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News

Maricopa e-Portfolio Day

Its fun and enlightening to to see how other institutions are working with e-Portfolios. Alan Levine of Maricopa Community College (Arizona) , in this blog entry, tells us about their e-portfolio day. The information on the event is at:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eport05demois.php/

The original event that Maricopa held in 2002 was key inspiration for our “e-Portfolio days” (2003 and 2004).

Members of our eportfolio community will especially enjoy the comments about the student panel… there is nothing like hearing the student voice for a solid reality-grounding experiece!

Categories
Community

BCCampus E-Portfolio Pilot Project for ABE.

Posted on behalf of Cindy Underhill

Just a brief update on the progress of this working group. Essentially we were brought together to look at the potential for e-portfolio use in Adult Basic Education programs. To date: we have decided on three platforms to pilot: SEGUE, OSPI and ELGG.

We have formed three test groups around these platforms. Our next steps are
to:

* create our own portfolios using the three systems.
* defeine a use case for the ABE programs
* examine the pedagogical issues

A rubric for assessment is in development and we will use this to guide our explorations. The goal is to test in April, evaluate in May and prepare to incorporate into some classes for September.

FYI:
BCCampus has worked with David Tosh and co. to develop some short, contextual “help” demos – dealing with a few aspects of portfolio development in ELGG. These can be viewed from the BCCampus Ed Tech Community of Practice site under Discussions > E-Portfolios > E-Portfolio ABE Pilot Project: http://community.bccampus.ca/bccampus

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News

OSPI Conference 2005 Call for Proposals

This message came through the EPAC listserv from Darren Cambridge earlier this week…

The OSPI Conference will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, June 10-11, 2005.

Call For Proposals open until March 15. If you have experience with
the Open Source Portfolio in implementation or evaluation, please
consider sharing with the broader community. Bring a student; bring a
colleague; most importantly, bring your ideas!

For the full text of the call, please visit the OSPI website.

Categories
Resources

e-Portfolio White Paper – Univ of Iowa College of Education

Thought I’d point to a very nice resource from the University of Iowa College of Education, a white paper published in 2002 entitled “A WHITE PAPER ON PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT IN TEACHER EDUCATION: The Iowa ePortfolio Model”, accessible at http://www.education.uiowa.edu/eportfolio/whitepaper.pdf.

The paper outlines their approach to introducing and supporting e-portfolios as a professional and personal tool. AS well, it provides a section on the employer perspective on this effort. I believe this will be interesting to both students and faculty. It has a strong focus on the requirements of teacher education within Iowa, but I believe that there is much to learni from the approach.

THe whitepaper describes a three part model that takes into account the the concept of development – what you need to do to get a student started (focus on practical!), how you engage them further and support they their increase in understanding of their learning over time, and how you help them once they have graduated…

The process outlined moves the students from focusing on their course requirements to a broader understanding. I need to read a little deeper to see how reflection is encouraged throughout.

Figures 2 and 3 are quite interesting in this paper — looking at the timelines from both student and faculty points of view. It would be interesting to look at our projects and see what our timelines look like – given their broad range in context and purposes.

Figure 4 is also useful — what is the technical framework required…

Interesting read!

Categories
News

To “e” or Not to “e” – BCcampus Webcast

I attended a very informative webcast this morning led by Dr. Helen Barrett. The webcast was part of a great series sponsored by the BCcampus EdTech Online Community.

Some of you may remember Dr. Barrett’s very moving keynote address at our e-portfolio event in November. Dr. Barrett will also be providing the keynote address at the BC EdOnline Conference in April. In this morning’s webcast, titled “To ‘e’ or Not to ‘e’: the High School Portfolio”, Dr. Barrett focused on a few core themes:

  • the positivist (standardized checklist of skills) versus the constructivist (reflective story of deep learning) approach to e-portfolio development
  • the assessment of learning versus the assessment for learning approach to evaluating e-portfolios
  • extrinsic versus instrinsic motivations for students

Dr. Barrett suggested some ways to help promote reflection amongst student learners:

  • provide models & examples
  • begin with forms or prompts; ie., ask a question that students answer
  • make use of journals/blogs
  • create tasks that challenge learners to integrate new learning into previous learning

An archive of the webcast is available on BCcampus’ website.

Categories
Community

CoP Meeting Summary- Jan 2005

Here’s a brief summary of our last CoP meeting…

Discussion Points

1. Project/dept updates: Representatives from Science, Education, Nursing, and Agricultural Sciences gave short updates on e-portfolio activities in their departments.

2. Interesting conversation of how to introduce folio thinking to larger classes. How to encourage students to reflect on their learning & make connections between their courses. One point made was that there is a definite benefit to continuing with the same software from year to year. By doing this, students don’t have to engage so much in learning new technology from year to year.

3. Sample e-Portfolios: Everyone agreed that sample e-portfolios should be available on the website. Many students in the pilots are eager to see example e-portfolios when embarking on their own. Members also suggested that we include examples of reflections. Kele & Alison will take the lead on assembling examples and will poll the community for input & feedback.

4. iWebfolio demo: A few members shared their thoughts on the iWebfolio demo that was held on Jan 19th. Scott Johnson from Nuventive travelled to UBC to demo iWebfolio 3.0, their latest version. This was not a live demo & consisted of a series of screen shots and a teleconference with Dave Choban, Nuventive’s CIO. A live demo should be available in late March. Initial reaction was very positive and many felt that Nuventive had indeed listened to feedback from it’s users. One huge improvement is the ability for users to choose themes and navigation schemes for presentation.

5. K-12 e-Portfolio Initiatives: Kele reported on a couple of meetings she attended with BCcampus & school district representatives on the potential to bridge portfolios from K-12 to higher ed. See seperate summaries of these 2 meetings in separate blog postings in “Community” area.

6. Upcoming events: see a list of the internal & external events in the attached agenda.

Categories
Resources

UBC Teaching e-Portfolio Wiki

Bjorn Thomson, our MEd. student who coordinates 3 of our pilots, has started a Teaching e-Portfolio wiki. Bjorn’s done a wonderful job of collecting examples of teaching e-portfolios as well as building his own in the various softwares we’re piloting. This is an excellent resource for our community!

Categories
News

High School e-Portfolios: to “e” or not to “e”

Just saw this… it was posted on the BCcampus website, and thought it would be of interest to the e-Portfolio Community of Practice. You will need to set up a registration profile to participate, but its easy to do!

Tue, Feb 15, 2005 10:00 AM
Live Webcast: Portfolios in High Schools – to “e” or not to “e”
http://community.bccampus.ca/bccampus?go=635457
——————————————————————————–

This presentation will focus on the BC high school portfolio requirement and the impact that using technology could have on student learning, motivation and engagement. Dr. Helen Barrett, keynote speaker for the BCEd Online Conference in April will give a brief overview of the literature on the electronic portfolio development process and will highlight several strategies that enable reflection: blogging and digital storytelling.

To take part in this live event, please log in to the BCcampus Community Webcast Room at 9:45am.

Categories
News

e-Portfolio Samples

One of the gaps on the e-portfolio website identified by our community is the lack of example e-portfolios. We’re working on a series of examples to post in the next month or so. We’ll also include examples of reflections as one of the top questions asked by students in the pilots is “Can you show me an example of a good reflection?”

Aligned with this effort, Bjorn Thomson, our MEd. student who coordinates 3 of our pilots, has started a Teaching e-Portfolio wiki. Bjorn’s done a wonderful job of collecting examples of teaching e-portfolios as well as building his own in the various softwares we’re piloting. I think you’ll find this is a great resource for the community. We’ll certainly add this resource to the website!

Categories
Community

Graduate Portfolio Forum – Surrey School District

I attended this forum in Surrey on January 13. It was particularly interesting to hear the teachers raising their issues of concern. One common thread was concern over how they were to integrate the portfolio practice and process into their teaching practice. I’m not certain of the status of portfolio implementation in other school districts, but Surrey seems to be quite proactive in their approach.

Here is a short summary of the meeting and the topics discussed.

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