Category — News

Day 3
The Exhibit Hall

I was able to spend a big chunk of time in the Exhibit Hall today. It is definitely an experience…one that must be seen. I’m glad that Brian took some photos that he posted to his blog. You really do need to see it to fully comprehend the giantness of it!

Clickers seem to be the big thing this year at the trade show. Lots of interest. And, of course, the Blackboard/WebCT merger is the big story both on the exhibit floor and the conference sessions.

I visited a few e-portfolio booths, including ePortaro and iWebfolio. our UBC folks will remember that iWebfolio has a great new release available. ePortaro also has a new version of their software out. Perhaps worth a look?

Day 2
EPAC Lives!!

I went to a couple of e-portfolio sessions today. One of them was co-facilitated by John Ittelson, who is one of the key drivers behind the EPAC (e-Portfolio Action Committee) community. It was great to reconnect with John and hear about the new EPAC initiative that will be starting up. I sat down for lunch with John, George Lorenzo and Marij Veugelers and Wijnand Aalderink, from the Netherlands, to talk about how EPAC could encompass an international community.

Stay tuned for more details on EPAC. It sounds like John, with the help of other EPAC members like Helen Chen (Stanford), will be resurrecting their monthly web chat confernces. There’s also talk of a Ready2Net Broadcast on e-portfolios in 2006.

Day 1
Arrival & Presentation

I co-facilitated one of Educause morning pre-conference seminars today with 2 of my learned UBC colleages, Brian Lamb & Michelle Chua. Our session, titled “Blogfolios: Using Social Software to Extend e-Portfolios”, went very well. We had a full and very engaged house. Brian and Michelle are so very knowledgeable about social software and narratives of online interaction, it was a pleasure to share the stage with them. It was interesting how the morning unfolded. Many of our participants raised questions very similiar to those raised in UBC’s e-portfolio pilots. Brian, did a nice job of summarizing their thoughts here.

We created a wiki to use as our presentation space, as well as a collaborative space for our attendees.

The folks in the room who had done some work with e-portfolios sang a refrain similar to the one sung in 8-part harmony at UBC…That the software tools do not yet adequately support a “folio thinking” approach. So, many of our attendees were quite keen on the idea of blogfolios. They liked the idea of a built-in reflective space for users. It’s a great idea in theory and one that Michelle very adeptly ran with when she manipulated the Movable Type interface into a blogfolio. We found though, that we just couldn’t support such an undertaking and the learning curve for many of those users who would want to customize their look and feel would be too steep.

And, btw, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the tool called ELGG, created by Dave Tosh and Ben Wermuller…You should! They’ve done quite an elegant job of merging the social software and e-portfolio worlds within one interface.

Bjorn Thomson and I hosted a webcast for the BCCampus community yesterday on e-portfolios. Our plan was to give an overview of this year’s e-portfolio pilots and plans at UBC, and to talk specifically about how some of our pilots are using reflection. But, the hour (actually it turned out to be almost an hour & a half) morphed into a very interesting discussion with the participants on the do’s and don’t’s of setting up an e-portfolio approach, the immaturity of the software market, and how to establish important policies (such as privacy and ownership).

It was a small group but many contexts were represented. Here’s what our attendance list looked like:

• someone from the e-portfolio tech industry (Chalk & Wire)
• a teacher from North Van SD
• a project manager from UVic’s Distant Ed program
• a manager from a downtown sales firm

It made for a very interesting conversation and these folks really drew out a lot of the issues we are grappling with in our pilots at UBC.

If you like to access the archive of the webcast, the following are 2 different routes:

• Through the BCCampus community
• Direct Link to Recording

School District #43 (Coquitlam) has created a public website targeted at students, their parents and the community. The goal is to provide information about the new grad program, including the portfolio requirement.

It’s a great overview of what will be expected of the students and, also, what kinds of portfolios we in the post-secondary world will be confronted with in 2007!

Graham Attwell will be presenting this paper at the Cambridge e-Portfolio event next month. He’s included a post on it on his ELGG blog as well as a link to the article itself.

Dave Tosh will open UBC’s TLT Series on October 12th with a talk titled, “Creation of a learning landscape: homogenizing weblogging, social networking.” Dave’s talk with not be a demo of the ELGG tool but will be a conceptual conversation around social software in education.

Here is the official event announcement and registration information…
Please join us on October 12, 2005, for the first Teaching and Learning Technology Seminar Series talk of the 2005-06 Academic Year. David Tosh, a U21 Visiting Scholar from the University of Edinburgh, will share with us his thoughts on “Creation of a learning landscape: homogenizing weblogging, social networking.”
Our thanks to the Faculty of Education (CMS) for hosting this talk.

Registration is limited, so please sign up early at:
http://www.tag.ubc.ca/programs/series-register.php?series_id=167&-nothing

Please feel free to forward this others who might be interested in this topic.

***********************
Details:
***********************
Title: Creation of a learning landscape: homogenizing weblogging, social networking and e-portfolios
Facilitator: David Tosh, U21 Visiting Scholar, University of Edinburgh Date & Time: October 12, 2005, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM

Location: Scarfe 310, hosted by the Faculty of Education (CMS)

Description:
Do we really know and understand the online environments our students are or could be expecting? What can we learn from the whole suite of web applications now available and being used by many entering higher education? This talk will explore the

potential of embracing these new technologies and discuss ways to integrate them into current systems creating a true online learning landscape.

About David Tosh:
Coming from an inter-disciplinary background, David obtained his first degree in geography, he then went on to gain a Masters in software development and is currently writing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh researching educational technologies

supervised by Professor Jeff Haywood. For the past four years David has worked as a web developer focusing on solutions for higher education. He is currently a U21 visiting scholar at UBC. As a staff member of University of Edinburgh, David was

responsible for the design and build of an e-portfolio being piloted across eight European countries and to provide insight into how the project would benefit from utilising the e-portfolio, practical considerations and possible future developments.

Other areas of research include working on a learning landscape model and exploring ways to homogenise everyday web technologies and practises to enhance the online learning experience.

Some of you may be interested in the upcoming online conference & workshop this group is putting on…

Collaborative Communities of Practice Online Conference, Fall 2005 CoPs as Learning Networks Co-Sponsored by iCohere, Inc. and CPsquare

September 27 and 28, 2005
http://www.icohere.com/CCOP2005

Sign up before September 19 to receive the Early Bird discount of 25% off.Join thought leaders like Etienne Wenger and Jack Merklein and a host of other experts on communities of practice for the third annual Collaborative Communities of Practice online conference, CoPs as Learning Networks. This online (virtual) conference looks at the best of practice in the present, while also exploring innovative, emerging practices that will be important to your future success.

Experts and practitioners from a variety of corporations, associations, educational institutions and government organizations will interact over this two-day online event. Participate at your own pace, without the inconvenience, expense or time required to attend a traditional conference. As part of a dynamic online community, you’ll experience the very collaborative technologies and practices the conference addresses!

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

“Learning for a Small Planet,” with Etienne Wenger, globally recognized thought leader and author of “Situated Learning” (where the term “community of practice” was coined)

“Blending Communities of Practice and Training,” with Jack Merklein, Director, Knowledge & Learning, Xerox Global Services, Inc.

“Collaboration at CSC: From Virtual Teams to Communities,” with Mark Neff, Senior Member of the Advisory Staff, Computer Sciences Corporation

“Building Association Learning Networks Using Social Media,” with Jeff De Cagna, Co-founder of Association Renewal LLC and Chief Strategist and Founder of Principled Innovation

“Going Statewide: Networking Learners,” with Sheryl Hansen, Director, Professional Development Programs, Ohio Learning Network

For more information, see http://www.icohere.com/CCOP2005

If you are interested in a deeper and broader introduction to learning about how collaborative communities of practice can benefit institutions of higher education, you might be interested in our four-week online workshop on the topic that starts September 27 – see http://www.icohere.com/HigherEdWshp/

TO KEEP INFORMED ABOUT FUTURE EVENTS, click: http://www.icohere.com/ccop2005/requestpop.htm

_______________________________________________
You have received this message because you previously requested to be kept informed about our online events. To unsubscribe permanently from this email distribution list, go to www.icohere.com/unsubscribe and submit your email address. _______________________________________________

The Collaborative Communities of Practice 2005 Conference is produced by:

iCohere, Inc.
1220 Oakland Boulevard, Suite 210
Walnut Creek, CA 94595
For questions and inquiries, contact us at conferences@icohere.com

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching upgraded the KEEP Toolkit to version 1.8 earlier this month.

What’s new in this version?

• Add Video Tool – upload video to snapshot easily.
• Template Gallery – choose from a list of templates created through collaborations with KEEP Toolkit’s partner institutions and programs.
• Advanced Stitching Customization – personalize stitched group with new advanced style and layout options.
• Gallery Tool – lets you create galleries of Snapshots by multiple authors quickly and easily.

My Experience…

Add Video Tool
Users can now easily include video files in their snapshot. Any user can upload multimedia files to their portfolio just like how they would upload an image file. The video will appear as a customized link on the snapshot. The user can also choose to upload a thumbnail image to serve as the link to the video clip.

Template Gallery
Users can now choose from a variety of pre-design templates using the template gallery. Templates are divided into three categories: SoTL Templates, Case Study Templates, and Blank Templates. Under each category, users can view a thumbnail image of a template and see an example of the template as well.

Advanced Stitching Customization
In the previous release (version 1.7), the KEEP Toolkit introduced a new feature which allows users to combine (or “stitch”, as the KEEP Toolkit named the feature) multiple snapshots into one snapshot. By stitching multiple snapshots together, users can easily combine various snapshots together into one. The KEEP Toolkit will automatically create a navigation menu to the stitched snapshots to offer easy access to different snapshots. However, there were very limited choices for the navigation menu in version 1.7: users could only choose from a horizontal or a vertical navigation menu. Version 1.8 pushes the stitching capability to another level by allowing users to customize the look and feel of the stitched snapshot. So I was able to personalize a stitched snapshot and make my navigation menu orange.

Gallery Tool
Aside from the previous addition of the Stitch Tool, the Gallery Tool is also added to this version. This tool “lets you create galleries of Snapshots by multiple authors quickly and easily. Select the Snapshots you wish to include in the gallery, and the KEEP Toolkit creates a single page with links to the Snapshots and contextual information. You also have the option of including automatically generated thumbnail images of the Snapshots in the gallery.” I created this gallery page to explore the new tool. I personally like the generate thumbnail features which allows me to include a thumbnail image for each of my snapshots.

Read a number of articles in the most recent Educause Review that focus on the student perspective on teaching & learning with technology.

Check out these article titles:

• If Higher Education Listened to Me…
• Five Points of Connectivity
• Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner
• “Engage Me or Enrage Me”: What Today’s Learners Demand

It’s great to see the student perspective moving to the fore. Some of the work done in UBC’s e-portfolio pilots have shown that students want to have their perspectives acknowledged, that they feel a greater investment in and engagement with their work if they feel the tools they are enabled to use truly represent their experience as students.