Category — News

Bob mentioned that there’s a new release of the KEEP Toolkit at our last Community of Practice meeting.

So, I loggged into the system and checked out the new features.

New features of this version of KEEP Toolkit (v1.6) includes:

• Enhanced Rich Text Editor
• My Dashboard: where you can access and manage all of your snapshots and KEEP Toolkit Operations.
• Stitiching Tool: select any number of snapshots and stitch them together. The snapshots will show up as menu items within a navigation bar

and more… a complete list can be found here.Some screenshots:

The Dashboard – an improved interface

Stitching a few snapshots together with a horizontal navigation bar.

Stitching a few snapshots together with a vertical navigation bar.

Its fun and enlightening to to see how other institutions are working with e-Portfolios. Alan Levine of Maricopa Community College (Arizona) , in this blog entry, tells us about their e-portfolio day. The information on the event is at:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eport05demois.php/

The original event that Maricopa held in 2002 was key inspiration for our “e-Portfolio days” (2003 and 2004).

Members of our eportfolio community will especially enjoy the comments about the student panel… there is nothing like hearing the student voice for a solid reality-grounding experiece!

This message came through the EPAC listserv from Darren Cambridge earlier this week…

The OSPI Conference will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, June 10-11, 2005.

Call For Proposals open until March 15. If you have experience with
the Open Source Portfolio in implementation or evaluation, please
consider sharing with the broader community. Bring a student; bring a
colleague; most importantly, bring your ideas!

For the full text of the call, please visit the OSPI website.

I attended a very informative webcast this morning led by Dr. Helen Barrett. The webcast was part of a great series sponsored by the BCcampus EdTech Online Community.

Some of you may remember Dr. Barrett’s very moving keynote address at our e-portfolio event in November. Dr. Barrett will also be providing the keynote address at the BC EdOnline Conference in April. In this morning’s webcast, titled “To ‘e’ or Not to ‘e’: the High School Portfolio”, Dr. Barrett focused on a few core themes:

• the positivist (standardized checklist of skills) versus the constructivist (reflective story of deep learning) approach to e-portfolio development
• the assessment of learning versus the assessment for learning approach to evaluating e-portfolios
• extrinsic versus instrinsic motivations for students

Dr. Barrett suggested some ways to help promote reflection amongst student learners:

• provide models & examples
• begin with forms or prompts; ie., ask a question that students answer
• make use of journals/blogs
• create tasks that challenge learners to integrate new learning into previous learning

An archive of the webcast is available on BCcampus’ website.

Just saw this… it was posted on the BCcampus website, and thought it would be of interest to the e-Portfolio Community of Practice. You will need to set up a registration profile to participate, but its easy to do!

Tue, Feb 15, 2005 10:00 AM
Live Webcast: Portfolios in High Schools – to “e” or not to “e”
http://community.bccampus.ca/bccampus?go=635457
——————————————————————————–

This presentation will focus on the BC high school portfolio requirement and the impact that using technology could have on student learning, motivation and engagement. Dr. Helen Barrett, keynote speaker for the BCEd Online Conference in April will give a brief overview of the literature on the electronic portfolio development process and will highlight several strategies that enable reflection: blogging and digital storytelling.

To take part in this live event, please log in to the BCcampus Community Webcast Room at 9:45am.

One of the gaps on the e-portfolio website identified by our community is the lack of example e-portfolios. We’re working on a series of examples to post in the next month or so. We’ll also include examples of reflections as one of the top questions asked by students in the pilots is “Can you show me an example of a good reflection?”

Aligned with this effort, Bjorn Thomson, our MEd. student who coordinates 3 of our pilots, has started a Teaching e-Portfolio wiki. Bjorn’s done a wonderful job of collecting examples of teaching e-portfolios as well as building his own in the various softwares we’re piloting. I think you’ll find this is a great resource for the community. We’ll certainly add this resource to the website!

Wow! Check this out! Karina from YorkU has very generously posted York’s e-portfolio plan to her blog.

It’s a very ambitious plan. Karina describes it as a vision of the system they’d like to have at York. It’s a very long post but well worth the read. She encourages her readers to give feedback and criticism on the plan. I encourage our CoP members to post their thoughts on York’s plans here in our blog.

Brian Lamb, Michelle Chua & myself co-presented a BCcampus webcast on blogfolios this morning. We focused on the Movable Type blogfolio templates, that are Michelle’s creation, that are being used by our professional staff e-portfolio pilot here on campus.

Visit our blogfolios:

• Brian Lamb
• Michelle Chua
• Kele Fleming

>>View the archived version of the webcast.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Colleen Adl, who is working with e-portfolios at Dalhousie. Colleen and I first met last summer at the OSPI Conference in San Franciso.

Dalhousie started piloting e-portfolios with individual students last fall and launched class pilots in January. It looks like they’re dedicated to using OSPI (1.5, I believe) in their pilot. 300 students registered in 9 different classes (leadership, health & human management, career services) will participate. I’ll keep in touch with Colleen because it will be interesting to hear their feedback on OSPI.

And, I recently came across this site that outlines Dalhousie’s plans for e-portfolio use and practice:

www.dal.ca/~career/connections/index.html

I came across this definition of an e-portfolio recently on Robert Patterson’s blog (see link below). To my mind, this is an ideal, almost utopian, definition of what an e-portfolio should be. Others are beginning to think along these lines as well, as is evidenced by the recent development of Dave Tosh’s & Ben Werdmuller’s ELGG Learning Landscape. I think it’s what we’re all striving for ultimately and I can’t wait until we get there!

Imagine this: a public blog, complete with RSS feeds, comments and trackbacks. A public profile, complete with social networking, search and Friend of a Friend functionalities. A private storage area that lets you house online everything from text-based documents to audio and film. A collaborative workspace that allows you to have discussions, post comments, share documents and work collaboratively on new projects with your class, tutorial or self-chosen groups. A tool that lets you create websites with the posts from your blog, the files from your personal storage area, the information from your collaborative workspaces and more, then lets you customize the appearance of such a site and choose its level of security. A system that connects dynamically with your university’s systems, adding information about your courses, your marks, your degree requirements and your transcript. That–and more.

*That* is what I mean when I say “ePortfolio.”

Clipped from Robert Patterson’s blog