Category — News

I was talking with Tracy Penny-Light, from UWaterloo, yesterday about the e-Portfolio pilot running there. Students in accounting & finance and in history are creating e-Portfolios this term. They are using Carnegie’s KEEP Tool Kit to build their e-Portfolios. I don’t know much about this tool yet, I’ve just created an account and will explore. It is a hosted product and looks very easy to use. I’ll post more info after Alison & I have had a chance to play with it. In the meantime, here’s a short description of the software and a link to the site. Go ahead and create your own account!

***CARNEGIE TOOL KIT The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Knowledge Media Lab has developed a new tool to help educators document and share their work and knowledge online. The KEEP (Knowledge, Exchange, Exhibit and Presentation) tool kit offers teachers and students an easy way to organize and display their work on the Web, including multimedia displays. The resource leads educators and students through the selection process for display materials. Using specially designed templates, the KEEP tool kit also allows presenters to reflect and comment on each item included in the online display. It is available at “www.carnegiefoundation.org/KML/keep/”:http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/KML/keep/. ***

David Tosh & Ben Werdmuller, both from the University of Edinburgh, will be conducting a webcast via BCCampus this Thursday (Oct. 21st) morning at 8:30am.

In order to view the webcast, you must be a member of the BCCampus EDTech Community. It’s easy to join, just visit, “http://community.bccampus.ca/bccampus”:http://community.bccampus.ca/bccampus, and join the community.

For those early risers, I’ve included a brief description of the webcast. It should be very interesting. David & Ben have been very active in the e-Portfolio community (both in Europe and here via EPAC and work with both UWaterloo and UBC) and have been working on what they call a “learning landscape”:http://elgg.net/. Tune in, it’ll be very interesting!

Here’s the description:

In recent years, adoption of e-portfolio tools has occurred in individual courses, departments, schools, and across institutions. We feel it is important to encourage students to recognize the value of e-portfolio software beyond simple course applications and outside the context of their undergraduate education. To facilitate this approach, we will describe a conceptual framework for addressing these issues relating to the implementation, adoption and sustainability of e-portfolio technology.

And, here is an archived version of the presentation:

“http://present.bccampus.ca/p20801572/”:http://present.bccampus.ca/p20801572/

This article, written by Steve Acker from Ohio State, came through Syllabus’ “e-Learning Dialogue”…

bq.. Course management systems offer powerful support for teaching, but they truncate student learning at the end of every term. ePortfolios offer a longitudinal learning environment in which a student can organize and maintain learning connections, but they may lack the orchestrated vision of an experienced educator. These alternate structures for capturing, evaluating, and reflecting on student work should intersect on the student

During the past few weeks, I have been exploring ways to create a printer friendly version of a downloaded iWebfolio e-portfolio.

After some time digging into the code and CSS style sheet, I have developed a style sheet that works with portfolio.htm (which is the actual page that renders the link “View Entired Portfolio”).This is a sample printout (PDF): http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/e-portfolios/archives/iweb_print_IE.pdf

Detail instruction on how to create such a printout can be found here:
Printing your e-Portfolio–An Alternative
Related Files:
*124F81_stylereport.css
*print.css
*124F81_stylereport_original.css (If you want to undo the changes, save this file as “124F81_stylereport.css”)

OSP 1.5 Generic Template for UBC is up and running (I have especially designed this template using UBC colors). With this generic template, users can create an e-Portfolio that contains any type of items. This template has 6 categories: Personal Information, Education, Career, Skills, Professional Practices, and Recognition. These categories are developed/derived from the original OSP 1.5 hierachy.

I have a sample public e-Portfolio using this template on the server which you can take a look and get an idea of how it looks like.

Sample: http://station17.olt.ubc.ca:8800/portfolio/renderView.do?shareId=50

Please feel free to comment and provide ideas on it.

An article on reflections which I found interesting is at
this site
This article has examples of different levels of reflection. Enjoy.
Bob Bruce

Jonathon Richter (Montana State University, Northern) posted a notice to the EPAC list about the MIT4: The Work of Stories Conference (May 2005). He suggests a connection between the topic of this conference and e-portfolios…

bq.. For those of us interested in using E-portfolios not simply as assessment tools OF learning, but for use as assessment tools FOR learning (thanks, Helen Barrett :), storytelling is a wonderful way to get people of all ages and walks to integrate their personal experience as well as bump against that “zone of proximal development” – hey, every good story has a conflict in it!

A cogent paper on E-folios, as living growing hyperlinked stories, could be a powerful addition to this very interesting (looking) conference.

p. More info & call for papers…
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/

Helen Barrett, a self-described advocate of using common software tools to build e-portfolios, has broadened the scope by posting a page that documents her recent exploration of a wide range of software options. The purpose of her “adventure” was to find options appropriate for high schools and individuals. While most of the tools she’s looked at aren’t used here at UBC (she does have plans to look at iWebfolio & OSP), it’s an interesting exercise.

Read on…
http://electronicportfolios.org/myportfolio/versions.html

Over the past week and a bit, there has been an interesting discussion happening on the EPAC email listserv about faculty e-Portfolios. It all started with this request from Darren Cambridge for examples of faculty e-Portfolios:

bq.. A request: My Dean in interested in portfolios that document all of a faculty member’s work, i.e. their research and service as well as teaching. While I’m familiar mostly with teaching portfolios, it seems likely that some of you are familiar with portfolios that also chronicle these broader activities. I’m primarily interested in portfolios that offer a substantial amount of reflection to make
sense of the activities and work products they include in terms of the author’s career trajectory and professional identity. (I’m familiar with enhanced CV services such as Community of Science. While these are very valuable, I’m interested in parallel to learning portfolios.) Do you know of examples I could share with the Dean?

p. Go to EPAC, sign in and click on the “Email Archive” link in the left side navigation to follow the thread. If you’re not yet a member of EPAC, you can sign up here: http://webcenter.aahe.org/chef/portal

EPAC hosted a chat last week. The topic of discussion was “Who are today’s students?” Participants were asked to read a series of articles by Marc Prensky, the main one titled, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” In the articles, Prensky makes use of his “digital natives, digital immigrants” metaphor to discuss the differences between today’s teachers and students.

Some participants questioned Prensky’s definition of today’s students as multi-tasking, indicating that in their experiences in the classroom, students want a structured, linear learning environment. Others suggested that Prensky’s definitions were too general and didn’t take into account, for example, gender or cultural differences.

It was a very lively discussion, with a large number of participants. I understand that this chat topic will be repeated this Wednesday (Sept 15th) at a later time (8pm PDT) to allow colleagues in Australia and Asia to participate.

The transcripts from all the EPAC chat sessions are made available at the EPAC site and make an interesting read if you can’t attend a chat session!