sailboat in Puget Sound

Journal writing week 3


Writing you must do this week. (3 hours)
1. Journal Writing. In your journal, consider your goals for yourself in the INO Program and anticipated highlights and difficulties.
2. Journal Writing. Write about your thoughts on self-directed learning and what connections you make to the Rogers reading.
3. Journal Writing. Write about an experience you had with self-directed learning in which you learned a skill. Identify the skill.?
4. Learning Autobiography. Choose at least three questions from the "Viewpoints" section of Chapter Four of Keen and Valley-Fox to write toward (especially page 69). Select the most relevant to begin your autobiography. Write this, and then you will post it in the next session to share with the class.
5. Learning Autobiography. Aside from answering the three questions (mentioned above), generally start working on your learning autobiography, and post what you have so far to the class in the discussion board.

My major goals are to learn and synthesize literature and philosophy, evolve my own literary theories about literature and the writers. I need to learn a fair amount of psychology about motivation and identity of the writers and who they think they are and who they are writing for.

I need to learn a fair amount of philosophy that is humanistic and existential as to find ways to deal with angst and the human condition. One impediment will be the dearth of time I have to read enough classics in literature that deals with these questions or issues. Examples of such works would be those by Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoevsky to mention a few of the greats.

Another difficulties would be the lack of such courses offered in UIS online that I can work with a professor, and so I have to do a fair amount of self-study, as I surmise at this point. But that shouldn’t really be a problem since I have self-studied poetry for some 30 years. The crucial thing is to find the same kind of motivation and interest in embarking on this new adventure of applying philosophy and psychology to the field of literature. This is not new at all, but to me it is a very exciting new undertaking.

Self-directed learning takes self-discipline and a vast amount of work once the
Initial curiosity is sparked. I would have to be my own critic and that’s going to be difficult and humbling and objectivity will be a hurdle. The connection I made with Rogers’ readings is that I must not subsume to any preconceived or the usual tracks just to get recognition for my work. I must go beyond the proven methods of getting recognition of an advanced degree. The key is the work. Wherever the work leads, that’s where I have to go.

One of the accomplishments I have is to set up a literary publishing press with
which I published several titles of poetry and prose and an anthology of poetry.
These are perfect-bound paperback books, like what you usually see in a bookstore. In the process of this endeavor, I learned how to solicit manuscripts, editing, copyrighting for the authors, negotiating with authors as to how many copies of the books to be printed, and I then engaged the services of a book designer who also handled the printing end of the books.