Final Reflective Post

In this final reflective portfolio post you are encouraged to review your previous posts and reflect on your journey as a learner in this course. How does the portfolio overall represent your growth and development? How might you continue to use the portfolio in the future to represent your professional capacity to external viewers?  

Discover / I started my portfolio reflections by writing about trying to explain a topic to a novice and struggling with how to break down multiple parts that made up my understanding. I wrote about my time working at my previous company, and how I knew the platform backwards and forwards, which made it difficult to explain things to clients. It was revealing to break down my thinking and learn about the different ways that novice and experts approach content. I was starting to shift into the mindset of an instructional designer, but was still stuck in my previous experiences.

Design / My next post was about how there is no way to divorce myself from the identities I hold in the ways I've been raised, which means that I always bring them into my design work. It was also a chance for me to reflect on what accessibility means to me. That hasn't changed, it's always been important. I see my past self fully immersed in the reflective “what did I bring that I didn’t know I brought?” work of designing learning, an essential part that I hadn’t ever been given the chance to consider before.

Develop / In my third post, I reflected on what it was like to work with my team for the asynchronous learning week. It was chaotic and went in unexpected directions, but it was extremely useful for me to understand what it was like to work on a team of people who have vastly different opinions and ways of approaching the same content and task. We ended up having a very fruitful discussion about learning design and the theories we were going to use and why, and I saw the benefits of different styles of learning about the same content that we had approached in week three as an in-person class.

Deliver / My most recent post which I wrote after the gallery walk was startling to read because I recognized my proximity to where I am now, but realized that I have also learned quite a lot in the time since the process of researching, the content organizing it, considering the learning theories in the writing of the content and the design of our site have really catalyzed my understandings and reflections that I've gathered over the semester.

In my portfolio posts, I see a trajectory of moving out of my very firm identity as an employee at a legal tech company to someone who was deeply immersed in the theory and research around instructional design, then got a chance to practically apply it and try to come up with something coherent only to realize that it would take quite a bit more effort to create something passable as “good” learning.

I have a deeper understanding and respect for this great work of designing learning. It is truly 90% design and research with a very small but extremely meaningful outcome that hopefully will accomplish some of the objectives that Katie and I have set.

I will continue to use this portfolio, actively in my upcoming semester and my time after school ends it is a culmination and collection of many of the things that I am most proud of, including this project.