This is paper is a reflection and inquiry into the process of my 13- Week practicum assisting the Office of Learning Technology and the Teachers Education Office TEO with the implementation of an e-Portfolio assessment system for teacher candidates at the University of British Columbia. A number of themes have developed throughout the process that I will reflect on more deeply: The role of political judgment and negotiation in program planning, the importance of an online presence in facilitating and planning online courses and the role of social interaction online. In the spirit of this assignment I will embed links to artifacts that will help to contextualize this process.

The Practicum

 I wanted to do a practicum to find a way into the area of educational technology. I have had a suspicion through my graduate degree in adult education that technology was redefining the process of learning and classrooms to an extent that research cannot keep up. It began with some emails and soon I had a meeting with Michelle Lamberson the director of the Office of Learning Technology and Shauna Butterwick agreed to supervise it. I thought that was it Michelle would write to me and tell me a day to come into the office, however that was only the very beginning of the initial process to clarify and set up the practicum. When I met with Michelle at the outset of the practicum she suggested I work on the project with the Teachers Education Office and I was directed to speak with Anne Schofield who at first was unsure of what role I could have. I couldn’t be an e-coach because the job required that I work with a cohort during class time and I am not a student in this program. After a week or so of wrangling they decided workd that I should be a workshop facilitator to help the e-coaches understand a course management blogging program called WordPress. I would plan and  facilitate 8 workshops during my practicum and write a WordPress section for the e-Portfolio manual. Wow a daunting task but I was excited now where to begin….

Sorks’ framework for planning describes 4 domains of planning: The technical, the socio-political and the ethical. The planning process involved in the practicum seemed the most influenced by socio-political and other relational factors. My analysis was also influenced by Cerevero and Wilsons discussion of the politics of planning.

The entire UBC, TEO e-Portfolio project had an external political purpose. The British Columbia College of Teachers has legal authority to ensure that all teacher training programs in British Columbia meet certain standards. In order to provide evidence that these standards are met through the teacher education program teacher candidates must produce an electronic portfolio that describes how they have developed competencies, skills and understanding that meet the requirements of the BCCT. Last year a system of Tech coaches was created. The tech coaches are teacher candidates hired by the Education department to assist other teacher candidates develop their e-Portfolios and navigate new technologies in the classroom. The program was mostly successful but there were some complaints from participants and e-Coaches that range of different programs available to create e-Portfolios made it difficult to teach because the needs of participants were so diverse. It was decided that a single platform would be chosen to enable the tech coachers—now called e-coaches—to develop expertise in one area. It was also recommended that an individual be hired to assist the e-Coaches in learning this platform and that it where I came in.

The program that was chosen for this project is called WordPress. It is a content management software that originated as a blogging site. Each WordPress site has both a scrolling blog role that is organized in reverse chronological order and static web pages. This means that articles and reflections can be embedded in a number of different ways on the blog. And WordPress in completely digital once you upload docs, pdfs, PowerPoint shows and images they are accessible by any compute. I think of WordPress as web designer for dummies. However it is also very versatile and more advanced web designers can use CSS style sheets and HTML to customize their pages. RSS feeds can be used to release the content of the portfolio into the blogosphere. I only began to understand my role in this process after the first month in the practicum. My tasks include developing workshops for the e-Coaches, writing a WordPress manual for the TEO e-Portfolio guide, meeting with the  Anne Schofield and John Yamamto and  assisting them in understanding and navigating WordPress and assisting in the movement of information between all stakeholders involved in the project. The metaphor of a bridge aptly describes my role in this process. I am a bridge between the Office of Learning Technology and the Teacher Education Office, a bridge between the Teachers Education and the e-Coaches and a bridge between the e-coaches and the WordPress platform.

 The Initial Process

At the outset of the program I had a few questions rattling around. What approach would best engage e-Coaches with the WordPress platform? How could the e-coaches ensure buy in to the WordPress platform? What privacy levels were required for this process? I also needed to master the platform itself, before I could train the e-coaches in this platform it was important that I was relatively fluent using it. In this earlier stage of the process I concerned myself with building relationships between all of the stakeholders. This meant meeting frequently with Anne Schofield and John Yamamato and discussing some of the overall goals that the TEO had within this success. We discussed the political conflict between the British Columbia College of Teachers and the TEO at UBC. I also used these meetings to understand more clearly some of the political issues involved in the process. There were a number of professors who had proposed and in some cases developed alternative e-Portfolio platforms that had been rejected in favor of WordPress and a couple of these parties were critiquing WordPress to the teacher candidates in their classes and proposing that the teacher candidates use programs other than WordPress for this purpose. There were professors who felt that the entire project was too        directive and through it the BCCT had too much influence determining what would be taught in their classes. Through a number of meetings I began to develop an understanding of the political negotiation and maneuvering that would be required in order to help make this program successful.

In addition to the political nature of this process, it was also important in the early stages to  develop relationships with all of the stakeholders involved. Developing a presence with the e-coaches and with the Office of Learning Technology from the beginning proved to be especially important. This presence had to be developed using a network of different tools, both digital and face-to-face. I will discuss the importance of creating these networks when planning programs that are online and involve telecommuting. However from the beginning it was important to establish a presence both online and face-to-face. I approached developing an online presence with the participants through two mediums emailing and blogging. In the next program where I am involved in the planning process I would like to incorporate a number of other platforms from the begging of the planning process such as Wikis, RSS feeds and other social networking tools.  I agree with Pratt and Pallof when they suggest that one of the most important factors in blended and online courses is establishing an online presence with workshop participants. From the outset establishing such as presence was not easy. One I had created an email group of all the e-coaches. I emailed them with some preliminary information about WordPress sites, where they could sign-up excetra. I also requested that they begin to email questions about WordPress that come up as they begin to set up the frame for their e-Portfolio. I tried especially in the early stages of the process to respond to any e-coaching question or request immediately and through doing this I felt I was able to quickly build trust with a number of participants. I also created an e-coaching blog. The purposes of this blog was to increaser interaction between the e-coaches, to create an information repository on e-Portfolios, WordPress and the specific TEO project. Each time I facilitated a workshop I uploaded the workshop ‘recipes’ for the blog so that students could follow along during the workshop and reinforce and practice their skills afterward.