is running smoothly.

Frustrations of Week 2

At the end of Week 1 I made a resolution to prioritize my activities better. Still, on Monday I found myself writing for my blog and thinking about some technical problems that had been left unanswered. In particular, I was preoccupied with access issues. I fully understand people, who were happy just to start blogging. So was I after creating my first blog. Soon, however, my excitement faded away, because I discovered that I had been spending a lot of time on writing what I thought was useful, but nobody read it! There was no traffic at all!!! Only spammers promoting prostitutes in all cities of Russia. It took me weeks of daily cleaning before I learned how to keep that spam away. 

Now I do not concern myself much about the content or design – I know that I can deal with that. Technical issues, such as Google analytical tools, liking profiles on all other social networks, etc. are what interest me. Also security, eliminating robots and spies, and all other kind of malicious software… 

So, preoccupied with all this I went to the Discussions to start a thread about these issues.

I went there and … I discovered that while I was mentally stuck to blogs, other people were going forward: doing reading, exploring search engines, writing objectives, discussing due issues. That was the first frustration of the day.

The second one followed shortly. I started reading the posts, and I discovered that I could not understand what people are talking about. I wrote to Jodi, who, definitely, was sleeping at that time and asked her a lot of questions. 

And only then a very clever idea struck my mind: what is I just open the instructions and will start doing the assignment step by step, as suggested? And – surprise, surprise! – I found answers to all the questions I had asked Jodi. I still can’t understand why I didn’t do obvious things? It’s such a thoughtful, well-structured course, with clear, well-written instruction – why should I focus on what IS NOT given, instead of first taking what IS offered and asking my questions later, when appropriate?

Resolutions of Week 2

I was really angry with myself. I hope these two additional frustrations are enough to get me on the right track. I have outlined a schedule for myself. I will publish it here for two purposes:

1) let my tutors see what I am going to do and correct me, if I do something wrong;

2) manage my friends expectations in case I can’t respond timely to their posts and comments.

So, here we go:

Mondays: Reading other participants’ blogs

Tuesdays: Posting 1st weekly assignment earl

Wednesday: Reading for the 2^nd weekly assignment

Thursday: Interacting at the Discussions

Friday: Posting my 2^nd weekly assignment

Saturday: Bloggin

Sunday: reading ahead (the upcoming week)

In short, the way to avoid stress and frustrations is: reading ahead, early posting, checking other people’s writing after the deadline.

Dear friends, I understand how it feels when you write something, and people do not respond. I will surely respond to everyone who talks to me after I am done with the assignments. 

 Achievements of Week 2

I tried this new way on studying on Thursday, and I was very happy: I didn’t miss a single post, and I completed reading all the posts and writing replies in one run! What an improvement in comparison with Week1. when I spent hours and hours recurrently visiting blogs that were not updated. 

Thus, looking back at the slipping away week I can say that there is at least one thing I have learned – I learned to organize myself.

As for learning web-skills, our dear teachers Jodi and Sherie don’t need to worry: I have been practicing this play-camel way each time I had intensive training course, and it was always successful. Play-camel way of learning means that I do as much as time permits me, but I carefully save the remaining materials, activities, links and tasks, and go over them after the course is finished. This time too, I have carefully harvested all the links from the Week assignments and from my mates’ posts, and I will explore them at ease later.

Besides, I have explored JupiterGrades. What a nice tool ! I especially liked the calendar. With such a tool one does not need to keep a journal – the assignment will be reminded automatically. I very nice way to monitor the process.

This is all from me by now.

P.S.

By the way, I found a video about circles. One can watch it on

https://plus.google.com/u/0/getstarted/findpeople

It’s on the right, under the title What are circles? If someone is also interested how to get traffic to the web-site, you are welcome to view it.