Graham Atwell posts a link to a long paper he has written about PLEs in general. In his blog post, he re-posts the comments he makes about reflection, the difficulties of getting students to reflect – and the fact that there is natural tendency to comment superficially on what the student thinks the teacher is going to want to read.
Reflecting on work isn’t something that I had to do at school, nor in my first degree. It’s something that I find hard, yet I have to get students to do it. Atwell quotes from Kathleen Yancey’s “Reflection in the writing Classroom”:
reflection is always a fiction where students write specifically to the needs of the tutor.