Category — News

Feedback on our Nov 19th e-Portfolio Conference has been showing up in a number of blogs recently. Here’s a sampling…

• Helen Barrett’s blog
• Jeremy Hiebert’s Blog: Post 1|Post 2
• David Tosh’s blog
  

Wow! What a great day we had on Nov 19th! Judging by the number of people who stayed late on a Friday to ask more and more questions of our student panelists, I’d say we had a successful and thought-provoking day.

All presentation slides are now available on the website for those who want to re-visit the day and reflect on what was covered. Video clips of the talks and panels will also be made available in the future.

Here’s my brief summary of the day…

The Morning…
Michelle Lamberson (Director of Learning Technology, UBC) & Beth Hawkes (Co-director, UBC Career Connections) opened the day and set the stage (or should I say lens!) for the rest of the day.

A moving and very reflective keynote was provided by Helen Barrett (UAlaska, Anchorage). She gave a very informative overview of the literature dealing with reflection and brain-based learning. She also focussed on new perspectives on storytelling as reflection on experience to improve learning. The very impressive examples of digital storytelling that she closed her talk with were a highlight.

Karen Belfer, Lynda Eccott, and Cathleen Nicholls, all from UBC, spoke about their experiences with transfer learning and reflection. They examined the issue of reflection and social dialogue practices to support folio thinking and how it helps portfolio owners become more aware of themselves and promotes their ability to transfer knowledge. One example of a student e-portfolio discussed illustrated how e-portfolios help learners build positive attitudes towards learning. This particular student kept a reflective journal for her course while doing an internship in Vancouver’s very poor Downtown Eastside and showed personal growth and deep reflection in writing about her experiences.

Midday
Lunch was combined with networking, poster and laptop demos and feedback centres in the e-Portfolio Cafe. This gave attendees an opportunity to mingle, share success and challenge stories, see the work of some of our UBC e-portfolio pilots and reflect on what they’d heard so far.

The Afternoon…
David Tosh (UEdinburgh), Tracy Penny-Light (UWaterloo) and Helen Chen (Stanford via videoconference) presented on their work on the learning landscape model and student engagement with e-portfolios. This panel was the perfect complement to the student panel that followed. I think they are right on the money with this model! Students will be more motivated to engage in e-portfolios if they are able to have more control over what they can do with them and if they are able to use types of tools they are familiar with…blogs and social networking software like Friendster & Flickr. David Tosh has recently posted a diagram to his ERADC blog that the 3 of them have been working on, with Ben Werdmuller, that details their idea of the learning landscape.

Our final panel of the day, was a student panel. The panel was moderated by Bjorn Thomson, a Master’s of Education student. The student panelists came from diverse departments on campus. Rob Emmerson (Education), Alex Moxin (Science), Martha Kinnear (Pharmaceutical Sciences), and Michelle Chua (Computer Science). The students spoke about their experiences with using e-portfolios in their courses, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what their understanding of reflection is, and their thoughts on how they can be better engaged in the process at university. They also showed examples of their e-portfolios. Judging by the overwhleming number of hands that went up when Bjorn asked the audience if there were any questions, the student voice was a very welcome addition to this conversation.

Traditionally, we end our e-Portfolio Days with a summary from a number of participants. Because of the volume of questions for the student panelists, we had to shorten this part of the day. But, Margot Bell (Student Development, UBC) and GailAnn Rickert (Dean of Academic Advising, Gettsyburg College, Penn) did volunteer to sum up the day. It was interesting to hear the perspectives of two people whose job it is to think about students and services for students at their respective schools. Especially after hearing from our student panelists.

Thank you all for your very valuable contributions to our e-Portfolio Day!

On November 15th, UWaterloo invited me to give a 15-minute videoconference presentation to the attendees at their e-Portfolio Day. They were particularly interested in hearing about the variety of pilot projects here at UBC, how the projects are structured, and about our Community of Practice. It would have been great to be able to attend their day and hear more detail about what they’re doing. According to Tracy Penny-Light, who is the Instructional Project Manager at UWaterloo’s Center for Learning & Teaching Through Technology, e-portfolios at UWaterloo are in a similar place to where UBC was in Year 1 of our campus-wide pilot. Tracy gave more information about the “UWaterloo e-portfolio landscape”:https://www.elearning.ubc.ca/home/DirCMSSiteContent/documents/eport2004/eport2004_TracyPL.ppt at our Nov 19th conference.

I was videoconferenced into the event about 15 minutes prior to my time slot and was able to watch the tail end of the demo of the KEEP ToolKit. “Toru Iiyoshi”:http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/aboutus/staff/iiyoshi.htm, from the Carnegie Foundation’s Knowledge Media Lab, was presenting. My ears perked up at the mention that the KEEP Toolkit will soon be available to individual institutions to download.

“View UWaterloo’s e-Portfolio Day agenda.”:http://eportfolio.uwaterloo.ca/events.html

Our blog has been a little quiet this month…conference preps, pilot projects launching, etc. have kept Alison & I very busy. So, time to catch up on a number of things…

BCCampus hosted ETUG’s Fall Workshop on Educational Technology on November 4th & 5th at BCIT’s downtown campus. It was a full day of interesting panels and presentations on a variety of topics. I was a panelist on a morning panel titled “E-Portfolio Trends (K-12, Industry, Post-Secondary) with Tracy Penny-Light (UWaterloo), Victor Leginsky (Lifia), and Tim Winkelmans (Open School BC). Tracy & I actually co-presented on the collaborative research project both our universities have engaged in with David Tosh from the University of Edinburgh.

Our very own Director of Learning Technology, Michelle Lamberson, participated in the Institutional Project Reports giving an overview of the Vista Pilot Project here at UBC.

After lunch, there were a series of birds of a feather sessions. Michelle, Tracy & I attended the one on e-portfolios. It was a great oppotunity to meet other folks in the province who are working with e-portfolios, including Cheryl Porter (North Island College) and Mary O’Neill (Malaspina).

Here’s a link for more info on the day:
“www.bccampus.ca/Page207.aspx”:http://www.bccampus.ca/Page207.aspx

As well, I understand there are a number of discussion postings in the BCCampus Online Community Space that came out of the day. Become a member of BCCampus’ Online Communites here:
“www.bccampus.ca/Page96.aspx”:http://www.bccampus.ca/Page96.aspx

IMS Global Learning Consortium’s ePortfolio Public Draft Specification was released earlier this month. It is available from the IMS Global website: http://www.imsglobal.org/ep/index.cfm.

A few weeks ago, I posted a message on the OSP website to inquire on the interoperability of OSP 2.0 and WebCT Vista. Sasan replied my message earlier last week and said:

The WebCT PowerLink for OSPI is undergoing final testing and packaging. It should be available for download in the next 2 to 3 weeks.

Related Link: The OSPI forum posting

University of Waterloo is using a tool called KEEP Tool kit for their e-Portfolio projects.

So I decided to explore the tool more. It’s free to create an account from their Carnegie Foundation – Knowledge Media Lab (KML) – KEEP toolkit’s website to try the tool out.

The tool

Cyprien Lomas recently posted to his Educause blog about USC using blogs as an e-portfolio platform. Their approach is particularly interesting because they’re using blogs to collect and the KEEP Tool Kit to publicly present their e-portfolios. Here at UBC, we are staring to experiment with blogfolios (Movable Type) with a professional staff e-portfolio pilot project. We hadn’t considered using a separate platform to present…

Read his post here: “http://www.educause.edu/Blogs/1511&user_id=cyprien&select_case=bloggers”:http://www.educause.edu/Blogs/1511&user_id=cyprien&select_case=bloggers

For users who are testing out OSP 1.5 from http://station17.olt.ubc.ca:8800/portfolio/index.jsp:
We have recently noticed that there are problems with the login process: it complains about bad login name and password combination even if the user has entered the correct combo.

I am looking into the problem currently. It looks like a caching issue with our server… I will talk to our server admin and fix it asap.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Our e-Porfolio blog has been quiet as of late. Now there is a flood of news, the biggest news in e-Portfolio land here on campus being the announcement of our fall event. Here are some details…

e-PORTFOLIO CONFERENCE: REFLECTION IS NOT A MIRROR, IT’S A LENS

November 19, 2004 | The Chan Centre, UBC

Come to this interactive, one-day conference and explore one of the key
aspects of e-Portfolios: reflection. Presentations by e-Portfolio
experts, including students, researchers, faculty and others, will
address the role of reflection in developing and using e-Portfolios as a
life-long practice, for both students and professionals.

PROGRAM AND REGISTRATION:

For information about the program, including the list of speakers, and
to register online, visit:

“http://www.elearning.ubc.ca/eportfolio/conference2004”:http://www.elearning.ubc.ca/eportfolio/conference2004