Category — News

Dave Tosh has posted the latest version of the learning landscape concept/model he has been working on with Tracy Penny-Light, Helen Chen and Ben Werdmuller.
Dave, Tracy & Helen presented at our November e-Portfolio Conference on the topic and have been garnering some well-deserved attention for their model (most recently at an NLII poster session).

Visit Dave Tosh’s blog for more information

The most recent edition of UBC’s e-Strategy Newsletter features an article written by Bjorn Thomson & Alison Wong, that highlights the student panel at our November 19th e-Portfolio Conference. Two of the students who participated in the panel, Martha Kinnear (Pharmacy) and Robert Emmerson (Teacher Education), are featured in the article. It’s great to hear from them again…about their experiences with e-Portfolios and their impressions of the benefits and challenges. What they say is a reminder to all of us working in educational technology that we need to listen to the student voice!

Read the article.

Last week Brian Lamb, Michelle Chua, and myself co-facilitated a 90-minute workshop on blogfolios for a small group of professional staff here at UBC. The staff who participated in the session volunteered to take part in an e-portfolio pilot project for e-Learning professional staff.

We held focus groups with the staff before Christmas to determine the following:

• why they had volunteered for the pilot
• what did they know about e-portfolios
• what were their goals for participating in the pilot
• what they would like to use their e-portfolio for
• what kinds of skills would they like to demonstrate
• what types of artefacts dod they want to collect

From the focus groups, it was clear that these folks were looking for something they could customize, somewhere they could display their work, and also a tool to use to reflect about their professional practice. Someone suggested trying out a blogfolio (I think it was Brian) because the blog portion could easily act as the reflective tool. After batting around some ideas, Michelle and Brian got to work on developing a blogfolio template (in Movable Type) that users could customize if they wanted to.

One of the reasons we’re very keen on this project here in our office is because it gives us an opportunity to see what happens when our worlds collide…the blog and e-portfolio worlds. Also, the staff participating in this pilot are pretty tech savvy and we’re expecting them to really push the software/templates. It will be interesting to hear their feedback after a couple of months of use. Stay tuned!

Since Brian and Michelle launched their own blogfolios, they’ve received a number of comments from our learning technology colleagues. Karina from YorkU has recently posted a number of times on blogfolios. She makes some good points about our approach and about the blogfolio approach in general. Particularly, she points out that the blogfolio (& other approaches to the e-portfolio) can give the user the impression that their e-portfolio is a finite object. We’re hoping that our piloteers will see their blogfolios as living documents, infinite really, and a tool that will allow them to collect their work and reflect on their professional growth.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else is trying this approach and how it’s going.

OSP is moved to a production server recently. It is a completely new installation and will be running for our pilot projects.

You can access OSP 1.5 from http://eportfolios.olt.ubc.ca

Please note that old copy on http://station01.olt.ubc.ca:8800/portfolio will not be accessible anymore.

One of UBC’s goals this semester is to build a strategy for the evaluation of e-Portfolio softwares currently available. We are currently doing this by testing a number of softwares and tracking user feedback and interaction with each. One of the core goals of our campus-wide e-Portfolio pilot in Year 2 (we’re currently in the middle of Year 2) was to evaulate and select a campus-wide software solution. It’s looking more & more like this is a premature goal. For two reasons, mainly…

1. It’s difficult to choose one software solution that answers the needs of all of our diverse users. It is frightening, from a support point of view, to think of a campus with a variety of e-portfolio softwares installed and running! But, is it really realistic to expect one single software to answer the needs of a Pharmacy program e-portfolio, a teaching portfolio for Teacher Education students, a professional development & reflective e-portfolio for professional staff, a faculty e-portfolio, etc.?

2. There is no killer app yet. e-Portfolio software is still relatively young. Time after time, I read posts on blogs from other schools describing the difficulty in selecting a campus-wide software solution.

At least we know we’re not alone in our quest!

And, another issue we will have to consider in a couple years time is the high school students graduating from BC high schools with portfolios (and, some with e-portfolios) and an expectation to continue this practice through out their post-secondary education.

Also worth a look…

Some of you may have explored the Alverno College DDP already. There is talk of them releasing their software to other institutions. They’ve posted a series of screenshots that give a good sense of what the student & faculty member experience inside the system.

It would be great to hear from our Community of Practice on some of the softwares that have been highlighted in our blog…Post away!

Karina Sumner-Smith, my counterpart at York University, has posted access to a demo of Wolverhampton’s Pace e-Portfolio system. It’s worth a look. Pace is completely Flash-based, but the output or presentation side is not.

Read Karina’s enthusiastic post(s) on Pace.

Access the demo of Pace.

I’ve recently been in contact with Karina Sumner-Smith from York University. Karina is the Special Projects Assistant with the Career Centre at York. In that role, she is busy building a Community of Practice and a framework for e-Portfolio use at York.

It’s great to see such good e-Portfolio work being done at other Canadian universities like York, UWaterloo & Dalhousie. I’m certain there are others too that we haven’t yet connected with.

Visit Karina’s blog for more information about what’s happening at York.

The December EPAC chat has been postponed until January. There will be 2 chats scheduled in January (details coming soon).

One of the chats will be a prep for the next EPAC face-to-face meeting at the NLII 2005 annual meeting in New Orleans, LA from January 23-25. And, another will focus on on recent ePortfolio conferences in La Rochelle, France
, Melbourne, Australia , as well as our event here at UBC.

The transcript for the most recent EPAC chat (end of Nov) is now also posted to the EPAC site. This chat was led by Helen Barrett, who delivered the keynote at our conference, and focused on digital storytelling.

More information and resources on digital storytelling are available on Helen Barrett’s website.

Dave Tosh & Ben Werdmuller are involved in a virtual discussion this week with Alan Levine and folks at Maricopa College. Dave & Ben just recently released the alpha version of their ELGG software to a selected group of testers. Alison & I have been able to have a look at it and must congratulate them on a fantastic job! They’ve combined social networking, blogging and e-portfolios under one roof. I believe the alpha test is invite-only at the moment but look for it to open up to a wider audience soon.

Alison has actually gone so far as to customize the templates in ELGG. Have a look at what she’s done. Very cool!

Check out the discussion, it’s all about ELGG & exploring ways to homogenise everyday web community technologies and practises to enhance the e-portfolio model.