Blogfolios

Last week Brian Lamb, Michelle Chua, and myself co-facilitated a 90-minute workshop on blogfolios for a small group of professional staff here at UBC. The staff who participated in the session volunteered to take part in an e-portfolio pilot project for e-Learning professional staff.

We held focus groups with the staff before Christmas to determine the following:

• why they had volunteered for the pilot
• what did they know about e-portfolios
• what were their goals for participating in the pilot
• what they would like to use their e-portfolio for
• what kinds of skills would they like to demonstrate
• what types of artefacts dod they want to collect

From the focus groups, it was clear that these folks were looking for something they could customize, somewhere they could display their work, and also a tool to use to reflect about their professional practice. Someone suggested trying out a blogfolio (I think it was Brian) because the blog portion could easily act as the reflective tool. After batting around some ideas, Michelle and Brian got to work on developing a blogfolio template (in Movable Type) that users could customize if they wanted to.

One of the reasons we’re very keen on this project here in our office is because it gives us an opportunity to see what happens when our worlds collide…the blog and e-portfolio worlds. Also, the staff participating in this pilot are pretty tech savvy and we’re expecting them to really push the software/templates. It will be interesting to hear their feedback after a couple of months of use. Stay tuned!

Since Brian and Michelle launched their own blogfolios, they’ve received a number of comments from our learning technology colleagues. Karina from YorkU has recently posted a number of times on blogfolios. She makes some good points about our approach and about the blogfolio approach in general. Particularly, she points out that the blogfolio (& other approaches to the e-portfolio) can give the user the impression that their e-portfolio is a finite object. We’re hoping that our piloteers will see their blogfolios as living documents, infinite really, and a tool that will allow them to collect their work and reflect on their professional growth.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else is trying this approach and how it’s going.