Category — News

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)

Elgg has recently publicized a set of new features that should give users with an improved experience. New features include dashboard, themed communities, and better searching. For more information, please visit:
http://curverider.co.uk/?p=15

Campus Technology Magazine has published an article, “Electronic Student Assessment >> The Power of the Portfolio“, that examines the innovative ways a number of U.S. post-secondary schools are using portfolios as assessment tools.

Helen Barrett has posted an online document, titled “Purposes of Digital Stories in ePortfolios“, that examines how to merge these two learning tools. She provides a number of good examples of digital stories.

The Vancouver Sun & Canada.com published an article in mid-August titled “Sophisticated new tools help students.” The article focuses on the internet and digital devices that are enhancing studies from art history to geography and features Land & Food Systems, Cathleen Nichols, and Arts’ Ancient Spaces.

Read the article.

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)

UBC Okangan has announced their 2nd Annual Learning Conference (note that this conference takes place on a Thurs-Fri and is followed by the Wine Festival!). Here are the need-to-knows:

UBC Okanagan’s 2nd Annual Learning Conference
Learning Free of Boundaries
May 4 & 5, 2006
UBC Okanagan, Kelowna

http://www.ubc.ca/okanagan/ctl/conference

Learning Free of Boundaries
The second annual UBC Okanagan Learning Conference will focus on learning free of boundaries – boundaries between disciplines, boundaries between professions, boundaries between learning spaces, boundaries between learners and learning materials and boundaries between learning and technology.
The conference will open with a keynote address by Dr. John Willinsky, Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at UBC and recent winner of the Blackwell Scholarship Award for his book The Access Principle. Dr. Willinsky will speak on “A Newly Open and Public Quality to Learning”.

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