The Web Project: Reflections
n the third short critical essay, students were asked to compose reflections instead of annotations (first essay) or arguments (second essay).
This assignment was perhaps the easiest part for the students to write and also the most helpful for the teacher as a form of feedback on the students' experience. However, the idea that the students had to consciously shift registers and voices from typical academic prose to a less formal and more personal style was an objective here. Even if many second-year students are unable to manipulate the style of their writing to any great extent, it is helpful to at least make them aware of the use of different registers for different purposes. The instructions:
In this node you will get personal. Unlike the other two nodes, where you annotate and argue in a formal and detached register (using the third-person pronoun), here you will write in the first-person and make some kind of connection from the material you have studied in this course to your own world of lived experience. How does this course relate to you when you are doing non-course related things? How might this course have changed the way you relate to anything in your world? You might structure the node itself (or part of it) as an anecdote or short narrative.
The exercise of reflection in a digital environment, moreover, carries added significance, given that such an environment is more commonly associated with speed and immediacy. For the students, it was meant as a moment of pause not only in light of the course but also their own digital culture at a time when that very thing — a pause — has come to signify an inconvenience.