This post is to be my review for the in class salon described here. As I study things out tonight, I will continually update this post. I'm publishing it this way to make collaboration easier. Any comments posted will be considered and I will update my post accordingly.
The expected learning outcomes for this class are categorized as follows:
1. History
2. Knowledge Institutions
3. Communicating Knowledge
4. Knowledge Skills
5. Sharing Knowledge
The Units covered for this class are:
1. Folk Knowledge
2. Oral Knowledge
3. Written Knowledge
4. Print Knowledge
The suggested review topics ask me to state how I increased in my mastery of the learning outcomes throughout the class. My responses should be divided into Units, and further categorized by the following criteria:
1. Self Directed Learning
2. Others' blogging
3. Collaborative Learning
4. Projects and Activities
Due to the unwieldy nature of posting all 80 responses (Objective, Unit, Category) in a blog form, I will format the rest of this blog as (Unit, Category) pairs, and give descriptions of how I generally approached the learning objectives for that pair, rather than specifically detailing each objective.
Folk Knowledge
Self Directed Learning
This portion of the class is the one that got me most interested in learning about knowledge. I have long held the opinion that the most valuable form of knowledge is personal skills and experience. The reason for this is that such knowledge can only be preserved from generation to generation by the actual act of teaching. Written knowledge, and in many senses oral, are easier to pass on, but if the last practitioner of an art form passes into the grave, the art is lost. As such I decided to seek out learning from my Grandma. She taught my wife and me how to can peaches. Since that time the jars in our cupboard have been a consistent reminder of the incredible experience our generation has access to if we will only ask our elders.
Others' Blogging
The most interesting part of the blogs from this unit were those that actually contained excerpts from lessons learned, videos of someone attempting a new art, and statements on the general feeling of accomplishment and good will that most of the class felt on succeeding in either teaching or learning a skill.
Collaborative Learning
I think that in regards to collaborative learning, this stage of the semester was rife with potential. All of us were anxious to work with the novel curriculum, and took to the blogs and group interaction quickly. While we didn't have as many topics to carry on conversation as we do now, we did develop then a camaraderie that has lasted the whole semester. Our ability to communicate well later on in the semester is greatly due to this stage.
Projects and Activities
For this unit we taught and learned a skill. I had the chance to learn playing tennis. (Also, I took the opportunity, as mentioned above, to learn how to can peaches). In turn I taught how to play the bugle. As far as the "Sharing Knowledge" learning outcome is concerned, this project is the easiest to categorize into its realm. The project was fun, instructive, and I will use the skills I learned through the rest of my life.
Oral Knowledge
Self Directed Learning
I honestly suffered in motivation during this unit. I was assigned to study the oral traditions of a civilization (the Scythians) who left very little written records behind, let alone traditions and stories. I found out that they were expert horsemen, and they had a story about how a king was chosen from three brothers by a set of four golden farm implements that were hot enough that neither of the older brothers could touch them, while when the third approached, they cooled, and he was able to pick them up. I didn't see much value in the story. While I do appreciate the value of the Book of Mormon as a record of a dead civilization, I think I will leave the discovery and translation of such records to historians and anthropologists.
Others' Blogging
It was interesting to hear about other's findings within their studies, but I didn't get much help or direction for my own, because most posts were based of of the premise that the author had found something that interested them, and I had a significant lack in that area.
Collaborative Learning and King James
This was where I focused most of my energy in this unit. With the King Benjamin project, I put significant energy into taking what we had been taught about orations, and what I already knew of performance, and wrote up blocking that would help our group highlight what we were saying. The group got behind the idea and we were able to present our assigned section rather than just recite it. Also, we banded together quite well to help each other memorize our lines.
Written Knowledge
Self Directed Learning
During this unit, I got tired of knowing nothing about my assigned Scythian race. To remedy this, my wife pointed me to the research librarians. I paid them a visit, and came home with a couple of books. As it turns out, there was a written record from the time of the Scythians, but not written by them. Herodotus, a Greek, decided to spend some of his life among the Scythians, and to write about his experiences. It turns out that they had no written language. Beyond that fact, it seems that Herodotus was liberal with his Grecian perspectives and simply called the whole civilization barbaric. This highlighted to me the song "Wonderful" from the musical "Wicked" wherein the Wizard of Oz points out how strongly our accepted histories are tied to the perspective of those who write them.
Others' Blogging
The blog posts that I found most interesting during this Unit were the ones that touched on different accounts of the same events in history. I can't remember if it was a blog post, or a class discussion, but it came up that even the story of Jesus Christ's atonement was portrayed in some cultures as an act of a warrior who bravely charged his way to the cross, rather than a sheep being led to the slaughter.
Collaborative Learning
With our group changes during this unit, I was somewhat separated from the camaraderie that I had developed during the 1st Unit, but that was quickly replaced by the members of the new group. It turned out that we all felt somewhat challenged by the civilizations we'd been assigned because of their obscure nature. Knowing I wasn't the only person having trouble finding anything on my culture helped me to find a bit more motivation to work on our Unit project.
Projects and Activities
The Rosetta Stone project was telling for me. Half as a joke, and half because we really only had languages that were written on stone among our varied civilizations, we decided to do our first half of the project on a stone slab. We got a chisel and some rock and met to decide what to write. Again due to our obscure peoples, we had trouble even finding something to write, but ultimately we came upon a phrase. Then we learned how hard rock really is, as we tried to chisel a language consisting of only straight lines into our stubborn medium. When we were done and ready to pass off our empty rock to the next group, we were informed that the project description had changed and we were now to do the second half of the assignment on the same medium as the first. At this point, I finally faced the choice I'd been building to all semester: Do I give in to my lack of motivation, built on by changing expectations and decisions (such as to work in stone) that had significantly more drastic consequences than I foresaw, thus failing both my group and myself, or do I find a way to do the impossible, carve intricate glyphs into stone, and salvage what hope I had of passing this class, and gaining friends through shared trials. Ultimately, I chose to try. I got hold of a power tool, learned about how masonry bits differ from normal ones, and provided the rest of my group with a way to actually do the project, with the only serious investment being time. Thanks to another group member who had been as serious about linguistically analyzing what we were to translate as I had been about being able to carve symbols, we managed to complete the project.
Print Knowledge
Self Directed Learning
With my newfound friends, the librarians in the HBLL, I plowed through the print unit fairly well. I was finally given a chance to choose a well documented topic, and I was able to find several books to cite for the annotated bibliography assignment.
Others' Blogging
As my ability to actually fulfill the requirements of the class went up, I began to depend on the other members of the class less. I enjoyed reading other people's discoveries, but our focus began to diverge as a group as we entered a more modern age with more information available to study.
Collaborative Learning
I believe that this stage of the class will be most helped by tomorrow's Salon. We all have had varied experiences throughout the class, and it will be very interesting to see what other people have gotten from the course.
Projects and Activities
My experience with the paper was unique in my life. Never before have I felt confident enough to write on the non-standard perspective of a major controversy and yet expect to be taken seriously and graded well by my teachers. Fortunately, I had enough resources gathered from the bibliography, and a wife who understood my chosen topic (Prescriptive vs Descriptive perspectives of English) well enough to share some of the folk knowledge she'd acquired during her studies at BYU as a linguist. I actually enjoyed the process of writing a paper for the first time in my life.
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