Desirable Difficulties in Learning

 The concept of desirable difficulties describes the idea that students need tasks that challenge them to the right degree in order to learn best. Blogging can play role in how we communicate with our peers, develop analytical thinking, and boosts creativity. As outlined in the book "Make it Stick" by Peter Brown, one form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called "write to learn." This brings me back to how blogging works. Students reflect on a recent class topic in brief writing assignments, such as this blog assignment I am completing. This is where they express the main ideas in their own words and relate them to other concepts covered in class. By generating our own written summaries of key ideas by restating them we "write to learn". By writing about our experiences, such as blogging, we engage in two potent learning processes. We retrieve the details and the story of what we have discovered, and we elaborate by explaining our own experiences to our readers (you right now). In turn, this allows for connections of what we already know about a subject and what we have learned along the way.