Pre-Salon Post

For our final exam, we're having a salon discussion. This is my pre-salon post covering topics from class in a note/list-like format.

Folk Knowledge:
Self-directed learning:
We weren't really thinking too much about self-directed learning at the beginning of the semester. We did direct ourselves in choosing skills for the "teach and learn" activity as well as people to learn from an teach.
Others' Blogging:
I think for some of us (aka me), others' blogging was most important at the beginning of the semester as a kind of self-gauge. I had never even considered starting a blog (some people have even fondly referred to bloggers as the "unwashed masses who think they can write") and was, to be perfectly honest, a bit resentful in the beginning that we had to blog weekly (though I now just see it as a less formal weekly paper of varying length and topic). I mainly used others' blogs to try to gauge how long my posts should be (mine were significantly longer at the beginning because I tend to ramble...) and to simply get adjusted to this new medium (something that I would have to do again in the written knowledge unit...)
Collaborative Learning:
The collaborative learning in this unit was mainly that many of us learned from others in the class and the rest of us learned from others who were, well, not in the class. We focused heavily on person-to-person interaction in the folk knowledge unit (and the oral knowledge unit that followed) because it's a more personal, more intimate form of interaction.
Projects/Activities:
This was the "teach and learn" activity. From this activity, a lot of us took away an idea about how the visual and the verbal aspects of communicating knowledge are both critical to the transfer of folk knowledge.

Oral Knowledge:
Self-directed Learning:
A lot of the self-directed learning in this unit was as we began to specialize on our blogging. We had general topics (in our case, language preservation and acquisition). I think that Brenda really exemplified self-directive learning during this unit. When the idea of what makes a language lost or preserved was brought up, she became interested and ran with it. We ended up basing a lot of our video group discussion on her passion for this topic.
Others' Blogging:
As group 2 had another language topic, I viewed their blog during the oral knowledge unit. However, it seemed as though their topic focused on language in the moment (language's functions) and ours focused on language over time (preservation and acquisition), so that was a bit of a dead-end. Most of us also had others blogging about the same civilization that we were, so we also used their blogs (more on these groups in the next unit).
Collaborative Learning:
A lot of the collaboration in this unit came from working together to focus on our themes (language preservation and acquisition) and from making sure our groups had all of our assigned section of King Benjamin's speech learned. Furthermore, we collaborated as a class for the choral lines of the speech. The groups also collaborated on the group video; in out group, we collaborated on how our different civilizations preserved (or failed to preserve) their languages.
Projects/Activities:
The main project for this unit was the class recitation of King Benjamin's speech. This was probably the most personally challenging project for me because I have horrible stage fright. Another activity in the oral unit was the interview on the target topic of our civilization. This was another difficult one for me because my attempts proved rather fruitless for quite some time. The other activity in the oral unit was the group video, which was again not a personal favorite for similar reasons to the King Benjamin activity.

Written Knowledge:
Self-directed learning:
It was during the written unit that self-directed learning became more stressed as the idea of a lack of a written syllabus was brought up several times. It was also during this time that our blogging became more independent: we were no longer focusing on specific ideas like we were in the oral unit but were rather developing our own ideas, though still within our civilization. I didn't see this as self-directed learning, but now I realize that we were given more free rein with our blogging's direction so that we would be more self-directed. I think this made our blogging more interesting and more rewarding as we pursued topics of our choice that interested us and weren't confined to certain limits with our learning.
Others' blogging:
Using the blogs of the other people in our Rosetta Groups was critical to our success in this unit. I hadn't blogged about the medium of my civilization except for maybe in passing, but I was glad that two of my group members had written a post specifically on the wax tablet medium in Ancient Rome. We also used each others' blogs to brainstorm phrases, how what we would need for the medium, etc.
Collaborative learning:
I think that the increase in self-directed learning in our blogging inadvertently led to a decrease in collaborative learning in that medium. To this end, we experienced a great deal of collaborative learning in our civilization groups when we had to work together to create our medium, find a phrase, write that phrase in our medium, translate another phrase into our language and English, and then put that into our medium. Needless to say, this was a collaborative learning experience that required a good deal of collaboration in the short time we had for the project in order to complete the assignment.
Projects/Activities:
The primary project for the written unit was the Rosetta Project. This was perhaps the most academically difficult assignment for the semester. Translating languages is difficult when you know next to nothing about the way the language works: I had to take a double look some of the time to make sure I was holding our scroll right-side up! Still, I enjoyed the Rosetta Project a lot more than the projects from the oral unit.

Print Knowledge:
Self-directed learning:
This was the unit where our self-directed learning was in full swing. Both our general blogging and our bibliography assignment (and the paper that grew out of it) were fully self-directed. We picked our own topics and did our own library research. We also went to one of two Now, even though it's not really the print unit anymore exactly, we're preparing for our own discussion in the salon.
Others' blogging:
In the print unit, we looked at the blogs for those in the class who were doing similar topics for their papers as we were. We also used others on our blogs to get feedback on ideas we were working on for our papers. This was the first time we tried such spontaneous blogging, and we found that it perhaps didn't work tremendously well.
Collaborative learning:
There wasn't as much collaborative learning in this unit because so much of what we were doing was independent research, but the collaborative learning when we reviewed each others' papers was very helpful for me and I think for others.
Projects/Activities:
The first activity was the "field trip" to the Crandall Printing Museum or King James Bible exhibit in Special Collections. I think out of convenience's sake, most went with the latter. The "field trip" was beneficial because we got to see the different stages of printing. Its much more involved counterpart was, of course, the annotated bibliography, which brought some of us literally to our knees as we searched the bottom rows of books in the libraries. Afterwards came the more traditional academic paper to connect our "usual learning methods" to our more unorthodox methods in this class.

And then comes the Salon...