On the January 21st edition of the New York Times President Obama’s Inaugural Address was published online—in a unique format. This format was described by a faculty member of DePaul’s WRD program as the way that writing was supposed to be in this day and age.

As shown in the screen capture above, this report is different from the traditional form of commentary, where comments are inserted between quotations. Instead, it took full advantage of Web technologies to include text, video, and annotation that can be delivered selectively through a click. Continue reading →

A dozen years ago when I completed all the required courses and prelim exams for a doctorate, my dissertation chair, Dr. Jerry Summers, said to me, “Congratulations, Sharon! You are now on your own!”

He was alerting me that on the dissertation journey, no one else would be holding the reins for me.

Frightened by the notion of being on my own and the rumor that only 20 percent of the ABDs who left their program end up finishing their dissertation, I declined a few “outside” job offers and took a position within my alma mater. Since there wouldn’t be any reminders from my dissertation committee, I rallied up what I called a “butt-kicker committee” to check on my progress on a regular basis. It includes a mentor who ran after me every Wednesday for more chapters, a boyfriend who threatened to break up if I didn’t finish, and my parents who pressured me by cooking super nutritious meals.  

Today, when I think of that process “metacognitively,” I see that the fear of being “on my own” that triggered me to do something about it was an essential reinforcement for me to complete my degree. The danger of being on one’s own is immense—it can make a disciplined person procrastinate and a procrastinator drop off. When work and life keep presenting mini deadlines day in and day out, it is so easy to neglect the big, long-term deadline you’ve set for yourself—like getting a course ready for online delivery.

Like writing a dissertation, this “on-my-own” syndrome has been a major road block for online-course development. When a professor’s day is constantly filled up with teaching, meetings, and researching activities, that deadline for putting together a carefully designed course will likely be pushed, rushed, or expunged.

To beat the odds, a professor from DePaul’s College of Education came up with the idea of opening his course development schedule and experience to the world. On January 5, Dr. Chris Worthman published a blog post on the Center for Educational Technology’s website called . Developing a Hybrid Course: In the Beginning…. In his blog, Chris announced that he will post a weekly update on the progress of developing his hybrid course. The content, in his own words, will include “what I have done, experienced, and been thinking about; what excites me, scares me, and leaves me scratching my head; and, generally, just what this means to me professionally.”

Chris’s idea of blogging his progress strikes me as such a brilliant idea—more brilliant than my butt-kicker committee (even though there were no blogs back then). I see that by turning a course-development project into a reality show, Chris sought out 1) an effective motivation strategy for himself, 2) a professional-development example for his faculty peers, and 3) a model for his students, which is the most important and cleverest aspect of it.

A Motivation-through-Visibility Strategy

As Chris mentioned in his blog, he is “in the enviable position this quarter of developing a new course for a new program that will be taught for this first time in spring 2012 as a hybrid.” Everything about this course was new—including he himself to the experience. Chris was put on a schedule by his instructional designer and initiated the blog to “hold himself to it.”

If making my dissertation visible to my mentor, boyfriend, and family helped create an audience that trigged me to contribute and deliver for their readership, Chris’s action of blogging about his course surely has pushed this “audience effect” to a much higher level. Researchers have found that motivation generated through visibility has been a driving force for the success of online systems such as Wikipedia. Knowing the existence of an audience, as they found, may be sufficient to trigger contribution on its own. So, for Dr. Worthman, having to present his progress every week makes moving his work forward an inevitable action that he now owes to his readers like me. This motivation-through-visibility strategy left him no room to fall back.

A Professional-Development Example for Faculty Peers

In his blog, Chris wrote, “This will be an exercise into the unknown for me because I am not used to spilling the details of a new experience in this way. I hope, however, that it will provide others—like you—with some insight into my professional development and invite others—like you—to share your own experiences, particularly as it relates to digital technology use.”

As the director of his school’s Center for Educational Technology and the associate dean for Curriculum and Academic Programs, Chris has the responsibility of leading faculty into the new era of teaching and learning, which is heavily influenced by the use of digital technology.  When it comes online learning, faculty may have been exposed to sample courses or bits and pieces of stories shared by online-teaching veterans, but very rarely do they have the opportunity to observe the whole process and almost never do they hear the pains and gains associated with each of step of development.

From an initial pledge of doing his work openly, to toiling with Softchalk, to a metaphorical analysis of online-course development, to juggling among elements within a course, his blog brought faculty members a real picture of what it is like for a faculty member to develop a new course in a new modality under a very tight schedule.

A Role Model for Students

I always feel that higher education—as it is now designed—seems to position its faculty and students into two very discrete groups of “knowledge providers” and “knowledge seekers,” or the ones who know and the ones who don’t.

If the process of learning was a race, the only ones who are running are the students; the professors are merely standing on the side to advise and to make some judgments. Those who belong to the professor clan never get to show the ones struggling on the track how they had approached the finish line and never get to rejoin the race—well, not until they begin to learn something new—like teaching online.

When it comes to building technology competencies, online teaching provides faculty members a unique opportunity to meet their students at the starting line. Not only does it put professors in the students’ shoes but also offers students an opportunity to observe how professors conduct the race. The latter can be achieved through a very careful design, like the one Chris Workthman is trying to accomplish. By implementing project-based learning, Chris, tried to develop an authentic learning experience for his students—by letting them experience what he is experiencing. As he said, in his January 19 blog, A Few Thoughts on Process, “To a large degree, what I am experiencing in designing my course is what I want my students to experience when they develop modules on different components of the English language arts.”

Besides teaching them the way of learning, it is even more critical for a professor to cast a spiritual influence on the students, such as the attitude that one should carry in dealing with the unknown. “I want them to jump, with no fear of failure but a level of realism that suggests they are going to have to work hard,” Chris wrote. “I want them to envision themselves as teachers doing actual teacher work. I want them to have a certain level of frustration that forces them to think at a meta-level not only about what they are doing but about teaching and learning in general.”

Lee Shulman once said, “Only when we have something to value, will we have something to evaluate… and we cannot value something that we cannot share, exchange, and examine.” Yet, it takes a lot of “guts” for one to be totally open to that action of sharing, exchanging, and examining. Chris Worthman’s blog reminded me of a comment George Clooney once made on using social media: “I would rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands [than use social media].” Although it’s meant to be a celebrity’s act to defend his privacy, it also showed how hard it is for people to open up their thoughts. For this, Chris’s idea of sharing your course development stories is more than brilliant—it is very brave! I am looking forward to seeing his hybrid course lead, inspire, and transform his students into online learning troopers in the coming spring quarter.

My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out.

Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, I didn’t feel like forcing him to learn something that he was not interested in—until one day he said to me, “Mommy, do you know why I can’t speak Chinese? It’s because you never taught me when I was a baby!”

As a mother, I had been used to being named the source of all faults, but this particular accusation brought me chills—I would be considered a criminal, at least by myself, if he brought up the same claim when he graduates from high school.

Ridden by guilt, I sent him back to Chinese school this fall.

On the first day of school, dropping Grant off at the first graders’ classroom was quite dramatic: all the parents and their well-behaved kids watched me struggle to break away from his clenching and screaming. But then something happened, and it made my Chinese-resenting son fall in love with learning Chinese. This something was a computer program on a CD that was given to first-grade Chinese students as a homework assignment. After learning the rhymed text in class, students were supposed to unscramble the sentences by dragging the characters to the right location. They were timed for their action and given a code to copy down to their homework booklet as proof of completion.

With his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand fiercely moving the mouse, Grant completed his weekly assignments at once and moved on to the next lesson by himself. Once in a while, he would throw his hand over his head and shake his fist, announcing with excitement “yeah, I got it in fifty seconds, Mommy” or “seriously, Mommy, I’ve got it in zero seconds before!” I know that zero-second record was a miscount because he couldn’t read the Chinese word for a minute that stood in front of zero seconds, but nevertheless, I was thrilled—not just by my son’s progress but more by witnessing live evidence of the impact of technology or, more precisely, the strategy of making learning a fun game.

When I put my instructional designer’s hat on to analyze this learning scenario, I see that this simple, computer-aided learning exercise designed by Dr. Liping Ma as part of her Chinese-language curriculum contains quite a number of gaming characteristics, even though it wasn’t branded as a game. In fact, it carries elements of all three general good-game design principles summarized by Dr. James Paul Gee (Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines):

• Empowered Learners—It was not me dragging him into a classroom; it was he himself driving the mouse and the movement of the words.
• Problem Solving—There is a challenge for Grant: he has to compete with himself to complete the task in shorter and shorter times.
• Understanding—Grant has to comprehend the rules of the game as well as the foundation of it, which is the meaning of each Chinese character (even though he didn’t realize that).

Using technology as its powerful carrier, games—in all forms and shapes—are invading our lives. They are commonly viewed by parents and educators as a threat—an evil monster made with some additive ingredients that competes with us for our children’s, our students’, and even our own attention and making it hard for all of us to focus on the right things, such as learning. In dealing with this “threat,” we have tried to shut it out (can you guess how many places I have tried to hide my son’s Nintendo DS?); we have used it to incentivize (“If you finish your homework, you get to play Nintendo for twenty minutes”); and in some rare cases, we have used it as a tool to teach (such as downloading a math or a spelling game to cover up the true purpose of learning with the mask of a game).

Above and beyond these commonly used strategies, there are people who have been trying to push the battle to a whole new level: they have dived into the core of the monster to detect those ingredients that have made it so evilly appealing and addictive. They are the researchers from both sides of the battle field: learning scientists and game designers. And they found out that designing a good game follows the same instructional-design principles that have made learning happen in an effective and pleasant way:

• it engages the player/student with the appropriate level of challenges
• it rewards the player/student with incentives (points, scores, levels, and/or encouraging words)
• it offers chances for nonwinners to try again
• it provides rules and support in clear and intuitive ways
• it fosters a sense of competition either with others or with the player him or herself
• it puts the player/student in the driver’s seat to make choices and to control the progress
• it offers a combination of consistent elements (so you don’t get lost) and surprises (so you don’t get bored)
• it calls for sensory involvement of eyes, hand(s), and brain
• it makes it possible for one to play as someone else
• it connects the players and/or forms a community

(This list will grow longer after more ideas and practices are shared by DePaul faculty at the Annual DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference—Playing with Purpose: Apply Game Design Principles for Learning, on April 20th, 2012. Please stay tuned for the Teaching Commons announcement.)

I hope as you read through this list, you will share my feeling that it is not just games that are everywhere—those game ingredients are easy to find in our lives and in our teaching practices. The other day, when Grant got back from his Chinese school, he gestured a high five to me—“Mom, guess what, I earned eight points for my team today!” I heard my heart chirping with gratitude to his teacher who probably hadn’t noticed that she had just “game-ized” a dry character quiz.

Dr. James Paul Gee said, “Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates).” By making it explicit, the game-design principles can offer us some clue to establish those right conditions so that the misconception of learning-as-work will be corrected by learners who then would reclassify their act of gaining knowledge as a leisure activity.

One evening after finishing my work-late day, I came home to find my husband battling with our five-year-old daughter and six-year-old son on the living room floor. With my daughter fiercely grabbing Daddy’s legs, my son pulled the pillow from his hand and jumped underneath the coffee table—“touchdown!” he yelled. As the two little ones marched on for another round of football, I heard my husband stopping them, “Grant, what was you score? OK, 38… So with a touch down, you get 6. What is your score now? What about the one point for the kick….”

As he paused to add the numbers up in his head, my little football player had no clue that he was taking a math class in disguise. But for the Daddy, he surely was game in catching a teachable moment to build some learning—thanks to that ten years spousal influence!

The Article of the Future project, an initiative of Elsevier, recently released prototypes for the web-based display of research articles in six discipline areas. The templates amazed me with their thoughtful design that allows readers to easily breeze through research articles on the screen. The design is as simple as a three-pane view we usually see on a web page, with the article outline, the content, and the references section. But what strikes me the most is the design philosophy behind the project: to leverage the use of technology to make reading more convenient, efficient, and rewarding, which is the philosophy needed for online-course design.

For example, the layout prototype for a business-management research paper offers a content view with tabs that can expand the layout to include an outline on the left, a context information pane on the right, or both of them, with a single click.

In the content area, the prototype takes full advantage of the multimedia and user-control capacity offered by the web: from graphic animation and video abstracts to interactive charts and diagrams, it offers a full spectrum of options to the readers.

The idea that Elsevier has of building a standardized online layout for research paper coincides with the desire our students have expressed to have a common structure for all of their online courses. In this summer DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, during the online student panel discussion, one faculty member asked, if there was one thing that the students could name as the most important for an online course, what would it be? The answers given were: feedback and structure.

While it is quite understandable how important it is for faculty to provide feedback to students they’ve never or rarely met, why would the structure matter?

“So we don’t have to worry about where to find stuff,” the student said.

The “stuff” is the content and the “where” is the structure. If we save students from using their mental power to seek and search for the content, they can then use that mental power for the content itself. And, as Ruth Clark pointed out in her efficacy in learning theory, one critical goal of instructional design is but to achieve the efficacy in learning by reducing the wasted mental power and maximizing its use for the instructional purpose.

Parallel with the Article of the Future project, DePaul’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) is moving toward creating a standardized course shell for online and hybrid courses. This master course shell includes not only preloaded menu items and module structure but also built-in content such as orientation, instruction on course navigation, online learning guidelines and expectation, and where to begin with the course.

But if all the courses look the same, will it be like an attack of the clones? What about creativity, innovation, and character?

As an instructor who strives to make every class refreshing, memorable, and profoundly “unique”, the hat that I also wear as an administrator of instructional technology helps me face reality, in which, as Gerry McGovern pointed out, the formality is merely the shell, the content inside of it is the one that is winning us the competitive advantage—whether for a web site or for a course. Besides, a consistent format, as Lee Schulman pointed out during his speech at DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, is critical for student success. Without a box, no one will be able to think outside it!

This is an analogy Dr. Carol Wren used to describe her feelings about online teaching—feelings that are shared by many participants of our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. “Teaching online,” as she says in the video below, “is sort of like learning a second language. You have to take what is unconscious and make it conscious. It is going from what you might call a cognitive understanding and making it metacognitive—that is, thinking about what you are doing.”

Carol’s analogy strikes me — a person who cuts across both fields as a trainer/promoter of online teaching and as a learner/instructor of a second language. Thinking about my own experience in learning (and then teaching), I believe a second language provides me with deeper understanding of how and why faculty would relate it to their feelings about teaching online. Without Carol’s permission, I am taking the liberty of adding a few validating factors to her comparison of the two dichotomies: teaching face-to-face versus teaching online and learning your first language versus learning a second language.

An Unconscious versus a Conscious Process of Learning

In learning to speak our native language, we observe, imitate, and interact. Most of these actions are taken without any awareness that we are learning. In this sense, learning to speak one’s first language is more of a natural and unconscious process, which is somewhat like how many of us get into the teaching practice in the classroom: we observed, for years and years, how it was done by our teachers, picked up the ideas, and carried them into our own classroom.

Learning to speak a second language, on the other hand, is a much more cognizant process that requires not only the intentional effort of memorizing and practicing but also a clear awareness of the learning effort itself. It takes some thinking to bring up a word and some more thinking to piece together a sentence—just like when we start to put a course online. It requires not only knowing what technical tools to use to carry the instruction but also how to conduct it. And often, what comes after the interpretation process is something that is completely “foreign:” a one-hour-long presentation is now four pieces of short videos followed by some online discussions; a term paper becomes a three-phase assignment that requires self-review, peer review, and instructor review; an in-class quiz is an online test with auto-feedback. The only difference is that instead of calling it “interpretation,” we call this process “instructional design.”

Implicit versus Explicit Rules and Objectives

While speaking a native language, one doesn’t have to think about grammar, sentence structure, and tenses. Your verbal expression follows the flow of your thinking, naturally and intuitively. Your thoughts are put forward in the form of words without any attentive effort.

When I asked my students why they would use “I have been to New York” instead of “I went to New York,” they said, “Well, ‘cause it sounds right.” But why does it sound right? Without knowing this “why,” we—the nonnative English speakers—wouldn’t know when to use which, and you—the native English speakers who are learning Chinese—wouldn’t know which Chinese word you should use.

Teachers and students both know the rules in the face-to-face class intuitively since they both grow up in this kind of environment, which is like knowing their first language, but all the “grammars” need to be clearly spelled out in the online world: what is expected, why it is expected, how to achieve the expectation, and when to achieve it.

For online students, you have to show them the ropes to avoid the drops.

The Cultural Connection

Language isn’t an independent entity. It represents the culture it stems from, and it is always attached to that culture. Isn’t it the same for online teaching? In order to teach online, you have to not only learn the skills to instruct through this medium but also prepare yourself to see the online world, which has developed (and is still developing) a culture of its own. Being open to that culture, talking to people coming from that culture (e.g. online students), and understanding the expectations of that culture become an important part of online teaching, just like when learning a foreign language. The sense of cultural sensitivity is essential to the online world where even font types can carry meanings that could impact the impressions of a viewer in front of the screen that is a thousand miles away.

The Surprising Benefit of Knowing Another

Students in my Chinese language class never thought that they would have to think more about English when they were studying Chinese. Likewise, it usually caught faculty by surprise when they realized that what they learned about online teaching was impacting the way they teach in the classroom.

Dr. Christine Reyna, a psychology professor, told us during a wrap-up interview with DOTS, “One thing that is really surprising to me about DOTS was how much it challenges me to think differently about my face-to-face class.”

After running eight editions of DOTS in the past three years, we are no longer surprised by comments like this. Examined closely, DOTS seems to be fulfilling the kind of profession education that Dr. Lee Shulman is calling for: to make the learners not only gain the skills but also the mentality and the moral of the profession they are studying for. When it comes to teaching online, what lies behind the technical skill is the pedagogical knowledge, and what goes beyond the knowledge is the virtue of being an online instructor.

So what is the virtue of an online instructor? I would say that an online instructor is the one who has the following attributes:

• Well organized (since an online course needs to be well organized, and an organized site is a reflection of the organized mind of its instructor)
• Advanced planning (since an online course is like an airplane that can’t be built while flying it; it takes a lot of planning prior to the launch)
• Caring and thoughtful (since this is the moral base for any user-friendly interface)
• Predictive (because all the foreseeable obstacles, either the logistical or the technical, need to be anticipated and addressed ahead of time)
• Concise and focused (since this is the only way to catch student’s attention before they click away)
• Efficient and responsive (as demanded by the pace and the turn-around time of online communication)

Now tell me, will any of these characteristics turn around to benefit teaching in the classroom?

“A critical part of becoming creative is being able to play—to play with ideas, with tools, and with pedagogical techniques.” This is a point made by Dr. Punya Mishra at the preconference workshop (Creative Teaching with (and without) Technology) for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference, and it is a point that I try to practice whenever I get to wear my professor hat.

As the instructor of a beginner-level Chinese-language class, I design various kinds of TPACK games and events that combine pedagogy (P), technology (T), and content knowledge of Chinese (CK). The activities I’ve designed range from celebrity-gossip sessions in Chinese (yes, I learned a lot about Jersey Shore in class), to an interactive lecture session with PowerPoint, to an online character-writing assignment on Wimba, to an all-about-my-family talk on Voicethread.

Although most of the time, I am the one who is throwing the ball to the students, when it’s their turn to swing, they strike back hard and soundly: the breakout sessions they managed during our online meeting had better structures than mine; the tally games and activities they designed during the final prep session were fun and sweet (with cookies and treats); and the presentations they put on Voicethread make mine look nothing but dry and boring.

This quarter, some of the players are just out of control—they knock one out with a movie!

CHN103 Movie: A Sneak Peek

Take a look at this trailer of a movie made by my students.

I called it a movie since this twenty-three-minute-long video project conveys a story with twisted themes played by eight characters. In addition to a series of well-designed episodes, it includes special effects, sound bites, theme music, animation, an FBI warning at the beginning, and bloopers in the end.

 It took eight students thirty-some hours to produce it—for a project that is worth only 10 percent of the total grade. That’s right, 10 percent, since all I asked was a short presentation in Chinese delivered via electronic means like Voicethread.

“Can we do a video project? Can we?” A call was made by one and echoed by a few.

“OK,” I said, “with one rule: everyone has to play an acting role in it!”

And from there on, eight out of the twenty-one students in my class teamed up and merged themselves into this fun and crazy idea of playing Hollywood at DePaul.

An Idea for Fun

I bumped into the cast and crew while they were shooting a scene outside the library. There was laughter mixed with screams of excitement between takes and cuts, but none of them ever bothered to ask me how many words needed to be included in their project or how long it should be or where to find the assignment requirements online. Clearly, they fell in love with what they were doing.  They were not driven by a grade; instead, they were doing the work they enjoyed so much that they didn’t consider it work or an assignment anymore.  And loving what they do is the one common attribute Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found among creative people (or people in their creative mood).

The sight of my students defining and designing their own class project reminded me of when I was a student.  Over a decade ago, I took a class on multimedia design and production, and I had a classmate who was far above and beyond everyone in the class (I secretly believed that he actually knew more than our professor). For his class project, he wowed us with an online game he designed that was not only animated but also interactive.  My professor gave his project an F, with a simple and “legit” reason: he didn’t follow her requirement of creating the animation in PowerPoint. I still remember how disappointed he looked when he told us his grade and how much time he had spent on this project.

I now know that from a professor’s point of view, this F was not just a grade; it was a message sent to a self-centered smart aleck: follow the rules and stop showing off!

I never thought there was anything wrong with that message until I became a professor myself.  Well, actually, until I became a mother, a role that forced me to explore and to understand what is going on in the little minds of my children.

Young minds are so fresh and original; they constantly manufacture crazy ideas longing to be attended.  They cry (literally) for the opportunity to show off!   Because they own the natural resource to generate creativity: the energy and brashness of youth (Malcolm Gladwell, Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity, New Yorkers, 2008).

When creativity is budding, it also requires a safe environment to live and grow.   Teachers — in day cares, colleges, and anywhere in between — have the power to either create or destroy that enviroment.   In a classroom where creativity is chreshed,  the sparkles of a creative thought may lead to a beautiful moment of learning through the hand of an innovative teacher  —like the one described in this new letter from my son’s day care.

A Newsletter

This is a letter prepared by Noel Sucherman, one of the teachers of my son’s preschool class. It contains updates of activities that have taken place in a classroom of three- to five-year-olds.  One of the stories goes like this:

During lunch, one friend asked another friend “what would happen if they put their apple seed in the ground.” The friend responded, “A tree will grow, with apples on it!” We talked about how some seeds are planted right outside while other seeds need to grow inside first. There were several requests to grow our own apple trees. Seeds from our apples were placed inside a bag with a little bit of water. The bag was closed to help keep the warm air inside. “We have to keep the seeds safe, a friend said.” After about fifteen days, a few sprouts were observed growing out of one of the apple seeds. “Noel, we cannot grow a tall tree in a bag. We have to put it in the dirt.” The apple seeds were transplanted into a pot of dirt for further growth. We also grew lima beans. Each child wrapped a bean inside a wet paper towel, then placed them inside a bag, watered them and taped them in various places throughout the classroom. Only two children wanted their beans in a dark place, the rest of the beans were hanging in the windows where they were exposed to more sun light. After nineteen days, the two friends beans began to sprout roots, interestingly they were the beans placed in the dark. So many of the children then wanted to relocate their beans to dark places in the room. Their beans also started growing. Once the roots started to appear, the children then planted the beans in little pots of dirt.

In this story, an interesting scientific experiment stemmed from a casual lunch chat or a crazy idea from a little kid wanting to plant a tree out of a seed—because they were well cherished and nurtured by a teacher!

Teaching is an art that lives in the moment; and most of the moments are jointly created by the teacher and the students.  After showing off my students’ movie project to the third audience group, I thought that I’d better jot down what my students have taught me about how to stimulate creativity:

• Maintain a young and playful mind (so you will appreciate the same)
• Give students plenty of chances to play with their own ideas (TPCK can be owned by them)
• Join them in the play
• Have a goal for every assignment, but unlock the rules
• Make a big fuss about any out-of-the-box thinking
• Seek meaningful learning outcomes from the fun of playing ( after all, their movie is in Chinese)

And last but not least,

• Reflect by writing a blog entry or respond to the one I wrote!