Lab Journal

Introduction | Keeping the Lab Journal | Things to put into your Journal

Guide to Writing Laboratory Journals

Introduction

Students often ask "What should we write in these lab journals that we have to keep in the labs?". This page attemps to answer that question. If anything in here needs clarification, please email John with your comments.

Keeping the Lab Journal

Maintaining your lab journal should be done with the SVN repository. That way you can keep track of your learning progress through the semester, and keep a permanent record of what you have learnt. If you are into keeping a Student Portfolio, such journal records should be an essential part of such a portfolio.

The svn repository for your journal can be kept in any of the svn repositories available to you, but it is recommended that you use http://svnte.infotech.monash.edu.au/svn/fit2022-your authcate id, since this repository is writable only by you, and thus cannot be accessed or modified by anyone else.

cd into a subdirectory that you use for your working copy of the repository, and check out your repository:

You will get a new subdirectory called fit2022-your authcate id. This will be empty the first time you do it, but you can add new files into the directory, and add them to the svn-maintained repository with

This will ask you for some comments about the new version, using a vi editor interface. Put something helpful into this so that you know what was edited into the file when you do an svn log.

Once you have such a working copy with your journal file in it, you can then keep it up to date with the repository by doing svn ci to check it in, and svn co repository_adr to check it out again.

Things to put into your Journal

How you maintain your journal is rather up to you. Since marks for your journal are mainly awarded on demonstrating what you have learnt, you can use various formats to demonstrate your new knowledge and understandings! For example, keeping the lab journal as a plain ASCII text file is a good starting point. But you can also demonstrate your mastery of FIT2043 by writing your journal in LaTeX!

At the very least, what you put into your file should read something like a diary. I like to prefix each entry with a date:time entry, like this: 20080717:104149. I have that coded up as a keystroke defined in my .emacs file, so it is very easy to do: 20080717:104232. There, I did it again! (If you want to know how it is done, see My Emacs Setup)

Following each date entry, write a paragraph or two about what you did, and what you learnt from it. For example, if I were to maintain a journal about writing web pages for FIT2022, then today's entry might read something like this:

20080717:104454
      Wrote a new web page Lab Journal as a guide for students writing
      FIT2022 journals.  Had to look up the code for the Technical
      Documentation unit, and discovered that the Unit Guide page only
      has those units being offered in the current semester!  Another
      brain fart by the faculty.

The important thing to remember is that your journal should supply evidence to the reader as to what you have learnt. Keep that in mind, and you won't go far wrong!

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