Week 1: Seasons of my learning

Wow! Finally my words are on line. It is an amazingly mixed feeling. A sense of achievement, no doubt, makes my heart swell but at the same time I can’t but feel the cold shiver running through my vein as soon as I start thinking of critics- experts, novice, known and unknown- judging my write-ups here. The transformation, from being an assessor of students as a teacher to being assessed as a participant, is going to take some time to be acclimatised. 

 I am a near fresher in blogging, maybe that’s why I am feeling the tense more than usual. I opened a blog in 2010 with no posting and with a simple Voki video. I created it (Voki) but surprisingly within the span of more than 3 years I found that the Voki avatar has changed its gender. I can surely remember it was male but now it displays a female avatar. Funny! And the sound is not coming either. I tried but failed to fix it. Now, I have created another one for this blog and tried to place it in the sidebar but in vain. I am still working on it Hopefully soon I will be able to do it.

 The task of creating a blog seemed initially easier to me. But the moment I started working on it I realised how wrong I was. Believe me, I felt like I was climbing a mountain. 

As a start, I went through resources on how blogs are developed, what purpose they serve, how many types there are and also browsed different blogs to see how they look, how informations are organised etc. The resources never end! Since I am a novice, I read extensively. At certain point, quite naturally, I became tired. I felt I was becoming like that person who has a PhD in swimming but does not know how to swim. So I quit and decided to make my hand dirty in developing blogs and playing with it.

 What could be an apt title for my blog? I thought over and again. Out of so many alternatives, I went with 'Eftu's Reflective Blog'. Surprisingly so many blogs are there with similar titles. Perhaps great men think alike. Later, I decided not to be great and coined Schön’s (1983) terminology ‘reflection-in-action’ for my blog title.

Google is a saviour! Whenever I was stuck (and I was stuck more often than not) to upload an image, to change the font, to add a link, to change the background I simply googled and tried to follow the instructions found. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes failed.

Overall, it was hard but fun!

Reference:
Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA., Jossey-Bass