Kele’s Educause Report #1

Day 1
Arrival & Presentation

I co-facilitated one of Educause morning pre-conference seminars today with 2 of my learned UBC colleages, Brian Lamb & Michelle Chua. Our session, titled “Blogfolios: Using Social Software to Extend e-Portfolios”, went very well. We had a full and very engaged house. Brian and Michelle are so very knowledgeable about social software and narratives of online interaction, it was a pleasure to share the stage with them. It was interesting how the morning unfolded. Many of our participants raised questions very similiar to those raised in UBC’s e-portfolio pilots. Brian, did a nice job of summarizing their thoughts here.

We created a wiki to use as our presentation space, as well as a collaborative space for our attendees.

The folks in the room who had done some work with e-portfolios sang a refrain similar to the one sung in 8-part harmony at UBC…That the software tools do not yet adequately support a “folio thinking” approach. So, many of our attendees were quite keen on the idea of blogfolios. They liked the idea of a built-in reflective space for users. It’s a great idea in theory and one that Michelle very adeptly ran with when she manipulated the Movable Type interface into a blogfolio. We found though, that we just couldn’t support such an undertaking and the learning curve for many of those users who would want to customize their look and feel would be too steep.

And, btw, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the tool called ELGG, created by Dave Tosh and Ben Wermuller…You should! They’ve done quite an elegant job of merging the social software and e-portfolio worlds within one interface.