Category — News

Earlier in June, I co-facilitated a day-long session on e-portfolios with Dave Tosh. Some of you likely remember Dave as the researcher from the University of Edinburgh we’ve been collaborating with on e-portfolio research this past year. Our session was titled “Through the Looking Glass: e-Portfolios for Reflection.” It covered many different angles, inlcuding:

• an overview of how e-portfolios are being used worldwide
• a presentation on UBC’s approach
• a summary of Dave’s research findings to date
• discussion topics (challenges, benefits, goals for use)
• reflective writing exercises
• demos of a number of software tools
• hands-on time to build an e-portfolio

Some of the issues raised in one of the discussion periods sounded very similar to those raised here at UBC by faculty & students. Here’s a sampling:

• portability/interoperability
• how do you assess them?
• what flexibilities do e-portfolios give us?
• we need to be convinced of the benefits before we’ll start using them.
• longevity
• how do they integrate with online communities
• what tools are out there and how do we access them?
• we don’t have support at our college? how & where do we start?

Dave and I have both posted our ppts from the session.

• Dave’s presentation
• Kele’s presentation

It was a very busy day, full of interesting discussions with and interesting questions from our participants. One of our participants, Jeremy Hiebert, has posted his impressions of the day to his blog.

On the second day, I attended 2 great sessions…one on authentic assessment online and the other, on weblogs & wikis, lead by our very own Brian Lamb and Jeff Miller. Brian & Jeff’s session was very entertaining and delivered with a lot of passion for the topic. It was a packed room and everyone was very engaged. Impressive for the last session on Friday afternoon!

Leah Macfadyen, a Research Associate in UBC’s Faculty of Science, Skylight (Science Centre for Learning and Teaching) sent in this reflection from the Innovative Teaching Forum at SFU last month. There’s lots of good info on how the some of the conference content relates directly to our UBC efforts with e-portfolios and promoting reflective learning. Thanks Leah!

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From May 18th – 20th, Joanne Nakonechny and I (both of Skylight,
Faculty of Science) attended the ‘7th Annual Symposium on Innovative
Teaching’, at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Campus
(http://www.sfu.ca/symposium2005/)

SFU has approved sweeping changes to its degree requirements that will
apply to all undergraduates admitted for September 2006 and thereafter.
In part, these requirements ask students to complete at least six credits each of courses identified “writing intensive”.

This year’s Symposium therefore had a strong focus on the concept of
“writing intensive learning” – in theory and in practical application –
paralleling the exciting efforts of faculty members across the disciplines to develop writing-intensive courses. Keynote speakers included Chris Anson from North Carolina State University, and Daniel Shapiro of California State University, Monterey Bay. Both of these Universities have made significant strides in consciously incorporating more writing into teaching and learning across the disciplines.

For me, the key take-home message from this Symposium – and one that is
also relevant for ePortfolios work – is the understanding of writing as a tool that can promote learning, thinking and critical analysis – not simply a tool for assessment. In other words, writing has value as a formative as well as summative process for students (and not just in traditional ‘writing intensive’ disciplines, either).

Of particular interest was a session entitled “Timing and wording of low-stakes writing: Making it work to help students’ learning and thinking”, led by Kathryn Alexander of SFU’s Centre for Writing Intensive Learning (CWIL).

Kathryn characterizes ‘low stakes writing’ as short pieces of exploratory writing that “can provide the intellectual building blocks and scaffolding for formal writing assignments”. Low-stakes writing can be used in class, may typically be unassessed (or students may be assessed for participation rather than quality) and helps students develop questions, summarize ideas and develop new ones – all while developing a more natural writing praxis. She quotes Peter Elbow
(1997), who wrote:

“The goal of low stakes assignments is not so much to produce excellent
pieces of writing, as to get students to think, learn and undertsand more of the course material. Low stakes writing is often informal and tends to be graded informally. In a sense, we get to throw away the low stakes writing but keep the neural changes it produced in students heads’.

It seems to me that this perspective directly supports the reflective practice wishes in ePortfolio teaching and learning projects.

SFU’s CWIL site (http://www.sfu.ca/cwil/) is worth a visit – they regularly run workshops and other events in this area.

Other useful references and resources include:

Bean, J. C. (2001) Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating
Writing, Critical Thinking and Active Learning in the Classroom. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Elbow, P. (1997). High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and
responding to Writing, In M.D. Sorcinelli & P. Elbow (Eds) Assigning
and Responding to Writing in the Disciplines. New Directions for
Teaching and learning. No. 69, Spring 1997. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Leah

News from the Open Source Portfolio Initiative website:

OSP 2.0 Released!: “Just in time for Community Source Week in Baltimore this week, we have completed testing and posted the 2.0 release under downloads.

(Via The Open Source Portfolio Initiative.)

During the first week of June, Alison & I attended the orientation for new students entering UBC’s Transition Program. The core mission of this program is as follows (from the website):

The University Transition Program is designed to support academic excellence while promoting social and emotional development of academically gifted adolescents who are committed to the goal of early entrance to university. Graduates of the two-year program achieve early entrance to UBC by writing the four provincial examinations required by the faculty of their choice

e-Portfolios are one of the methods being used to help students acheive their goals within the program. One of the orientation activities was to have students from last year’s cohort present their e-portfolios to the new students. We saw 4 students present their e-portfolios. The students used a wide-range of software tools to build their e-portfolios…KEEP Toolkit to Dreamweaver to LiveJournal. It was exciting to see the students so engaged in the process and talking about portfolios and reflection with such enthusiasm. This coming year will see all students in the program building e-portfolios. I believe they’ll be using ELGG as a tool.

After discussion with others, I start to wonder if calling TiddlyWiki a wiki system could be a little misleading…

Calling it a wiki somehow implies that anyone could modify/update the page; in the e-portfolio world, it would probably be the ability to provide feedback and comments directly on the page.

However, TiddlyWiki doesn’t really provide this functionality. In other words, it’s more of a personal wiki system in that the owner herself can edit the page like one would edit a wiki.

Why? and What’s the mechanism behind this? Since there is no database behind to drive the wiki, TiddlyWiki actually needs to create new files to save the updated page. It first creates a backup file that stores the original page. Then it updates the file and saves it in the system. To do this, the user will need to have permission to create and write files on the server.

Thus, the best way to have TiddlyWiki working would be editing and saving the files on the user’s computer, which she would have permission to save and create files.

I think TiddlyWiki might work in the WebCT environment because it saves the students from using the HTML editor (which could be a pain to load up the Java Applet), or having to do even a little bit of HTML editing (e.g. changing the title of the html file). Thus, instead of having students to edit the e-portfolio template (a simple HTML file) inside WebCT, we can actually ask them to use TiddlyWiki and make all the changes on their computers using simple wiki formatting rules. The final step would be uploading the wiki page and other evidences (e.g. word documents, images, movie clips, etc…)

To provide feedback or comments, instructors and students will still need to use the native tools like Mail and Discussion Board in WebCT.

Other features of TigglyWiki which I like are:

• its ability to generate an RSS feed
• custom CSS style sheet
• wiki on a thumb drive (think about e-portfolio on a thumb drive… cool)
• and there are other adaptations like TiddlyTagWiki and TagglyWiki that feature tagging

This is cross-posted on the alison’s blog.

Catching on the an earlier discussion with Brian and the Careers@UBC group on using a wiki tool to create an e-portfolio sounds like a logical approach for students with less technical skills or for students who just don’t wish to spend the extra time to learn about yet another system.

So recently I found out a wiki tool called TiddlyWiki, a self-contained (one html file), easy-to-edit wiki tool. The good thing about the system is that it does not require any server side support (no database, no php and no perl scripting). The entire tool is contained in one html file using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Which makes the wiki very portable, and can be run in any modern browser. As suggested on the website, I also installed it and PortableFirefox on my USB thumb drive. This would make updating/showing the e-portfolio very portable as well. However, to save the changes of the wiki page, it requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, plus save capabilities (write access) to a server. Hence, I envision end-users working on a local copy of the wiki file in a folder on their computers. Then upload the final version and all associated files (contents in the folder) to a server.

Since the wiki system uses simple formatting syntax, students could easily build their wiki page (including the navigation) by following the wiki’s formatting rules.

With the experience from the last project using WebCT’s student presentation tool as an e-Portfolio tool, TiddlyWiki could be an easy alternative. Hopefully it could minimizes the issues with using the Java-based WYSIWYG HTML editor, and other frustration with HTML.

Here’s an example of my TiddlyWiki e-Portfolio

This is cross-posted on the alison’s blog.

I came across an article in the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning that I thought members of our e-portfolio community might find useful.

The article, by Seung-hee Lee (Indiana University), is Design and Analysis of Reflection-Supporting Tools in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

One thing I like about this paper is that argues that reflection is not a solitary activity. To me, the implication of this from a software side is that both “individual” and collaborative/social tools should be included in an e-portfolio system in order to provide a more meaningful experience for e-portfolio owners, and enable deeper reflection.

My personal experience with this harkens back to the launch of our e-portfolio community of practice in early 2003. I think that was the first time I became conscious of the social aspect of reflection. The activities that Barbara Cambridge engaged us in – cubing, dialogue journaling – underscored the very notion that creating an e-portfolio is a social activity. We learn and hone our understanding of our learning and ourselves by interacting with others.

So, … about the article:
This short article provides a concise overview, theoretical foundation and design considerations for online environments that support reflection, particularly collaborative reflection. Figure 1 is a good snapshot of the concepts covered; it links the design principles (facilitating social awareness, thinking visualization, learner discourse, and group meta-cognition) to the components of an environment that support collaborative reflection. The four components include:

– Group workplace
– Reflection journal
– Thinking sharing board
– Reflective scaffolding

The research carried out by the author spanned three universities. Learners were placed into three groups: 1) learners that used collaborative reflection-supporting tools; 2) learners that used individual reflection-supporting tools; and 3) learners that used no reflection support.

The author concludes:

“…the findings show that reflection-supporting tools have positive impacts on the group performance as well as the perception of learners on collaborative learning. Also, the reflection-supporting tools in CSCL environments were effective and user friendly for group learning.”

The observations associated with each of the components provide more context; I believe that members of our community of practice will find pearls of wisdom for their specific contexts and purposes.

What was my pearl?
I took to heart the observations related to the comfort level of learners with the tools. From the preface to the discussion of the components:

“At the beginning, learners with little online group learning opportunities seemed to have psychological and cognitive overload to collaborating online, but they perceived online learning positively as time gradually went by.”

A few thoughts. ..

Students are adjusting to number of elements when they go online, with changes in environment and expectations related to (increased) personal responsibility high on the list.

Collaboration in and of itself is most likely unfamiliar to many, and adding a number of new tools that support activities carried out in new ways….

It’s not surprising that is daunting!

The comforting part is the part of the quote that says..

“..as time gradually went by”.

Students did and do adjust, if they are supported through that process, particularly if the instructor provides concrete linkages between the activities and the students’ success in the course.

This requires that we make conscious decisions about when and why we employ tools, and ensure that they support the objectives of the course.

To me this means a need to think about tools within the context of a program – not just a course (module).

This leads me to a question about the role of curriculum committees and learning technology decisions. For online programs, I believe the technology decisions are integrated within the discussions. What about “traditional” curriculum committees? Do they also discuss the role of learning technology in the overall curriculum? Is “learner support” a component of this?

Be interesting to know more about that — sounds like something I need to investigate!

Id love to hear from our Community of Practice members on this!

This message came through the Educause listserv…

NLII Becomes EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative

We are pleased to announce that the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) has completed its transition to the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI).

Under the leadership of EDUCAUSE Vice President Diana G. Oblinger, the strategic planning team and our current NLII members have reframed the organization’s mission to be advancing learning through IT innovation. ELI will be focused on learners and
successful learning-a unique emphasis in the teaching and learning with technology community. We will explore three areas in particular: learners, learning principles and practices, and learning technologies.

7 things your should know about…

ELI is taking the best of NLII programs and services and building on them, offering extensive online resources; member-only Web seminars; a new briefing series called “7 Things You Should Know About…”

OSPI posted the instruction for tomorrow’s load test on their website. I will simply copy and paste it here:

OSP 2.0 Load Test Instructions
(Friday May 13, 2005 2:00

Found on the OSPI website today:

… is planning a load test of the OSP 2.0 software on Friday 5/13 at 2pm Eastern time. No prior experience with OSP 2 is necessary. In the next couple of days we’ll be posting instructions for participation.

Here’s a link to the post.

I will post updates as soon as more information is released.