Writting a personal blog

Beginning in the second week of the course, you will embark on a personal learning challenge where you will challenge yourself to learn a new skill. You are free to identify any safe and legal activity which you would like to learn and you will have four weeks to practice.

Skills which may interest you include:

· playing a musical instrument

· riding a bicycle or unicycle

· juggling

· cooking, baking, or grilling (!) a series of more challenging recipes

· breaking or starting a habit

You are encouraged to complete the learning portion of this activity with other people, either within the class or in your local community. For example, if there are several people who want to learn an instrument, you may want to work together, form a band, and learn a particular song.

The main point of the activity isn't for you to become perfectly proficient at your chosen skill, but for you to experience the challenges associated with literally changing your brain in order to learn something and then to reflect on those challenges and successes to share what you have learned with the rest of the class in relation to what you are learning about designing learning experiences.

In order to reflect on your experience, you will need to document your learning somehow. Data might include the ratio of successful to unsuccessful attempts, time spent practicing, subjective ratings of confidence in your ability, reports of others related to the quality of your performance, pictures, videos, audio recordings, etc. Once you have gathered some data, look for patterns. What time of day is best for you to practice? Was there a 'breakthrough' moment where everything came together? What was most difficult? What was easiest?

Sharing your experience will be based on the data that you gather and will take place on your blog. Please narrate your experience for the rest of the class. Tell us about your process. How did you plan your learning? How did you work through challenges? Is is better to practice alone or with someone else? If you practice with someone else, is it more helpful if they are more skilled than you? Share your data with us! You don't need to become a YouTube or Instagram influencer through this process, so don't worry too much if the media you share isn't sparkly and slickly produced. It is expected that this will be a formative process, meaning you will be really bad at the beginning, and more skilled at the end.

The most important part of this activity is for you to connect your learning process to what you are learning in this class about learning and learning design. It's all very meta.

Each of your 5 graded blog posts (due at the end of weeks 1-4 and 6) will be about your learning challenge and are worth 7% of your final grade each for a total of 35% collectively.