Being a participant

Spend five days last week being a participant! Should do that more often. It's nice to be a participant. No responsibility for programmes, materials, the number of markers, availability of the beamer...only responsible for my self!

The topic was 'assessment of learning'. How do you know you learned something? How can you show?

At the end of every day writing in my 'learning diary'. To be honest the first time I did so. In the last years handed out many many of these diaries to participants but never used one myself. And I liked it. The same for being in a learning trio with two 'learning friends for the week'. Meeting each other after writing in the diary.

Not that I could write in my diary 'what I learned', neither could I tell my learning friends. I could describe my thinking during the days but that didn't end in 'Yes I learned this'. It ended in questions, many questions. So my main result of the five days is having even more questions then I had before. And I'm quite happy with that. The questions will give some more guidance to further search and learning.

Making wonderful progress in my playing the guitar. There I have clear questions and I get the answers easily. It's all much more simple. Looking for the chords and licks, finding them somewhere on the net and then practicing how to play them. Important to do that in the right balance and pace. You can find hundreds of chords but then you still have to make your fingers find the right position to play them and to change quickly from one chord to an other. Just doing it a lot helps! Don't need a diary for that.