Wow! Check this out! Karina from YorkU has very generously posted York’s e-portfolio plan to her blog.
It’s a very ambitious plan. Karina describes it as a vision of the system they’d like to have at York. It’s a very long post but well worth the read. She encourages her readers to give feedback and criticism on the plan. I encourage our CoP members to post their thoughts on York’s plans here in our blog.
Brian Lamb, Michelle Chua & myself co-presented a BCcampus webcast on blogfolios this morning. We focused on the Movable Type blogfolio templates, that are Michelle’s creation, that are being used by our professional staff e-portfolio pilot here on campus.
Visit our blogfolios:
>>View the archived version of the webcast.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Colleen Adl, who is working with e-portfolios at Dalhousie. Colleen and I first met last summer at the OSPI Conference in San Franciso.
Dalhousie started piloting e-portfolios with individual students last fall and launched class pilots in January. It looks like they’re dedicated to using OSPI (1.5, I believe) in their pilot. 300 students registered in 9 different classes (leadership, health & human management, career services) will participate. I’ll keep in touch with Colleen because it will be interesting to hear their feedback on OSPI.
And, I recently came across this site that outlines Dalhousie’s plans for e-portfolio use and practice:
I came across this definition of an e-portfolio recently on Robert Patterson’s blog (see link below). To my mind, this is an ideal, almost utopian, definition of what an e-portfolio should be. Others are beginning to think along these lines as well, as is evidenced by the recent development of Dave Tosh’s & Ben Werdmuller’s ELGG Learning Landscape. I think it’s what we’re all striving for ultimately and I can’t wait until we get there!
*That* is what I mean when I say “ePortfolio.”
Dave Tosh has posted the latest version of the learning landscape concept/model he has been working on with Tracy Penny-Light, Helen Chen and Ben Werdmuller.
Dave, Tracy & Helen presented at our November e-Portfolio Conference on the topic and have been garnering some well-deserved attention for their model (most recently at an NLII poster session).
The most recent edition of UBC’s e-Strategy Newsletter features an article written by Bjorn Thomson & Alison Wong, that highlights the student panel at our November 19th e-Portfolio Conference. Two of the students who participated in the panel, Martha Kinnear (Pharmacy) and Robert Emmerson (Teacher Education), are featured in the article. It’s great to hear from them again…about their experiences with e-Portfolios and their impressions of the benefits and challenges. What they say is a reminder to all of us working in educational technology that we need to listen to the student voice!
This is a summary of the initial meeting, attended by Marianne Schroeder and myself, on bridging e-portfolio use between K-12 and post-secondary.
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:
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.
OSP is moved to a production server recently. It is a completely new installation and will be running for our pilot projects.
You can access OSP 1.5 from http://eportfolios.olt.ubc.ca
Please note that old copy on http://station01.olt.ubc.ca:8800/portfolio will not be accessible anymore.
One of UBC’s goals this semester is to build a strategy for the evaluation of e-Portfolio softwares currently available. We are currently doing this by testing a number of softwares and tracking user feedback and interaction with each. One of the core goals of our campus-wide e-Portfolio pilot in Year 2 (we’re currently in the middle of Year 2) was to evaulate and select a campus-wide software solution. It’s looking more & more like this is a premature goal. For two reasons, mainly…
1. It’s difficult to choose one software solution that answers the needs of all of our diverse users. It is frightening, from a support point of view, to think of a campus with a variety of e-portfolio softwares installed and running! But, is it really realistic to expect one single software to answer the needs of a Pharmacy program e-portfolio, a teaching portfolio for Teacher Education students, a professional development & reflective e-portfolio for professional staff, a faculty e-portfolio, etc.?
2. There is no killer app yet. e-Portfolio software is still relatively young. Time after time, I read posts on blogs from other schools describing the difficulty in selecting a campus-wide software solution.
At least we know we’re not alone in our quest!
And, another issue we will have to consider in a couple years time is the high school students graduating from BC high schools with portfolios (and, some with e-portfolios) and an expectation to continue this practice through out their post-secondary education.