Discussion Board Video Reflections

A drawing of a handshake A pencil scribbling a line An open laptop Five interlocking circles symbolizing the five canons of rhetoric Four hands reaching out to meet in the middle A computer with speech bubbles on the screen A profile view of a face with an open mouth to indicate speech A person with shoulder-length hair looking at their reflection in the mirror Interlocking puzzle pieces

The content we discuss in this section must be understood for what it was: student-generated reflection often in a vlog format. These were low-stakes, discussion board posts. In larger major writing assignments, students were encouraged to use technologies that would add additional complexity, but for these one-minute clips, students chose an appropriately low-stakes reflective style. By viewing the full prompt (Figure 1 on the Entering Twenty-First Century Communication Communities page) for the week 15 discussion board post, you read our request of students: to post what was for them, in the course, a new kind of discussion board reflection. We asked for alphabet-text response and video-format response. Below, we extract some of the full prompt's language, we want to draw attention to our requests for rich-media.

Please explain how you developed metacogntively (meaning, your own understanding of your own learning, via the class's assignments, texts, and discussions) in a short one to two minute video. You can create a narrated Powerpoint, a short Jing video, an iMovie, or a vlog to create this video.

We weren't sure how students would react to being asked to create another video for ENGL 219, as they'd created a few already in the term and we wondered whether they would think this was a big request for a discussion board post that did not hold much numerical value to their course grade. But we were pleasantly surprised by the thoughtfulness and the time investment shown by students in this week 15 post. Some students filmed themselves talking; some students created a PowerPoint slide deck over which they narrated, using clip art; some students used slides comprised mostly of text. There was considerable variation as they tried to engage intellectually and technologically with the concept of metacognition, to move into an exegetic experience of the canon of Memory. We've assembled a few of these students' reflections in the video below.

As you watch (and, note that the transcript for the video is available here), please be aware that we have pulled out some of the students' remarks and have added them as screen text; we've summarized a few student comments in this way, too. Ask yourself as you watch:

Next: Metacognitive Synthesis in Portfolio Reflections

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