One of the challenges for me in reading your posts is to determine whether you are saying things in a genuine way or if instead you are writing about what you think I want to hear. The former is what I hope for. The latter is a kind of opportunism, one I'm afraid too many students learn as their default behavior from all the classes they take. Instructors have power over students that results from the ability to assign grades. I really wish I didn't have that power, yet that we were nonetheless engaged in this blogging activity. This is impossible to pull off, given the realities of the system. So here I will content myself with describing the ideal.
Earlier in the semester I mentioned an important work skill that you all need to acquire - the ability to write a cogent memo to some higher ups in the company where you work. Here I want to mention a different life skill that you need to to master as well, one that I have yet to talk about in class. You need to self-direct your own learning based on following your interests, your opportunities, and your current skill set. You might think of this as coming up with your own prompts and then writing to them. Sometimes you can do this in your head without typing anything out. Other times you have to process the ideas in a variety of ways to internalize them. In doing this you need to please yourself, which is what all self-directed learners do. What that means might be vague now, but over time you develop a sense of taste of what is pleasing. Developing that sense of taste is an important part of the the learning.
For a specific subject matter, of course, there is benefit to acquire insight from someone with expertise, who can get you deeper into the subject than you might with your own explorations and/or who can get you up to speed in a much shorter period of time than you would otherwise be able to do on your own. But this is a two-way street. There is the matter of why the expert will talk with you. What do you bring to the table? How will you use the information after the conversation occurs? Being self-directed in your own learning will help answer those questions.
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The two most common terms from our course that students brought into these posts were opportunism and transaction costs. Nobody mentioned gift exchange and collegiality, what we talked about during the very first week of the class. (If you added the class after that there is some reason why you may have not mentioned it, but do note there is presentation material you could have reviewed on this.) Likewise, nobody mentioned complexity, the use of buffers to manage uncertainty, and that in general we come up with rules of thumb for making decisions (we satisfice) rather than optimize. In other words, you connected what you said in the blog posts, but you didn't connect with other things we talked about in class.
The reality is I can't write a prompt on everything we consider. So even if you are writing on my prompt rather than on your own, the more connections you can make with class themes - including from the Excel homework or from class discussion - the richer will be your take away from the course.
Finally, I want to mention a paper I stumbled upon a few years ago while I was researching something else. It is by Kenneth Bruffee and is called Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" and which might be a bit much for you to read through. It definitely isn't about economics, so I will give you a very condensed version here. Thinking, writing the blog posts, and class discussion are all conversation in some form. That class discussion is conversation shouldn't be surprising. That thinking is conversation might be a new thought for you. Bruffee calls it internalized conversation. Then, writing is also an imagined conversation, with the hypothetical reader (who is in your head). You always have the reader in mind when you write.
I try to teach this way, even though we are an Econ class, not an English class. I wonder if you had this sort of course as a first-year student (perhaps it would take several classes like this) whether the lessons I mentioned about learning self-direction would have taken hold with you earlier. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about that.
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