If I talk very specifically about the problems I encounter, the solutions I find, and technical perspectives of the work I do my journal becomes a very useful tool to me... and an unintelligible, boring log with occasional pictures to everybody else.
If I talk generically about the progress I am making it will sound very, very repetitive and serve little purpose to me. However, the comment was made to me, that people are interested in what I am doing, not necessarily how I am doing it.
Here is a template for every abstract post I might or could make:
I started with the goal of [some feature to implement]. I ran into some problems with the programs I'm using [list a couple of bugs, like "the sidebar is too wide in Firefox"]. I found a fix for [some problem I had before] - it works now. Next I need to [perhaps some goals].
At first glance, that seems like a thoughtful and perhaps even interesting blog post. As a tool to me, however, this post offers little help. 'The sidebar is too wide in Firefox' is the kind of bug developer hate. Its not really a bug, it's a symptom. A useful description of the bug might be "Firefox doesn't support the box-style CSS property. The style was written to use border-box, which is valid in Chrome. Using a temporary Firefox-specific style instead."
As a compromise, I might start prefacing some technical posts with a summary (following the above template roughly) and then getting into the technical details after.
Ms. Lord and I were just discussing this in class today, and she seems to love the detailed, specific posts, but also encourages variety. She asked if anyone in our class read a journal entry from our gleaning from the past assignment that was just a list of technical terms that is important to them. She called that a gem. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that if you can explain something to a layman, you really know the topic. I know you know this, you study for tests by teaching others all the time.
ReplyDeleteIstvan and Joon--it really is a pleasure to see you two ponder the HOW and the WHY! Istvan, I completely understand your conundrum...no doubt it's every WISE student's quandary. But, when it comes down to it, I find myself wanting to empathize with the side that wants "meaning for me" (the WISE student gaining something for self) over simply "performing for a grade"--I've also observed and assessed enough of these projects that I can fairly confidently say I can tell the difference!
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth! Ms. Lord :)