Repeated Reading Project: Metadiary, entry 1

Monday 22 July, 2015

My original plan with the learning diary was to type it up and put it on my blog.  Perhaps I’ll do that too, but I started writing it by hand in a notebook, and I’ve found the fact that I’m too lazy to “undo” (with an eraser) anything beyond a few spelling mistakes may actually be a benefit in this case.  When I type, I re-process what I’m going to say and go back to change it to match what I’m currently thinking, rather than what I thought at the time.  I’ve already done this several times with this paragraph.

When I write by hand, however, I don’t erase my previous jottings when I think better of them, I just cross them out and make a note to skip down to the point where I’ve recast what I’m doing.  This means my previous mistakes are still there to be read – and we all know how much information about the learning process can be gleaned from mistakes.

So, theoretically, I’m going to try to keep the learning diary going as a hand-written thing and type up my reflections on the process (this “metadiary”) to go online.  My original idea was to have the whole thing go online – just to really push the “Open Access” side of things.  Forget being able to access and use whatever papers I may or may not produce as a result of this project – my raw data will be available for other researchers, if they know where to look.  And, heck, let’s face it – I’m hardly the best person to analyse what’s happening here, am I?  I’ll do my best, but I think the best thing I can do is let other people play too. 

I’ll probably scan the hand-written notes at a later time and put them up somewhere.  I’m hesitant to type them up at this point, as I’m already double dipping in the diary idea by writing this reflection on the diary writing process.  Typing up the notes will just be compounding the observer’s paradox even further, and I’m pretty sure I’m already at a point where the data is highly compromised by the design.

Just to give myself a decent skeleton to work with for the learning diary, I’ve given myself a series of questions to answer after each session.  I’m also quite deliberately not answering them immediately afterwards, but a day or so later.  This is because I’m trying to avoid tiring myself out so that I can put more effort into it.  After reading a passage of text with a dictionary to help me with every third word (for some sentences, much more than that) I’m not ready to do something with a high cognitive load.  If I wrote in the diary immediately, I’d probably do a very poor job of it.

On the same track, I’m also making sure the questions I ask myself aren’t too onerous.  I want to eliminate possible excuses for avoiding the dairy in the future.

The questions are as follows:

·         What did you read?

·         How many words did you need to consult?

·         What’s the story so far?

·         Note two things you had to look up again

·         Note two new things that caught your eye

·         Have you learnt anything since last time which explained something you read or reread?

·         Are there any outside influences which may be affecting your perceptions or understanding?

·         Choose a sentence and dissect it.

I can see a number of “issues” arising from this project.  For one thing, my learning diary is part exploratory and part reflective.  That may be really useful for learning, but it’s probably going to be a nightmare for analysis.  For another, this metadiary is likely to be having a strong influence on what I remember/notice/process, so the double diary thing is also going to make analysis terribly awkward.

Oh, well, these things can always be discussed in the Discussion section.  Isn’t that what every paper ends with – telling the readers what the major issues with the paper where and why we “need more research” to confirm any findings?

So far I haven’t actually reflected on my learning diary entries.  Well, there’s only one so far, and I wrote it over a couple of days, and to write it I went back over the pages I’d already read a second time, so I’m actually reading each section more often than I thought I would originally – I’m repeating it for the preparation for reading the next section, and I’m repeating it for the journal.

However, I have noticed that the number of words I had to consult for the first passage I read practically halved the second time.  I also noticed that I had completely forgotten about postpositions and about the fact that particular prepositions and postpositions go with particular cases.  It was only when I started to dissect my sentence of choice and consulted Tuldava (my grammar text book) that I remembered this.  Having remembered it, I began noticing it in other instances throughout the text.

So far, I think both the repeated readings and the diary are helping me process some vocabulary and syntax that I would previously have skimmed over and forgotten.