Author: alison

Campus Technology has an article on Electronic Student Assessment >> The Power of the Portfolio

At Bentley College (MA), the interdisciplinary Liberal Studies program has undergone quite a makeover: Educators there have completely revamped the way in which they assess student performance in class. For years, the process was “old school”—students were required to submit all work in person, printing out assignments on paper, stapling them, and handing them over to professors upon request. These days, however, the school handles assessment with nextgeneration ePortfolio tools that enable students and teachers to exchange assignments electronically.

Read more here: Electronic Student Assessment >> The Power of the Portfolio

Below is an excerpt from the Autumn 2006 KEEP Toolkit eNewsletter:

New Ways of Using the KEEP Toolkit
College Lesson Study Project by Bill Cerbin & Bryan Kopp

The process of Lesson Study is a unique form of collaborative classroom inquiry, frequently practiced in Japanese elementary schools, in which a small team of instructors designs, teaches, studies and refines a single class lesson. In the Spring of 2006, Bill Cerbin, professor of psychology and the Director, and Bryan Kopp, professor of English and the Associate Director of the College Lesson Study Project located at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, used the KEEP Toolkit to develop a procedure for documenting and publishing lesson studies by college instructors.

Seeing Student Thinking and Building a Space for Collaborative Faculty Curriculum Development by Whitney Schlegel

Whitney Schlegel is an Associate Professor of Biology and Director of Human Biology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is interested in collaborative student learning, pedagogies (such as case-based teaching), and exploring how students learn in teams. As a Carnegie Scholar (2003-2004), she carefully documented evidence of student learning in a team-based and case-based human physiology course.

Distributable KEEP
At the Knowledge Media Laboratory we are currently developing a distributable version of the KEEP Toolkit that will be available for download free of charge (GNU license). We are asking you, as a partner institution, to help us expedite this process by beta testing Distributable KEEP. We can provide you with installation instructions, as well as the source code to the KEEP Toolkit. In return, we ask that you become an active member in our development community by participating in our new developer’s forum.

KEEP Toolkit is now integrated with Sakai!
KEEP Toolkit can now be fully integrated with Sakai, an online open source Collaboration and Learning Environment, used by a wide range of institutions to support teaching and learning, portfolios and research collaboration. A plug-in for Sakai 2.1 or later enables one-stop authentication for easy access of KEEP Toolkit from within a Sakai instance through the use of web services. (The plug-in package is available for the distributable version of KEEP 1.9).

The New Gallery of Teaching and Learning
The Knowledge Media Laboratory is pleased to announce the launch of our new Gallery of Teaching & Learning. The Gallery has received an extensive makeover, which includes:

• A more intuitive design
• Features that allow us to receive feedback from visitors
• Sorting tools to help you find your information faster
• Integrated Google search within the Gallery and collections

More details: Autumn 2006 KEEP Toolkit eNewsletter

The Joint Information Systems Committee posted a summary of their e-portfolio projects on their website: e-Portfolios: an overview of JISC activities.

PDF version of the paper can also be found here: e-Portfolio Overview October 2006 (PDF)

During our last CoP meeting, Regina Lyakhovetska, from Student Development talked about her experience with the International Peer Program’s e-Portfolio project using Elgg. She talked about how the project’s structured, students’ experience, successes and challenges of the project.

Regina agreed to share her presentation with the community. You can download the presentation in different formats:

• PowerPoint Presentaion (.ppt)
• 6 Slides per page (.pdf)

Dr. Marion Porath from the Masters of Education program, worked with the KEEP Toolkit Team to put together a case study for her take on e-portfolios using the KEEP Toolkit.

The case study provides background information of Marion’s course and also showcases a number of example e-portfolios from her students.

Link: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/master/sub.asp?key=38&subkey=1087

Bjorn, Dennis and I participated at the UBC Tech Career Fair organized by the CSSS (Computer Science Student Society), UBC Engineering Physics and UBC IEEE last week. The poster and the brochure we prepared can be found in my previous entry.

The three of us were there to promote the use of e-portfolios as a career and personal development tool. Despite the fact that we, unlike others, didn’t have any job opportunities to offer, we still caught many students’ interests. Students are open to learn about e-portfolios, and how it might help them job hunting. I printed 200 copies of the brochure and about 70% of them are gone now. Gayle Mavor, Communications Coordinator of the Department of Computer Science, also took a pile of the brochure and agreed to distribute them within the department. In addition, we also asked students to leave us their email addresses if they’d like to attend a workshop on building e-portfolios. To our surprise, we collected more than 40 email addresses. I think it’s a really good start as this is our first try to promote e-portfolios to students outside a course setting.We had a few FAQ from students during the day:

• Are you hiring?
• What is the difference between an e-portfolio and buying my own domain name and setup a website of my own?
• Do you have a database of e-portfolios like monsters.ca, so employers can come to the site and view the pool of e-portfolios?
• Do you have an online tutorial somewhere?
• Will employers really look at my e-portfolios?

Regarding to the last question, Dennis and I spoke with some of the company representatives at the career fair. Many of them suggested that an e-portfolio will be helpful during the final phase of the hiring process. The reason behind is that corporates (see the list of companies participated at the UBC Tech Career Fair here) get hundreds and thousands of job applications each year. They usually have their own software that filters out resumes by keyword queries. Thus, employers/HR’s generally wouldn’t have a chance to look at the applicants’ e-portfolios/websites until they come down to 3-5 applications.

Having said that, some of the representatives also expressed interests in tools that would allow them to actually see the applicants’ work before interviewing them. It allows them to learn more about the applicants, and to actually see proofs of the skills and knowledge the potential applicants claim to have on their resumes.

Last Thursday, Jan 26th, Bjorn, Dennis and I participated at the UBC Tech. Career Fair. We are trying to push e-portfolios to another level by promoting the use of it as a tool for career development.

• View Poster (2400 x 1373 pixels) [.jpg]
• View Poster (1200 x 687 pixels) [.jpg]
• Brochure for students (US Legal) [.pdf]

More updates from my career fair experience to come soon!