Also worth a look…
Some of you may have explored the Alverno College DDP already. There is talk of them releasing their software to other institutions. They’ve posted a series of screenshots that give a good sense of what the student & faculty member experience inside the system.
It would be great to hear from our Community of Practice on some of the softwares that have been highlighted in our blog…Post away!
Karina Sumner-Smith, my counterpart at York University, has posted access to a demo of Wolverhampton’s Pace e-Portfolio system. It’s worth a look. Pace is completely Flash-based, but the output or presentation side is not.
I’ve recently been in contact with Karina Sumner-Smith from York University. Karina is the Special Projects Assistant with the Career Centre at York. In that role, she is busy building a Community of Practice and a framework for e-Portfolio use at York.
It’s great to see such good e-Portfolio work being done at other Canadian universities like York, UWaterloo & Dalhousie. I’m certain there are others too that we haven’t yet connected with.
Visit Karina’s blog for more information about what’s happening at York.
The December EPAC chat has been postponed until January. There will be 2 chats scheduled in January (details coming soon).
One of the chats will be a prep for the next EPAC face-to-face meeting at the NLII 2005 annual meeting in New Orleans, LA from January 23-25. And, another will focus on on recent ePortfolio conferences in La Rochelle, France
, Melbourne, Australia , as well as our event here at UBC.
The transcript for the most recent EPAC chat (end of Nov) is now also posted to the EPAC site. This chat was led by Helen Barrett, who delivered the keynote at our conference, and focused on digital storytelling.
More information and resources on digital storytelling are available on Helen Barrett’s website.
Dave Tosh & Ben Werdmuller are involved in a virtual discussion this week with Alan Levine and folks at Maricopa College. Dave & Ben just recently released the alpha version of their ELGG software to a selected group of testers. Alison & I have been able to have a look at it and must congratulate them on a fantastic job! They’ve combined social networking, blogging and e-portfolios under one roof. I believe the alpha test is invite-only at the moment but look for it to open up to a wider audience soon.
Alison has actually gone so far as to customize the templates in ELGG. Have a look at what she’s done. Very cool!
Check out the discussion, it’s all about ELGG & exploring ways to homogenise everyday web community technologies and practises to enhance the e-portfolio model.
I attended the School District 43 (Coquitlam) e-Portfolio container meeting on November 26, 2004. There were several software demos during the meeting. I have compiled a the notes from the meeting. Please find the file under the “Continue reading ….” section.Meeting notes
Feedback on our Nov 19th e-Portfolio Conference has been showing up in a number of blogs recently. Here’s a sampling…
Wow! What a great day we had on Nov 19th! Judging by the number of people who stayed late on a Friday to ask more and more questions of our student panelists, I’d say we had a successful and thought-provoking day.
All presentation slides are now available on the website for those who want to re-visit the day and reflect on what was covered. Video clips of the talks and panels will also be made available in the future.
Here’s my brief summary of the day…
The Morning…
Michelle Lamberson (Director of Learning Technology, UBC) & Beth Hawkes (Co-director, UBC Career Connections) opened the day and set the stage (or should I say lens!) for the rest of the day.
A moving and very reflective keynote was provided by Helen Barrett (UAlaska, Anchorage). She gave a very informative overview of the literature dealing with reflection and brain-based learning. She also focussed on new perspectives on storytelling as reflection on experience to improve learning. The very impressive examples of digital storytelling that she closed her talk with were a highlight.
Karen Belfer, Lynda Eccott, and Cathleen Nicholls, all from UBC, spoke about their experiences with transfer learning and reflection. They examined the issue of reflection and social dialogue practices to support folio thinking and how it helps portfolio owners become more aware of themselves and promotes their ability to transfer knowledge. One example of a student e-portfolio discussed illustrated how e-portfolios help learners build positive attitudes towards learning. This particular student kept a reflective journal for her course while doing an internship in Vancouver’s very poor Downtown Eastside and showed personal growth and deep reflection in writing about her experiences.
Midday
Lunch was combined with networking, poster and laptop demos and feedback centres in the e-Portfolio Cafe. This gave attendees an opportunity to mingle, share success and challenge stories, see the work of some of our UBC e-portfolio pilots and reflect on what they’d heard so far.
The Afternoon…
David Tosh (UEdinburgh), Tracy Penny-Light (UWaterloo) and Helen Chen (Stanford via videoconference) presented on their work on the learning landscape model and student engagement with e-portfolios. This panel was the perfect complement to the student panel that followed. I think they are right on the money with this model! Students will be more motivated to engage in e-portfolios if they are able to have more control over what they can do with them and if they are able to use types of tools they are familiar with…blogs and social networking software like Friendster & Flickr. David Tosh has recently posted a diagram to his ERADC blog that the 3 of them have been working on, with Ben Werdmuller, that details their idea of the learning landscape.
Our final panel of the day, was a student panel. The panel was moderated by Bjorn Thomson, a Master’s of Education student. The student panelists came from diverse departments on campus. Rob Emmerson (Education), Alex Moxin (Science), Martha Kinnear (Pharmaceutical Sciences), and Michelle Chua (Computer Science). The students spoke about their experiences with using e-portfolios in their courses, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what their understanding of reflection is, and their thoughts on how they can be better engaged in the process at university. They also showed examples of their e-portfolios. Judging by the overwhleming number of hands that went up when Bjorn asked the audience if there were any questions, the student voice was a very welcome addition to this conversation.
Traditionally, we end our e-Portfolio Days with a summary from a number of participants. Because of the volume of questions for the student panelists, we had to shorten this part of the day. But, Margot Bell (Student Development, UBC) and GailAnn Rickert (Dean of Academic Advising, Gettsyburg College, Penn) did volunteer to sum up the day. It was interesting to hear the perspectives of two people whose job it is to think about students and services for students at their respective schools. Especially after hearing from our student panelists.
Thank you all for your very valuable contributions to our e-Portfolio Day!
On November 15th, UWaterloo invited me to give a 15-minute videoconference presentation to the attendees at their e-Portfolio Day. They were particularly interested in hearing about the variety of pilot projects here at UBC, how the projects are structured, and about our Community of Practice. It would have been great to be able to attend their day and hear more detail about what they’re doing. According to Tracy Penny-Light, who is the Instructional Project Manager at UWaterloo’s Center for Learning & Teaching Through Technology, e-portfolios at UWaterloo are in a similar place to where UBC was in Year 1 of our campus-wide pilot. Tracy gave more information about the “UWaterloo e-portfolio landscape”:https://www.elearning.ubc.ca/home/DirCMSSiteContent/documents/eport2004/eport2004_TracyPL.ppt at our Nov 19th conference.
I was videoconferenced into the event about 15 minutes prior to my time slot and was able to watch the tail end of the demo of the KEEP ToolKit. “Toru Iiyoshi”:http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/aboutus/staff/iiyoshi.htm, from the Carnegie Foundation’s Knowledge Media Lab, was presenting. My ears perked up at the mention that the KEEP Toolkit will soon be available to individual institutions to download.
“View UWaterloo’s e-Portfolio Day agenda.”:http://eportfolio.uwaterloo.ca/events.html
Our blog has been a little quiet this month…conference preps, pilot projects launching, etc. have kept Alison & I very busy. So, time to catch up on a number of things…
BCCampus hosted ETUG’s Fall Workshop on Educational Technology on November 4th & 5th at BCIT’s downtown campus. It was a full day of interesting panels and presentations on a variety of topics. I was a panelist on a morning panel titled “E-Portfolio Trends (K-12, Industry, Post-Secondary) with Tracy Penny-Light (UWaterloo), Victor Leginsky (Lifia), and Tim Winkelmans (Open School BC). Tracy & I actually co-presented on the collaborative research project both our universities have engaged in with David Tosh from the University of Edinburgh.
Our very own Director of Learning Technology, Michelle Lamberson, participated in the Institutional Project Reports giving an overview of the Vista Pilot Project here at UBC.
After lunch, there were a series of birds of a feather sessions. Michelle, Tracy & I attended the one on e-portfolios. It was a great oppotunity to meet other folks in the province who are working with e-portfolios, including Cheryl Porter (North Island College) and Mary O’Neill (Malaspina).
Here’s a link for more info on the day:
“www.bccampus.ca/Page207.aspx”:http://www.bccampus.ca/Page207.aspx
As well, I understand there are a number of discussion postings in the BCCampus Online Community Space that came out of the day. Become a member of BCCampus’ Online Communites here:
“www.bccampus.ca/Page96.aspx”:http://www.bccampus.ca/Page96.aspx