UBC e-Portfolio Community of Practice - archive

The Canadian Journal of Learning Technology (CJLT) will be publishing a special issue devoted solely to e-portfolios in the new year. One of the articles is co-written by Dave Tosh, Tracy Penny Light and myself and outlines the findings of our collaborative research into student engagement with e-portfolios thus far. CJLT has made the abstracts available online. Looks like it will be a great issue.

Dave Tosh and Ben Werdmuller are planning some great new developments for Elgg. The new developments will build out the presentation side of the tool, essentially making it a viable presentation e-portfolio solution. Here’s how it will work:

• Elgg users will be able to create presentations by extracting content based on keywords (similar to Gmail where you can create things called labels – you use these to house certain emails)
• the user will create a presentation called whatever they want – they will then be able to go and extract any content they want have have it display in this presentation
• the presentation will have its own URL which they can then point people to
• this enables users to create presentations for specific audience

This sounds great! And, will further secure Elgg’s position as a truly learner-centric tool. Can’t wait to see this new feature in practice.

UBC’s own Cyprien Lomas (an ELI Scholar-in-Residence) will be faciliatating a 1-hour web seminar on November 8 10am PST titled, “New Learning Technologies and Emergent Practices in Higher Education.” THe seminar is free to ELI members – UBC is a member.

Here is a description of this online event:

New technologies are changing how we teach and learn in classrooms as well as informal learning spaces. Techniques such as blogging, podcasting, and videoblogging once used by tight-knit groups of techies have emerged as key strategies of established media corporations. Social software practices like tagging and intelligent searching are changing how we process information and can potentially change what happens in our formal and informal learning spaces.

Join Cyprien Lomas in exploring a cross section of emerging technologies and practices—including gaming, mobile applications, and social and collaborative applications—as well as strategies for integrating them into campus environments. We’ll discuss:

How do these technologies meet the needs of different types of learners and promote deeper learning?
What are the potential implications of students equipped with these technologies?
How might they disrupt our existing teaching and learning practices?
How do they fit with existing campus infrastructure and support systems?
What are the fiscal implications of their widespread adoption?
What are the policy issues raised by their use?

REGISTER NOW

Educause’s ELI (Educause Learning Initiative) will be holding a focus session on e-Portfolios in Colorado in September 2006. The ELI replaces the NLII, a body focused on the teaching and learning side of incorporating technology into education. Information is a little thin on this event so far, but watch for a call for proposals in the next month or so.

Day 3
The Exhibit Hall

I was able to spend a big chunk of time in the Exhibit Hall today. It is definitely an experience…one that must be seen. I’m glad that Brian took some photos that he posted to his blog. You really do need to see it to fully comprehend the giantness of it!

Clickers seem to be the big thing this year at the trade show. Lots of interest. And, of course, the Blackboard/WebCT merger is the big story both on the exhibit floor and the conference sessions.

I visited a few e-portfolio booths, including ePortaro and iWebfolio. our UBC folks will remember that iWebfolio has a great new release available. ePortaro also has a new version of their software out. Perhaps worth a look?

Day 2
EPAC Lives!!

I went to a couple of e-portfolio sessions today. One of them was co-facilitated by John Ittelson, who is one of the key drivers behind the EPAC (e-Portfolio Action Committee) community. It was great to reconnect with John and hear about the new EPAC initiative that will be starting up. I sat down for lunch with John, George Lorenzo and Marij Veugelers and Wijnand Aalderink, from the Netherlands, to talk about how EPAC could encompass an international community.

Stay tuned for more details on EPAC. It sounds like John, with the help of other EPAC members like Helen Chen (Stanford), will be resurrecting their monthly web chat confernces. There’s also talk of a Ready2Net Broadcast on e-portfolios in 2006.

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.

Bjorn Thomson and I hosted a webcast for the BCCampus community yesterday on e-portfolios. Our plan was to give an overview of this year’s e-portfolio pilots and plans at UBC, and to talk specifically about how some of our pilots are using reflection. But, the hour (actually it turned out to be almost an hour & a half) morphed into a very interesting discussion with the participants on the do’s and don’t’s of setting up an e-portfolio approach, the immaturity of the software market, and how to establish important policies (such as privacy and ownership).

It was a small group but many contexts were represented. Here’s what our attendance list looked like:

• someone from the e-portfolio tech industry (Chalk & Wire)
• a teacher from North Van SD
• a project manager from UVic’s Distant Ed program
• a manager from a downtown sales firm

It made for a very interesting conversation and these folks really drew out a lot of the issues we are grappling with in our pilots at UBC.

If you like to access the archive of the webcast, the following are 2 different routes:

• Through the BCCampus community
• Direct Link to Recording

School District #43 (Coquitlam) has created a public website targeted at students, their parents and the community. The goal is to provide information about the new grad program, including the portfolio requirement.

It’s a great overview of what will be expected of the students and, also, what kinds of portfolios we in the post-secondary world will be confronted with in 2007!