Important information about Comments and Reflections

When commenting, add your views and share your own relevant experiences (or other supporting evidence) so that the whole group can benefit from your message. You may wish to respond to your colleagues’ postings in one or more of the following ways:

• Ask a probing question.
• Share an insight from having read a colleague’s posting.
• Offer an evidence-based opinion or suggestion inspired by their work.
• Validate one of their ideas with an example from your own experience.
• Expand on the ideas in your colleague’s posting.

Please note that when you critique the content of other students’ answers, the comments should always be constructive and NOT attack the author personally.

At the end of each topic, your summary post should reflect on the key points you have learned SINCE you answered the set question from reading the work of other students and interacting with them. What has this activity added to your initial understanding of the topic? You should include a link in your post please to each of the specific comments that you have made on the posts of the other students so the marker can track the conversations.

Your post should be concise and focused on the key points you have learned – please do NOT attempt to summarise everything that has already been said on the topic!

Here’s a good example of a well written reflective summary that includes direct links to the comments made by the author on the work of other students.

Don’t forget to read the handouts we supplied on Reflective Writing and Evaluating Web Sources.

By the end of each topic the whole class should have collaboratively discussed the materials, shared experiences and insights, and improved the collective understanding of the subject.