...First, reflection is a process of change. In the language of physics, reflection is the phenomenon in which energy is returned after impinging upon a surface. Once our experience of "real life" encounters a different medium—our memories, for instance, or the writing process itself—that real life experience is changed.
--Rebecca McClanahan (from "Frelection")
Danielle Wickingson—she goes by Dani—won a scholarship for using her ePortfolio to demonstrate her excellence. In high school Dani took part in a short student exchange program in Japan, and then was able to spend the next year studying and living in Japan. Upon returning to Utah, she enrolled at SLCC and one of the first courses she took was Culture and Human Experience.
In her ePortfolio she wrote the following: “Taking Culture & Human Experience was really the beginning of realizing my potential, as well as my love for learning. Everything I was taught in this class made me understand why a lot of things happened during my time in Japan: the mistakes I made, my cultural misinterpretations, my ethnocentrism, but also my triumphs and accomplishments. It shed a whole new light on my year abroad and made it that much more meaningful. Click to continue reading Dani Wickingson's reflection |
Eli Spikell is a non-traditional student at Salt Lake Community College who won a scholarship for the strength of his ePortfolio.
In his COMM 1020 Public Speaking course, Eli had to give nine speeches, post one of those into his ePortfolio, and reflect on his own performance and experience in the course. The first thing one notices in Eli's reflection is how the course has helped him understand public speaking from the point of view of the audience: "I have learned the importance of organizing ideas in a way that a particular audience will receive them in the way a speaker intends. I have felt myself become turned off by an unorganized speaker and found my mind wandering. It is just like Professor Larkin taught us at the beginning of the semester, you have to get the audience's attention and keep it. You only have a short period of time to to get your message to them, and people will usually only remember a couple of things from a speech. The audience does not want to work for the message." Click to continue reading Adam "Eli" Spikell's reflection |
Highly productive and creative individuals think about their own thinking while they are thinking. This process, called metacognition, allows people to engage in a valuable conversation with themselves, exploring their background, questioning and correcting their thinking in the process, and pursuing the dynamic power of their minds.
--Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do