Assessment Task

IFN623 Human Information Interaction

Semester 2 2024

Assessment 3 – Reflective Journal

Name    Assessment 3 – Reflective Journal Due                   Week 13 (see Canvas for exact date) Weight 20%

Submit PDF via Canvas

Rationale and Description

Reflective writing can be helpful in working through challenging situations. Writing down your thoughts about recent events helps you organise them and make sense of them. It allows you to take time to process the emotions associated with significant events, but at your own pace and on your own terms. If you lack experience in dealing with particular challenging situations, your quick decisions may not look as appropriate in hindsight. Reflecting on these situations and the decisions made, will allow you to consider what you might change next time. In other words, reflective writing helps you learn from challenging situations. A reflective journal provides evidence of your thinking about how you are learning.

However, writing reflectively is not just about learning. Many studies have shown that personal wellbeing benefits flow from writing about difficult situations. The process of writing allows you to process things that may be difficult to speak about, or that you do not want to dwell on. It can give you an opportunity to express emotions but without the risk of making that expression to someone who may not understand you. A reflective journal provides evidence of your thinking about how you are coping with new and challenging experiences.

Reflective practice is an essential meta-level skill for most professions. It requires the practitioner to develop a level of self-awareness which can identify personal strengths and weaknesses and seek out ways to capitalise on those strengths and remedy the weaknesses. A reflective journal provides evidence of your thinking about your strengths and weaknesses and the effect they have on professional practice.

Learning Outcomes

When successfully completed, this assessment task should evidence:

1. your ability to reflect on personal capabilities and appraise yourself in relation to expectations for information professionals.
2. your thinking about your own learning and how you coped with new and challenging learning experiences.
3. your participation in the learning experiences offered in this unit, and the extent to which you have learnt from them.

Essential Elements

It is important to reflect regularly - at least every week when you engage with the learning experiences of this unit - and keep a written record. This written record will not be directly assessed, but you could be asked to furnish it as evidence of your ongoing work towards your reflective journal during the semester.

You must use first person point of view in your writing, giving your personal opinions, and using the words ‘I’ and ‘my’ throughout. Your writing needs to relate to your personal views and experience and authentically reflect your learning throughout the semester.

The following questions must be addressed in your final submitted journal

1. Thoughts – What do I notice about my learning? What does it mean for me? Why is it significant?
2. Feelings – How do I feel about these learning experiences? Why do I feel this way? What do these feelings say about me as a learner?
3. Challenge – What problems exist in my learning? How do they challenge me? What impact will these challenges have on my goals and aspirations? What solutions did I come up with to address these challenges?
4. Self-reflection – What are my strengths and how do I use them? What should I improve and why? What other ideas can I use to develop myself?
5. Check-in and Participation – What did I learn from my check-ins and participation during the semester? How will I use what I have learnt to inform how I meet challenges, interact with others or learn new concepts in future?
6. My Career – In 5 years’ time, my career will be [describe what that career looks like]. How can I apply what I have learnt in this unit to my future career? How have my perspectives/expectations on my future career changed based on what I’ve learnt in this unit?
7. The Future – Reflect on a future technology you’d like to work with (either by developing, designing, or using). Feel free to be creative. How would someone interact with this technology? How can you use what you’ve learnt in this unit to assist you in making your future interactions (or those of your future customers/clients) best for this technology?

Check-ins

As this assignment involves reflecting on your learning journey in the unit, it is important to include reference to active participation in discussions with teaching staff and other students. One formal reference to this to be included in your Assignment as an essential element is reflection on at least two “check-ins” with teaching staff throughout the semester. Check- ins must be arranged in either drop-in or Q&A sessions during the self-directed learning portions of the Semester (i.e., between modules). There is no ability to schedule times outside of these sessions for check-ins, so it is a good idea to approach teaching staff in one of the earlier drop-in or Q&A sessions in each self-directed learning period to ensure you don’t miss out.

Your honesty and integrity are an essential component of this assessment and may be verified by the teaching team from other sources. For example, your participation in workshops and on-line discussions on Slack, as well as notes made during check-ins may be used to verify claims you make about engaging with the learning activities.

Your writing must be your own original work and must not include any text from other sources unless clearly identified as such. If there is doubt about whether the reflective journal is your

own work, the unit coordinator may require you to furnish evidence of your regular reflections in order to verify originality.

Further detail on the steps required for completing the Reflective Journal is outlined in the ‘detailed instructions’ section below.

Marking Criteria

This assessment is criteria referenced, meaning that your grade for the assessment will be given based on your ability to satisfy key criteria. Refer to the attached Criteria Sheet and ensure that you understand the detailed criteria.

It is important to realise that you are required to not only know what is needed for the task, but that you also demonstrate and provide evidence of your understanding and ability to complete the task. This means that you need to make your knowledge and understanding clear to the person marking your assignment. It is not the marker’s responsibility to interpret work that is ambiguous or unclear, nor will you have the opportunity to further clarify your work after submission.

You will not receive marks or percentages for this assessment. You will receive an overall grade (e.g. pass - 4, high distinction - 7) based on the extent to which you meet the criteria. In general, the most important criterium (listed at the top) will be essential to the grade, and the least important (at the bottom) will affect the grade when other criteria are in conflict or are ambiguous.

Feedback

Part A of your reflective journal should be submitted for formative feedback. Formative feedback does not count towards your final grade, but it is based on the same criteria that will be used to grade your final submission.

Submitting for feedback is highly recommended, as it will help you: (a) identify if you have satisfactorily addressed the criteria of the task, (b) understand where you can make improvements, and (c) spread your assignment load more evenly across the semester.

In order to receive formative feedback on this assessment, you must submit by the specified date:

PART A Due: Week 8 (see Canvas for exact date)

The teaching team will endeavour to provide feedback within 10 business days of this date. Feedback will only be for Part A journals submitted by due date and feedback for submissions after this date will not be given.

Detailed Instructions

1. Attend three check-ins: Between modules, there will be periods of self-directed learning. During these weeks, you are required to arrange two to three separate times (either in the second part of the Q&A time or during the Drop-in session time) to participate in a 5

minute check-in with one of the teaching staff. These should be spread across the semester, with at least one during each self-directed learning period. The purpose of these check-ins will be to discuss what you have been working on and to receive informal feedback. Reflecting on this discussion will form part of the final assess able reflection journal you will submit for this assignment.

Note: If there is no record of a check-in session that you refer to in the final journal (i.e., if no check- in occurred), it will affect the grade for the criterion associated with this portion of the reflective journal. This means that it is important that you notify the teaching staff when you would like to conduct a check-in. For instance, if you approach one of the teaching staff during a session in the self-directed learning period, simply tell them that you would like the discussion to count as one of your check-in sessions. Teaching staff may take notes during check-in to cross-check with reflections.

1. Regular reflection A: During weeks 1 to 8, you should write a reflection each time you work on aspects of this unit. It is expected that you will reflect at least every week, but most likely more frequently during this time. Your reflections should focus primarily on the new knowledge and skills you are learning in these weeks and should take account of thoughts, feelings, challenges, and self-critique. You can use the first 5 questions above (in Essential Elements section) to guide your reflecting.

You can record your weekly notes of your reflections in any format you choose (e.g., in a notebook, word document, notes file, etc.). Journals submitted must not be a collection of your weekly reflection notes, but a summary of these as an overarching reflection.

1. Journal part A: Using your weekly reflections, write a reflective summary (1-page maximum) around the questions listed in Essential Elements. The questions are associated with the first 5 aspects of reflection (thoughts, feelings, challenges, self-critique and check- ins). Ensure that your reflection is about your thinking. Be careful to avoid simply describing or listing what happened, but also include your reflections and personal perspective by writing with the first-person (e.g., I found that ... My feeling was ... I think that ...). Ensure that you write from the first-person point of view. Use the criteria sheet (specifically, criterial 1-5, 8) as a guide for how the journal will be graded.
2. Submit part A: Ensure that your name and student number are at the top of the page. Save your Reflective Journal Part A as a PDF file and submit via the provided Canvas link by the due date. You should ensure that your file is named in the format student Number- full Name-journal Part A.pdf before uploading to Canvas. This submission is for formative feedback and will not count towards your final grade.
3. Reflect on feedback: Read the formative feedback you receive on part A and write a reflection on how you can use that feedback to improve your reflective writing for part B.
4. Regular reflection B: During weeks 9 to 13, you should continue to write reflections related to your learning. It is expected that you reflect at least every week. Your reflections for part B should focus primarily on how you are applying your learning to particular situations, the technology you will interact with and what the future might look like. For Part B, you should take account of the questions associated with all 7 aspects of reflection above (in Essential Elements section), and focus on summarising the semester as a whole (rather than simply adding to Part A or pasting your weekly reflections in one after the other).
5. Final Journal: Write a final reflection for the whole semester (2 pages maximum) based on the questions listed in the Essential Elements section, reflecting on all your weekly regular

reflections including your writing and feedback for part A. You can include your content from part A, but you may choose to modify it based on the feedback that you received. Ensure that all of the points of Essential Elements have been catered for in your writing, in particular writing from the first-person point of view. Also ensure that you have carefully read the criteria sheet (all criteria 1-8) so that you know how your journal will be graded, allowing you to write the journal in a way that gives you a good grade. Better assignments typically do not use the questions/criteria as headings, but cover them all within a cohesive overall reflection of the learning journey throughout the semester.

1. Submit complete Journal: Ensure that your name and student number are at the top of the first page of your journal. Save your Reflective Journal as a PDF file and submit via the provided Canvas link by the due date. You should ensure that your file is named in the format student Number-full Name-journal Final.pdf before uploading to Canvas. This submission will be assessed and contribute 20% of your final semester grade.

Submission

The assignment must be saved as a PDF and uploaded to Canvas using the link provided prior to the assignment due date. Your file should be named as indicated above and should include your name and student number at the top of the first page. You are encouraged to upload early to avoid unexpected issues close to submission time. You may upload multiple versions, but only the latest version prior to submission time will be marked. Take care that the last version you upload is the correct version.

Referencing, use of AI and Academic Integrity

As this assignment requires you to reflect on your own learning journey in this unit, it is not expected that you will need to draw on other sources (e.g., journal articles or books) to inform your writing in this assignment, only your own personal reflections. However, if you do draw from external sources to accompany your own reflections, ensure that you only include this if relevant (keeping in mind that the criteria by which you will be marked relate to your own reflections, rather than your understanding of other sources), and reference using standard APA style.

Plagiarism is taken very seriously at QUT and multiple methods are employed to detect it. Not only is it a violation of the academic integrity policy to plagiarise; at a more basic level, it is unethical to take someone else’s words or ideas and present them as your own. This is particularly relevant in this assignment as only you can reflect on your own learning. You will not be awarded any marks for sections that include copied text (even if the wording has been changed or rearranged), as the marks for someone else’s ideas and writing do not belong to you. In addition, if the amount of work that is plagiarised reaches a certain level, we are required to report it.

Use of AI Tools

This assignment requires you to reflect on your own learning journey in this unit. Only you are able to do this. Using AI tools such as Chat GPT to generate parts of this assignment is therefore not appropriate or permissible, and unlikely to meet the requirements as graded according to the marking criteria.

Honest reflections, even if they are written informally or conversationally, are much more likely to meet the requirements of this assignment compared to polished, grammatically correct

responses that are generated by large language models. Remember that these tools cannot attend the lecture or tutorials for you, nor do they have human-level ability for genuine reflection and as such, are unable to meet the specific requirements of the assignments to the same quality as you can. Overly generic content that does not relate to specifics of learning in this unit and reflective writing required in this assignment will not meet essential criteria for a passing grade.

Resources

The following resources may assist with the completion of this task:

• https://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/write/reflectivewriting.jsp
• https://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/academichonesty/atQUT.jsp

Questions

Questions related to the assessment should be directed to any of the teaching team or via Slack.

The teaching team will generally not be available to answer questions outside business hours, including over the weekend before the assessment due date. It is your responsibility to ensure that you plan to avoid the need for last minute questions.

Criteria Sheet – Assessment 3 Reflective Journal

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*Note: Some criteria descriptions are common across multiple grade levels. This occurs where the differentiation between grades is dependent on the relative quality across grades within a certain description.