Eifel’s 2005 Conference will present and debate the latest progress made in e-Portfolio implementation, policies, state-of-the art technology and hear direct from the e-Portfolio users about the benefits for their own learning and development.
The conference, which will take place in Cambridge (UK) on October 27th and
28th and the provisional programme is now available.
by Trent Batson
Website: http://www.educause.edu/LIVE0513
The core value of e-Portfolio is *student ownership*
–> eventually lead to life-long learning
Uses for e-Portfolios:
# Individual reflective portfolio
# advising management system
# resume builder
# faculty portfolio
# showcase portfolio
# identity development portfolio
# assessment management
Motivation coming from: School of Education
Work retained by students in an Assessment Management System; produces reports through aggregations of these students’ portfolios.
National e-portfolios (workforce portfolio):
* for life-long learning
* documenting/record experience one has
* more than the academic community
*The e-Portfolio Market*
# iWebfolio
# Folio
# e-Portfolio – Chalk and Wire
# FolioLive – McGraw Hill
# WebFolio Builder – TaskStream
# College Live Text
# Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
# True Outcomes
# Masterfile e-Portfolio Manager – Concord
# Angel e-Portfolio – Angel Learning
# Blackboard
# TK-20
# OSP 2
# efolio — Avenet
*Implementation Models*
# subscription – students buy an account on a remotely hosted portfolio for a resume-builder
# subscription plus installed by client on site
# open source
# buy the license and support services
*Which have Assessment Management Systems:*
* nuventive, with Trac Dat
* Chalk and Wire, with Rubric Marker
* TaskStream
* College LiveText
* True Outcomes
* OSP 2.0, r*smart [reporting tools in 2.1]
* Angel [reporting tools in next release]
*Cautions*
* Market shake out
* Should enterprise e-portfolio be hosted off0campus?
* Is open source as sustainable at the application level as at server level?
* Demand and expectations ahead of market
* No definitions; no standard e-portfolio lexicon
* e-portfolio for life makes it harder to switch
* portability: can keep student files in a university digital repository, but may lose:
** comments
** association with learning goal
** and perhaps permissions
* check for compliance with IMS e-Portfolio specification 1.0
*Tips*
* It will all mean nothing if students aren’t taught how to do “folio thinking” and how to build an e-portfolio
* and will succeed if faculty use the production of e-portfolio as the main project in the course
* student ownership
*Websites*
* www.educause.edu/ELI/5524
* www.eportconsortium.org
* www.ibritt.com/resources/stu_eportfolios.htm
* Helen Barrett
Thanks for Cyprien for pointing out an upcoming online e-Portfolio Seminar:
July 7: Trent Batson on E-Portfolios
Trent Batson
Director
Information and Instructional Technology Services
University of Rhode IslandTopic: The Current State of E-Portfolios in Higher Education
Date: July 7, 2005
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m.
PDT)); international participants: You may wish to visit this external
time-conversion Web site to calculate the event’s start time in your
time zone.
Duration: 1 hourAccording to Casey Green’s 2004 Campus Computing Survey, the number
of institutions offering e-portfolios doubled from the previous year
to nearly one-third of institutions in the United States. Growth is as
rapid in the United Kingdom and other European countries, as well as
Australia and Canada.At this seminar, join Trent Batson as he maps the national
e-portfolio sector and offers recommendations for campus e-portfolio
strategies from the viewpoint of campus IT. Batson served for nearly
two years on the board of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI)
and is an IT administrator at the University of Rhode Island.http://www.educause.edu/LIVE0513/
http://www.educause.edu/RegisterNow%2521/7109
The seminar is free, but registration is required and virtual seating
is limited. REGISTER NOW.
Dave Tosh, our research collaborator from the U of Edinburgh, has recently posted to his blog on some early findings/trends that are emerging from his data collection both here at UBC & at UWaterloo…
From Dave’s post:
Dr. Helen Barrett points out that there is a new resource on the Saskatchewan Learning Website
A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY: Facilitator’s Guide to Reflection and Portfolio Development (PDF)
This guide has been developed to support facilitators as they lead learners through a process of thinking about what they know and can do (reflection). Through involvement in these activities, learners identify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they have developed, and create evidence of their learning. These general activities are intended to be adapted by facilitators to meet the needs of any group.
This is a useful resource for designing and facilitating e-portfolio and reflection assessments.
Thanks to Bob for pointing out this paper on Communities of Practice and Complexity : Conversation and Culture by Peter Bond
http://www.leader-values.com/Content/detail.asp?ContentDetailID=984
Scott Wilson, Assistant Director of CETIS, has posted a ppt that gives an excellent and very thorough overview of the world of e-portfolios. He covers a lot of ground in the presentation and does a great job of trying to answer these 4 core questions:
Definitely worth a careful read-through.
Earlier in June, I co-facilitated a day-long session on e-portfolios with Dave Tosh. Some of you likely remember Dave as the researcher from the University of Edinburgh we’ve been collaborating with on e-portfolio research this past year. Our session was titled “Through the Looking Glass: e-Portfolios for Reflection.” It covered many different angles, inlcuding:
Some of the issues raised in one of the discussion periods sounded very similar to those raised here at UBC by faculty & students. Here’s a sampling:
Dave and I have both posted our ppts from the session.
It was a very busy day, full of interesting discussions with and interesting questions from our participants. One of our participants, Jeremy Hiebert, has posted his impressions of the day to his blog.
On the second day, I attended 2 great sessions…one on authentic assessment online and the other, on weblogs & wikis, lead by our very own Brian Lamb and Jeff Miller. Brian & Jeff’s session was very entertaining and delivered with a lot of passion for the topic. It was a packed room and everyone was very engaged. Impressive for the last session on Friday afternoon!
Leah Macfadyen, a Research Associate in UBC’s Faculty of Science, Skylight (Science Centre for Learning and Teaching) sent in this reflection from the Innovative Teaching Forum at SFU last month. There’s lots of good info on how the some of the conference content relates directly to our UBC efforts with e-portfolios and promoting reflective learning. Thanks Leah!
———————-
From May 18th – 20th, Joanne Nakonechny and I (both of Skylight,
Faculty of Science) attended the ‘7th Annual Symposium on Innovative
Teaching’, at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Campus
(http://www.sfu.ca/symposium2005/)
SFU has approved sweeping changes to its degree requirements that will
apply to all undergraduates admitted for September 2006 and thereafter.
In part, these requirements ask students to complete at least six credits each of courses identified “writing intensive”.
This year’s Symposium therefore had a strong focus on the concept of
“writing intensive learning” – in theory and in practical application –
paralleling the exciting efforts of faculty members across the disciplines to develop writing-intensive courses. Keynote speakers included Chris Anson from North Carolina State University, and Daniel Shapiro of California State University, Monterey Bay. Both of these Universities have made significant strides in consciously incorporating more writing into teaching and learning across the disciplines.
For me, the key take-home message from this Symposium – and one that is
also relevant for ePortfolios work – is the understanding of writing as a tool that can promote learning, thinking and critical analysis – not simply a tool for assessment. In other words, writing has value as a formative as well as summative process for students (and not just in traditional ‘writing intensive’ disciplines, either).
Of particular interest was a session entitled “Timing and wording of low-stakes writing: Making it work to help students’ learning and thinking”, led by Kathryn Alexander of SFU’s Centre for Writing Intensive Learning (CWIL).
Kathryn characterizes ‘low stakes writing’ as short pieces of exploratory writing that “can provide the intellectual building blocks and scaffolding for formal writing assignments”. Low-stakes writing can be used in class, may typically be unassessed (or students may be assessed for participation rather than quality) and helps students develop questions, summarize ideas and develop new ones – all while developing a more natural writing praxis. She quotes Peter Elbow
(1997), who wrote:
“The goal of low stakes assignments is not so much to produce excellent
pieces of writing, as to get students to think, learn and undertsand more of the course material. Low stakes writing is often informal and tends to be graded informally. In a sense, we get to throw away the low stakes writing but keep the neural changes it produced in students heads’.
It seems to me that this perspective directly supports the reflective practice wishes in ePortfolio teaching and learning projects.
SFU’s CWIL site (http://www.sfu.ca/cwil/) is worth a visit – they regularly run workshops and other events in this area.
Other useful references and resources include:
Bean, J. C. (2001) Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating
Writing, Critical Thinking and Active Learning in the Classroom. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Elbow, P. (1997). High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and
responding to Writing, In M.D. Sorcinelli & P. Elbow (Eds) Assigning
and Responding to Writing in the Disciplines. New Directions for
Teaching and learning. No. 69, Spring 1997. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Leah
News from the Open Source Portfolio Initiative website:
OSP 2.0 Released!: “Just in time for Community Source Week in Baltimore this week, we have completed testing and posted the 2.0 release under downloads.