Author: Kele Fleming

We have reached the end of Year 2 of our campus-wide e-portfolio pilot here at UBC. So, it’s time for us to reflect on the year past and look ahead to the next 12 months of the academic year. The project members are currently busy collecting all of the project artifacts that have been created over the past year. These include: how to documents, sample e-portfolios, examples of reflection, lessons learned, presentations, testimonials from project participants. Our plan is to assemble all of the project artifacts into a blogfolio. This should be complete in a couple of weeks. I’ll post again, with a URL, once it’s ready for release!

Novak pointed me towards this article published on the Educause website:

“Beyond the Electronic Portfolio: A Lifetime Personal Web Space

This article may be old news to most of you (originally published in 2004), but it was new to me. I like the concept of personal webspace as the engine behind the e-portfolio. The authors also mention Vannevar Bush’s classic article “As We May Think” and his concept of the memex to extend an individual’s active memory. Interesting food for thought.

Here at UBC we could consider extending a personal webspace model to students. Students could store all their relevant academic, workplace and personal documents/artifacts there and choose which ones to pull into different contexts (e-portfolio, resume, online course, personal website). Do you think this would work?

More from the BCEd Online Conference…Helen Barrett, yesterday’s keynote at the pre-conference, has posted to her blog about the event. She is very concerened that the BC high school graduation portfolio will poison the well for future (e)portfolio implementations/experiences.

For more on this, read the post from Helen Barrett’s blog.

I’ve heard Helen Barrett speak a couple of times about e-portfolios, reflection & digital storytelling and I am always impressed and inspired. She brings so much passion to the topic and backs up what she says with solid research and personal experience. She has such a clear committment to what I see as the central ethos of folio thinking…that portfolios should be learner-driven.

She included some new references in her talk. One in particular that is worth a careful read is How to write reflections, step-by-step.” Here at UBC, we are searching for ways to encourage and teach reflection. We are currently working on a resource page for our website that will inlcude a wide range of example e-portfolios and reflections.

I attended the BCEd Online Pre-Conference Day yesterday. In the afternoon I participated in a panel with my colleagues from the BC Systemic Portfolio Working Group. The purpose of the panel was to report on our work and discussions and to get feedback from conference attendees on the issues our group have identified as central to the bridging of portfolio practice from K-12 through to post-secondary.

I podcasted parts of the panel…Rather than reading my extensive summary, I figured that hearing the panelists in their own words would be almost as good as being there. Click on the mp3 files below to listen to snippets from the panel.

• Paul Stacey’s introduction Download File (.mp3) 4.5MB
• Shelley Willcox (Surrey SD) outlines portfolio K-12 context Download File (.mp3) 5.5MB
• Joe Jamieson (CoolSchool), Jan Fee (SFU) & Kele Fleming (UBC) give overviews of stakeholder views and the post-secondary context Download File (.mp3) 8.6MB

This came through the EPAC listserv recently…An article by Stephen Acker that was recently published in Campus Technology:

Overcoming Obstacles to Authentic ePortfolio Assessment

This morning’s broadcast, co-sponsored by BCCampus, showed a wide-range of e-portfolio practice across a large geographical area (Canada, US, UK, Europe, Australia). The title of the broadcast was “Electronic Portfolios for Lifelong and Lifewide Learning: Research and Practice.”

The Minnesota eFolio system is statewide and currently has 30,000 users. Darren Cambridge (George Mason University) conducted a research project with UMinn on e-portfolio use and gave a good overview of some of the research questions pursued. Some of those questions were:
– how does reflection impact student learning?
– what impact do e-portfolios have on student’s engagement with their learning?
– do e-portfolios help improve the workplace experience?
– do e-portfolios help students and instructors reach their educational goals?

These questions are similar to the one being aksed by David Tosh in his PhD. research, as well as, some of our project leads here at UBC. It will be interesting to see how some of our findings compare with those of Darren Cambridge and the eFolio folks.

The hand-out from this morning’s broadcast has more information on the various systems that were highlighted and on the research project itself. It will soon be posted for CoP members in the Community area of the blog.

Dave Tosh has posted the latest iteration of the learning landscape model he has been working on with a number of colleagues in recent months. You can view a PDF on Dave’s blog.

It’s particularly interesting to see how they’ve connected all the various elements of learning together in one roadmap with ELGG at the centre. I’d like to see this model developed a step further to plug in the “real” (as opposed to virtual or online) instances and contexts of learning.

Alan Levine explores the possible links between podcasting & e-portfolios in this interesting post on his cogdogblog.
Check it out!