UBC e-Portfolio Community of Practice - archive

BCCampus is organizing this 2-day event to be held June 2 & 3 at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology. I’m very pleased to be co-facilitating one of the full-day sessions (on e-portfolios, of course!) on June 2 with David Tosh.

The full program and registration are now available on the BCCampus website.

Kathleen Yancey delivered both an excellent lecture and an informative workshop as part of our Teaching & Learning with Technology Series on March 29th. She brings a lot of passion to her work and our Community of Practice was very inspired by the day! She focused on the process of reflection and folio thinking rather than on the end product. A very refreshing and simple approach.

Here are some reflections on Kathleen Yancey’s talk & workshop from our community members…

From Marion Porath, ECPS:

I was particularly impressed with Kathleen’s integration of e-portfolio strategies with literature on learning and research on the effects of digital learning. The things that “go with” e-portfolios – integrative thinking, reflection, thinking in context, thinking in community, self-assessment, and peer review – all contribute to making them a learning tool with great potential.
Some phrases/questions I loved and that I think capture the essence of the digital learning experience are:
Genre of portfolio
What makes it digital?
A new site or space for learning
Creating portfolios (rather than technology) that both take off and take hold.

From Valeria Veripot, Enrolment Services:

I have a few thoughts I would like to share:
Kathleen’s passion for e-Portfolio is highly communicative. It was a wonderful experience to have someone that passionate as a speaker.
She highlighted the different styles of e-Portfolios she has encountered and helped me realise there is not one ideal portfolio…but each one is unique.
During the workshop, going through the different portfolios and the evaluations has given me an idea of what are the key elements of a good e-Portfolio. Kathleen has also helped me go through the major hurdle of creating an e-Portfolio and has shown me how easy it is once you are given proper direction. I enjoyed her approach very much.

From Bob Bruce, Education:

One point she made which I found interesting Kele was when she talked about combining co-operative, peer education with making learning visible. The practice of using a web based tool to have several peers critique one’s writing and then the author choosing which edits to apply and annotating the changes and why they were made, seems a very powerful way of creating reflection and community among learners.

The most recent EPAC chat took place on the morning of March 24th. This was a well-attended chat that focused on an update on EPAC activities, sessions, and discussions from the AAHE National Conference on Higher Education which took place mid-March in Atlanta, GA (http://www.aahe.org/National/2005.htm). The face-to-face EPAC meeting at this conference was facilitated by Tracy
Penny-Light from the University of Waterloo and Helen Chen from Stanford University.

These chats are always a great way to connect with people from other schools doing similar (and different!) work with e-portfolios. I connected with a couple of folks (Stanford, Kennesaw, Simmons) interested in hearing more about our International Peer Program here at UBC and how this group may leverage e-portfolios next year. They are also mapping out ways to use the e-portfolio to promote global learning/awareness for their students.

Congratulations are in order for Dave Tosh & Ben Werdmuller, who have released ELGG as Open Source. Here is some info from Dave’s blog:

It is now available – Elgg version 0.1 alpha has been released as open source software under the GNU Public License.

At present documentation is limited to install instructions, however, this will be rectified shortly!

You can also read more about this in Ben’s blog.

Helen Barrett, who some of you may remember as the keynote speaker at our e-Portfolio Conference last November, is currently leading the REFLECT Initiative.

REFLECT is a research project to assess the impact of electronic portfolios on student learning, motivation and engagement in secondary schools. Helen Barrett has recently published a white paper titled, “Researching Electronic Portfolios and Learner Engagement” (available on the REFLECT website). In the paper she outlines the key reasons for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for students using e-portfolios.

Definitely a recommended read!

April will be a busy month here in Vancouver with a couple of conferences on the near horizon…

• BC Ed Online, April 20-22
• Lifia’s Pan American Working Forum on e-Portfolios , April 18-19

From my understanding, the Lifia event will focus primarily on e-portfolios and their various applications. BC Ed Online will focus on 5 main strands (e-Pedagogy, Online Content Development, Leadership in e-Learning, Professional Development, Innovations), within which e-portfolios and folio thinking will be well-represented.

I’ve been facilitating an online discussion on e-portfolios in the BCCampus Online Community site. It’s been pretty quiet in the forum thus far with only 2 of us posting. If you’d like to join in the discussion, share your thoughts, your experiences, do’s & don’t’s, login here:

http://community.bccampus.ca/

If you’re not currently a member, it’s easy to join. Just click through the “create an account” link and sign up.

Bob Bruce pointed me in the direction of this great article from the NLII.

Community of Practice Design Guide: A Step-by-Step Guide for Designing & Cultivating Communities of Practice in Higher Education

The article does a good job of outlining the lifecycle phases of community development & design. In my reading of the article, I’d say that our community is strong and growing and on the right track. I’d be interested in hearing what our members think about this.

Interesting also is how the article outlines why communities of practice are important, including:
Communities of Practice…

• connect people
• provide a shared context
• enable dialogue
• stimulate learning
• capture & diffuse existing knowledge
• introduce collaborative processes
• help people organize
• generate new knowledge

It’s a great resource and one of the most comprehensive and well-presented I’ve seen on the topic so far. Definitely recommended reading for our CoP. Thanks Bob!