Author: Kele Fleming

As a follow-up to an earlier post on this same topic, here is a detailed list of new features from the Elgg development team:

1) New CSS driven theming engine.
2) Your resources – including an aggregated collection of your feeds
3) HTML editor
4) Community membership moderation
5) Anti-spam
6) Emailed comments
7) Watched threads / tracking threads you are interested in
8) Improved code efficiency
9) Improved internationalisation
10) Auto populate your Elgg blog from external blog
11) Enhanced searching – including lists of public communities
12) Aggregated feed of friends and communities
13) Bug repairs that have been reported
14) Some cool RSS functionality

These are the features/improvements users can expect to see on elgg.net post v0.4 released a little later this month.

This project year, we have 2 students working for us. Many of you are very familiar with Bjorn Thomson and his extensive work with the community and a number of our projects. We also have Dennis Yoo with us this year. Dennis has been working on making connections to students on campus via student societies and careers fairs to get the word out about the benefits of e-portfolios. in fact, Dennis, Bjorn & Alison will be presenting at a couple of careers fairs in the coming weeks.

I wanted to take this opportunity to point readers in the direction of their blogs in which they make very valueable comments on e-portfolios, social software & student engagement.

• Dennis’ e-portfolio
• Bjorn’s Elgg blog

Dennis, our e-portfolio work study student, participated in a BCCampus webcast on e-portfolios with Helen Barrett and others. Read his reflections…

BCCampus’ Online Community is hosting a webcast on digital storytelling next week. If you’re not already a member of BCCampus’ Online Communities, it’s easy to join & it’s free! Follow this link to join:
http://community.bccampus.ca/

Digital Storytelling Finds It’s Place in the Classroom
Digital Storytelling is the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling. Digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experi…

Dec 7, 2005 (3:30 PM )
http://community.bccampus.ca/expo?go=971553

Liz Heathcote, a Visiting Scholar from the Teaching and Learning Support Services Department of Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia) has been on a study leave here at UBC for the past month. She has been doing some very exciting work related to how one uses the data from Learning Management Systems in support of quality teaching and learning, a topic she spoke on at the recent eLearn conference in Vancouver. She has agreed to give us an overview of this work in the form of a Teaching and Learning with Technology seminar.

Please join us in the afternoon of December 5, 2005 (2:30-4pm) for a Teaching and Learning with Technology Seminar Series talk entitled, “Data Mining for Evaluation, Benchmarking and Reflective Practice in a Learning Management System”.

Registration is limited, so please sign up early at:
http://www.tag.ubc.ca/programs/series-detail.php?series_id=167#578

Cyprien Lomas (LFS/AGSC) & Bjorn Thomson (TAG/OLT) will be co-leading a session on digital storytelling here at UBC next week. Here are the details…

Facilitator: Bjorn Thomson, Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (TAG)/Educational Studies and Cyprien Lomas, Faculty of Land and Food Systems
Date: Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Time: 9:30 am to 12:30 pm
Location: Seminar Room, Basement of David Lam Building

Looking for a way to engage your students? Want another way to get your students to ‘own’ their ePortfolios? Would you like to help your students connect deeply with course material and understand concepts rather than just the facts? Then you may be interested in this session on digital storytelling. Digital stories are one way to get students to ‘teach to learn’ using narrative and reflection. Students produce, orchestrate and remix content to create ‘mini-movies’ that are educational and compelling. Often using software that is free, easy to learn, and user-friendly, students are able to express themselves in new ways. Educators find that students who use digital stories produce work that is reflective, and conceptually rich. In addition, they learn some valuable technical skills in the process. Come to our session for an overview of the impact of digital storytelling. We will show a number of examples and outline some of the tools needed to create (and re-create) digital stories in your own classes.

Register Now!

Our very own Marion Porath (Educ) will be leading one of our upcoming Teaching & Learning with Technology (TLT) Series talks. Some of you may be familiar with Marion’s great work on reflection & e-portfolios with her Master’s of Education students. If you’re not, this is your chance to hear all about it.

Here are the details…

Dear colleagues,

Please join us on November 28, 2005, for the second Teaching and Learning with Technology Seminar Series talk of the 2005-06 Academic Year. Dr. Marion Porath, a Professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, will share with us her work related “Technology for Reflection and Knowledge Building”.

Our thanks to the Faculty of Education (CMS) for hosting this talk.

Registration is limited, so please sign up early at:
http://www.tag.ubc.ca/programs/series-detail.php?series_id=167

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Details:
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Title: Technology for Reflection and Knowledge Building
Facilitator: Marion Porath, Professor, Department of Educational and
Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, UBC
Date & Time: November 28th, 2005, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Location: Scarfe 310, hosted by the Faculty of Education (CMS)

Description:
How can an e-portfolio tool support reflection and integration of knowledge? What are the pedagogical implications of using such a tool? This talk will describe how the KEEP Toolkit was used to support M.Ed. students to characterize and integrate learning over the course of their graduate study.

About Marion Porath:
Marion is a Professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education. Her background includes elementary teaching and graduate work that integrated special education and cognitive developmental psychology. Marion also has strong interests in problem-based learning and documentation and representations of learning.

Bjorn Thomson, one of the grad students who has been working in our e-portfolio pilots, sent in this report from the recent ISSoTL Conference. Thanks Bjorn!

I love conferences. And sure, I know that makes me a geek. I can’t help it. You meet people just as excited as you are about matters esoteric and, while geeky, you get new ideas; and, not incidentally, you often get fed regularly to a standard higher than the typical university-cafeteria fare.

That is, if you are attending a conference as a registrant or presenter. If you’re working for the conference, your experience is a little different – the food is still good, and you often still meet interesting people, but you rarely get to attend many sessions and don’t get to indulge in as much geek-speak. Sigh.

Although I was working for the ISSOTL conference, I did also get the chance to present with Joanne Nakonechny and Shona Ellis on the topic of e-Portfolios for reflection. While timing was tight (we only had 15 minutes), we did have an appreciative audience and the chance for a few questions. We presented findings from Shona’s Biology 321 class, which had used e-Portfolios within WebCT last fall as a tool for encouraging metacognitive and higher-order thought about mosses and
liverworts, as well as how the subject matter of the course related the discipline of science as a whole and whether students’ concept of science had changed due to the course. The session was videotaped, so I hope this footage will be available in near future. At any rate, results from this pilot continue to be interesting – stay tuned as well move into the next iteration of the bryo-portfolio in January 2006!

Darlene Redenbach (Rehab Sciences) kindly shared her reflections on the ISSoTL conference with us. This little article will also be appearing in an upcoming issue of Tapestry, the newsletter of the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (TAG). Watch for it, and other articles about the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) Conference held in Vancouver in October at
http://www.tag.ubc.ca/resources/tapestry/

Read on! Concurrent Session 809.1
Using the Keep Toolkit to Foster Sotl, Student Learning and Institutional Change
Spencer Benson (Chair), University of Maryland; Toru Iiyoshi, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The knowledge Media Laboratory’s KEEP Toolkit is a free, open source, adaptable, user-friendly, web-based presentation tool that can be used to document scholarship, facilitate student learning, provide mechanisms for analysis and reflection, foster professional development and encourage institutional change. In this panel we will describe the tool and its uses through case studies and illustrate how it can be used and adapted to meet the needs of institutions, faculty and students.

Spencer Benson described his use of the KEEP toolkit and Toru Iiyoshi described the tool itself. Contributors use KEEP toolkit to produce a small “snapshot” of their initiative, which may then contain links for further information. The goal is to may this form of communication easy to use (templates) and public (no cost).

The KEEP Toolkit is an open source product available free to individuals and groups. The data is housed (currently) at the Gallery of teaching and Learning by the Carnegie Foundation. The purpose is to encourage free exchange between scholars working on innovations and assessment of their teaching, a showcase for their scholarly reflections (and assessment if done) on course innovations. Participants may use the template or create their own to fill out a course portfolio. KEEP Toolkit takes the organizational work out of the activity of sharing SoTL. The site facilitates reflections, allows “publicness”. The goal is 5 fold: 1) document SoTL; 2) share SoTL; 3) make real evidence available; 4) document student reflections; 5) document change in practice over time.

I saw this toolkit as assisting the scholar in two ways. First, to provide a framework to record reflections on one’s work, including data; Second, to offer a wide range of examples in many different fields and methods to scan for ideas and see some of the data. My question was about the ethics issues involved in posting student work and using data from students as “informal” (no ethical review) subjects. This enjoys the interpretation of NOT being a publication, as much of the information is behind a password for “members.

Spencer Benson (University of Maryland) described his use of KEEP toolkit in group assignments, which brings together multiple tools (power points, film clips, papers etc). He described how he provides a clear rubric for grading, showing actual graded assignments on his snapshots at the Carnegie Gallery. I was impressed at his willingness to put his grading out to public view, justify his choices, compare grading to his rubric (which he said was efficient and time saving) and transparent. He talked about initiatives on campus to use KEEP Toolkit. The resulting course portfolio is portable, can be downloaded to a campus serves that supports the program and can be used locally. A visit to his website provides a wealth of information about SoTL.

I have already passed this site on to others, which indicates that I got a lot from this session.