Category — News

Lifia is hosting it’s second Pan-American e-Portfolio Working Forum in Vancouver on April 18 & 19. UBC’s own Cyprien Lomas from Land & Food Systems will be presenting along with others from Canada and the U.S. For more information & to register, go to: http://www.lifia.ca/en/index.htm

Helen Chen (Stanford) will be here at UBC this Friday March 3 to share her thoughts on emerging technologies and community building. Helen’s work is very much aligned with the work of UBC’s e-Portfolio Community of Practice with crossovers on research and reflection.
This talk is hosted by Skylight in the Faculty of Science.

Here’s a short description of the topics Helen will be covering:

How can we identify and build opportunities for students to effectively reflect upon and integrate formal and informal learning experiences in a language and format that is relevant to how today’s students understand and live their lives? Drawing from examples from Stanford’s Folio Thinking research program and the work of the National Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research, this session will engage participants in an interactive discussion about theoretical models for framing ePortfolio design and research, the potential contributions of the ePortfolio model to assessment and scholarship of teaching and learning efforts, and scaffolding and facilitating reflective thinking using wikis, blogs, and other social software technologies.

It’s not too late to attend this excellent talk! You can register here:
http://www.tag.ubc.ca/programs/series-detail.php?series_id=167

From day 1 of UBC’s campus-wide e-portfolio pilot, one of the key goals has been to choose a campus-wide software solution. It has become clear that that goal, first stated 3 years ago, was ahead of it’s time. We haven’t yet had success with this one and have found that a one-size fits all may not be the way to go. However, recently announced developments with a number of tools (WebCT, iWebfolio, Keep Toolkit, Elgg) give us hope that an easy-to-use and scaleable solution may be in our future.

A message came through on a WebCT listserv this morning detailing the top 5 reasons to upgrade to WebCT Campus Edition 6. Reason # 4, copied in below, is to get ready for the WebCT Portfolio. A number of our pilots have used WebCT (the student presentation) for student e-portfolios. We’re looking forward to seeing how this will work and are hopeful that it will indeed be easy to learn.

4. Get ready for the WebCT Portfolio!
————————————————————

Moving to WebCT Campus Edition 6 will also pave the way for
you to start using the WebCT Portfolio. Targeted for release
in the first half of 2006, the WebCT Portfolio is a personal
portfolio solution that will make portfolio initiatives easy
for institutions to manage and for students and instructors
to learn.

Educause is sponsoring the following webcast on the 2006 Horizon Report. If you have the time, I recommend attending this session. The report was distributed during the ELI Annual Meeting in San Diego and is worth a read. UBC is a member institution, so go ahead and register if you have the time.
—

Topic: Emerging Learning Technologies: The 2006 Horizon Report
Date: March 6, 2006
Time: 1:00 p.m. EST (12:00 p.m. CST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 10:00 a.m. PST); International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion Web site to calculate the event’s start time in your time zone.
Duration: 1 hour
Facilitator: Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, The New Media Consortium

The annual Horizon Report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within the coming one to five years. It is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.

Join Larry Johnson at this seminar to find out about the trends identified in the 2006 report and what they may mean for teaching, learning, and technology at your institution. Johnson will also describe the process behind the report’s development, NMC’s Horizon Project.

This free seminar is an exclusive benefit for ELI member organizations—you and any others at your organization are invited to attend. Virtual seating is limited, however, and registration is required.
Register here.

This year UBC’s e-Portfolio Conference has been rolled into the larger UBC Learning Conference. This is a wonderful development in a couple of ways:

1. UBC’s funded campus-wide e-portfolio pilot wraps up at the end of April and the conference, planned for May 11 & 12, is the perfect venue for our community and projects to report out on their successes, challenges, future plans. This larger conference will provide a wider, more diverse audience for this.
2. The theme of this year’s conference is “At a Crossroads in Teaching: Reflection, Innovation, Technology, Learning,” a perfect fit for discourse on the advantages and disadvantages of a particular approach to teaching and learning (folio thinking & reflection) and it’s associated technologies (e-portfolios, blogs, & social software).

The Call for Proposals is now out, marked with a March 10/06 deadline. So, bring your innovative ideas on teaching and learning, using technology in the classroom, and student engagement forward and submit something!

Follow this site for more details about the conference as they become available:
http://www.elearning.ubc.ca/ubclearningconference

Bjorn, Dennis and I participated at the UBC Tech Career Fair organized by the CSSS (Computer Science Student Society), UBC Engineering Physics and UBC IEEE last week. The poster and the brochure we prepared can be found in my previous entry.

The three of us were there to promote the use of e-portfolios as a career and personal development tool. Despite the fact that we, unlike others, didn’t have any job opportunities to offer, we still caught many students’ interests. Students are open to learn about e-portfolios, and how it might help them job hunting. I printed 200 copies of the brochure and about 70% of them are gone now. Gayle Mavor, Communications Coordinator of the Department of Computer Science, also took a pile of the brochure and agreed to distribute them within the department. In addition, we also asked students to leave us their email addresses if they’d like to attend a workshop on building e-portfolios. To our surprise, we collected more than 40 email addresses. I think it’s a really good start as this is our first try to promote e-portfolios to students outside a course setting.We had a few FAQ from students during the day:

• Are you hiring?
• What is the difference between an e-portfolio and buying my own domain name and setup a website of my own?
• Do you have a database of e-portfolios like monsters.ca, so employers can come to the site and view the pool of e-portfolios?
• Do you have an online tutorial somewhere?
• Will employers really look at my e-portfolios?

Regarding to the last question, Dennis and I spoke with some of the company representatives at the career fair. Many of them suggested that an e-portfolio will be helpful during the final phase of the hiring process. The reason behind is that corporates (see the list of companies participated at the UBC Tech Career Fair here) get hundreds and thousands of job applications each year. They usually have their own software that filters out resumes by keyword queries. Thus, employers/HR’s generally wouldn’t have a chance to look at the applicants’ e-portfolios/websites until they come down to 3-5 applications.

Having said that, some of the representatives also expressed interests in tools that would allow them to actually see the applicants’ work before interviewing them. It allows them to learn more about the applicants, and to actually see proofs of the skills and knowledge the potential applicants claim to have on their resumes.

Last Thursday, Jan 26th, Bjorn, Dennis and I participated at the UBC Tech. Career Fair. We are trying to push e-portfolios to another level by promoting the use of it as a tool for career development.

• View Poster (2400 x 1373 pixels) [.jpg]
• View Poster (1200 x 687 pixels) [.jpg]
• Brochure for students (US Legal) [.pdf]

More updates from my career fair experience to come soon!

As a follow-up to an earlier post on this same topic, here is a detailed list of new features from the Elgg development team:

1) New CSS driven theming engine.
2) Your resources – including an aggregated collection of your feeds
3) HTML editor
4) Community membership moderation
5) Anti-spam
6) Emailed comments
7) Watched threads / tracking threads you are interested in
8) Improved code efficiency
9) Improved internationalisation
10) Auto populate your Elgg blog from external blog
11) Enhanced searching – including lists of public communities
12) Aggregated feed of friends and communities
13) Bug repairs that have been reported
14) Some cool RSS functionality

These are the features/improvements users can expect to see on elgg.net post v0.4 released a little later this month.

This project year, we have 2 students working for us. Many of you are very familiar with Bjorn Thomson and his extensive work with the community and a number of our projects. We also have Dennis Yoo with us this year. Dennis has been working on making connections to students on campus via student societies and careers fairs to get the word out about the benefits of e-portfolios. in fact, Dennis, Bjorn & Alison will be presenting at a couple of careers fairs in the coming weeks.

I wanted to take this opportunity to point readers in the direction of their blogs in which they make very valueable comments on e-portfolios, social software & student engagement.

• Dennis’ e-portfolio
• Bjorn’s Elgg blog

Dennis, our e-portfolio work study student, participated in a BCCampus webcast on e-portfolios with Helen Barrett and others. Read his reflections…