Project & Process Reflection

All in all my project work went very smooth and every day I had some time to work on it. Nevertheless I wish to work more focused. I experienced the pattern, that if I start to work on my projects theoretically I have a lot of ideas what I could do or add, then I have to research them immediately. This leads to many open research themes where I only scratch the surface and that keeps me from working efficiently. At the same time I am happy that I managed to balance thinking and doing with the help of the Kolbs Model and experienced every stage of the learning cycle. Especially in the bee project I strongly experienced how theory and practical work replenished each other. In the education project that was important as well but there I could work more intuitively. With bees you need a certain amount of knowledge to start properly.
My way through the learning stages of the Kolbs Model is not perfect yet, but I can see myself getting better in consciously implementing them.

To a certain extend my projects (at least the education project) are different from what I outlined in my LIPD, but they still meet some of the goals I presented. Only the bee project I took over almost exactly from my LIPD. In addition to all the other things I also kept working on the soil and building project. 

Further OP-Plans:

In my OP 4 I plan to combine the education project with the soil project because I organize a Terra Preta production workshop together with Declan Kennedy. I hope to provide good content for the participants and a good balance between thinking and doing although the emphasis will be on doing. Furthermore I plan to expand my capacity to create useful mind maps (with the help of ArCEA), which I will prototype in the bee projects and then apply them accordingly in the Terra Preta workshop.

Additionally I have another project idea, which is to write a blog. The idea developed because in the next months my boyfriend and I will traveland hopefully learn a lot about permaculture, communities and different countries in Southern Europe. Therefore, we thought, it would be just the right thing to continuously document our experiences on a blog. My first plan is to design our possible future blog. I am not sure yet, if I will document the developments in my next OP, but it is a possible option.  

This time I started to create my OP very early and more relaxed than the last time. Because of my almost continuous project documentation I had a lot of project text written down already. Nevertheless it took me a lot of time to write the essence of my projects and I am still not sure if I managed to do it. During the OP creation it helped me to take a lot of notes to record all my ideas, thoughts and inspirations. From time to time the pieces of paper became confusing because I collected them in one place instead of sorting them. Next time I will try to write them in a small notepad.

From the beginning I designed my OP around the Core Report by using the Kolbs model as a design process. For more information on how I used the Kolbs model just take a look at the XMind on the right side.

Through its very simple and clear approach the Kolbs model proved itself as practical and gave me orientation at each stage. I really appreciated to work with such a simple but effective method which encouraged me to experiment, conceptualize, experience and reflect.

The Kolbs model in general

The two Kolb kite models down below show my Kolb profiles: on the left before I started to work on my project, on the right after I went consciously through every stage of the model. As the profile "after unlearning" shows I really expanded my thinking especially in Reflective Observation and Abstract Conceptualization during my projects "Bee-keeping" and "Education". I observed that I also used these strategies - however less detailed - in the small projects I am doing by the way. And I recognized that I expanded the reflection stage by questioning facts and actively thinking about facts at hand. Furthermore I catch myself more often conceptualizing different strategies and theories. So in conclusion I can say that my skills according to the Kolbs model became more balanced by using Reflective Observation and Abstract Conceptualization more often.