Learning Review Essay

Introduction Learning Logs are more or less like personal diaries which helps you to record, structure, think about and reflect upon the evidence of your own learning. The difference between a learning log and personal diaries is that a learning log contains your conclusions about how what you have learnt is relevant to you and how you will use the new information or knowledge in the future. Development I used the Learning Log to record the courses I went on, Internet sites I had looked at, and television programmes I watched. My first experience I had when I was writing the first learning log was quite interesting and very difficult, being that I have never done anything like that before. I would say it is sometimes hard for someone to talk about oneself and feelings about something. Before I started writing the log, I asked myself a couple of questions like (What I did? , my thoughts and feelings? , what I learnt? , and What I will do differently next time? ). At first it seemed difficult to critically reflect upon my own learning’s, but over a period of time after much practising, it became a little easier and understandable. The more often I practiced the skill of self-reflection, the easier it became. Most of my learning logs were more or less focused on my personal life as it seemed easier to reflect on my personal life than reflecting on my academic life. Although talking about my personal life can get difficult as I sometimes did not know how to express my feeling toward what I was writing on. I encountered many difficulties and questions in writing my third log. At first, I thought I knew how well to write learning log, but later, I realised I was not so good. I asked myself, do I need to write every learning log referring to all my previous lecture or tutors? I cannot apply them so quick and see if they work for me. Then I realised it is easier to write about my daily life although it is harder to reflect on personal life. The content of one of my lectures (principles of marketing) was quite hard for me to write about and apply in my daily life. Apart from the above mentioned problem, I also have a question of what I learnt from an online marketing intelligent tutor program. At that tutor session, it was focused on the main issues of marketing. Evaluating the lecturers tone and works, the choice of evidence, the validity of the evidence, I think these points can be tried only when I read more commentary or article about the topic. The third lecture from my economics class was on critical reading. In the part of defining critical reading, I found myself always reading books passively and recklessly. When I have to read textbooks, this will happen easily. Some contents of those textbooks are quite long and boring. Just as now I am studying Microeconomics, I should read the whole chapter to get more information and concepts about this subject. But I don’t think it is easy to read. The sentences are long and hard to understand. When I read this textbook, I often cannot get concise concept and write summaries to be able to reflect on them One of the interesting logs I wrote was on a book I read titled â€Å"Good Decisions†. This particular log gave me a better idea on how to perfect my log writing skills because I was able to reflect on it. This book made me understand the different ways to approach ethical problems. I learnt that I have two core values, upholding harmony between people and doing the right thing, and this makes my decision-making difficult. I think I am not alone though, most people probably have similar problems and the reason why we cannot agree on some ethical issues is based on the fact that we approach them from different perspectives, rather than that we disagree on the fundamental values we have. I realised that if we share these values, our decision will depend on how we define caring for others and what things are the right things in different situations. I would also assume there might be a gender difference, with women being more likely to prioritise well-being of others and men finding it more important to uphold the rules. I decided that when next I am faced with any ethical dilemma with someone, I will try to identify what methods they are using to make the decision and see if that extra insight would help us solve the problem at hand quicker. Conclusion Overall I believe that the learning logs have helped me understand the importance of self-reflection. After I completed the amount of logs required weekly, I was able to achieve certain goals. Learning logs have made me tolerant, Analytical, Diplomatic, Become more open to learning, reflective in all I do and Self-Aware.