Category — News

Helen Barrett, who some of you may remember as the keynote speaker at our e-Portfolio Conference last November, is currently leading the REFLECT Initiative.

REFLECT is a research project to assess the impact of electronic portfolios on student learning, motivation and engagement in secondary schools. Helen Barrett has recently published a white paper titled, “Researching Electronic Portfolios and Learner Engagement” (available on the REFLECT website). In the paper she outlines the key reasons for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for students using e-portfolios.

Definitely a recommended read!

April will be a busy month here in Vancouver with a couple of conferences on the near horizon…

• BC Ed Online, April 20-22
• Lifia’s Pan American Working Forum on e-Portfolios , April 18-19

From my understanding, the Lifia event will focus primarily on e-portfolios and their various applications. BC Ed Online will focus on 5 main strands (e-Pedagogy, Online Content Development, Leadership in e-Learning, Professional Development, Innovations), within which e-portfolios and folio thinking will be well-represented.

I’ve been facilitating an online discussion on e-portfolios in the BCCampus Online Community site. It’s been pretty quiet in the forum thus far with only 2 of us posting. If you’d like to join in the discussion, share your thoughts, your experiences, do’s & don’t’s, login here:

http://community.bccampus.ca/

If you’re not currently a member, it’s easy to join. Just click through the “create an account” link and sign up.

Bob Bruce pointed me in the direction of this great article from the NLII.

Community of Practice Design Guide: A Step-by-Step Guide for Designing & Cultivating Communities of Practice in Higher Education

The article does a good job of outlining the lifecycle phases of community development & design. In my reading of the article, I’d say that our community is strong and growing and on the right track. I’d be interested in hearing what our members think about this.

Interesting also is how the article outlines why communities of practice are important, including:
Communities of Practice…

• connect people
• provide a shared context
• enable dialogue
• stimulate learning
• capture & diffuse existing knowledge
• introduce collaborative processes
• help people organize
• generate new knowledge

It’s a great resource and one of the most comprehensive and well-presented I’ve seen on the topic so far. Definitely recommended reading for our CoP. Thanks Bob!

Apologies for the late posting of this call for papers notice…Looks like an interesting conference, though. This message came from Helen Chen via the EPAC listserv.

We are delighted to invite you to our conference E-Portfolio & Talent Management, – the Nordic Experiences. The development of digital portfolios is of great importance for education, industry and government. The portfolio is more than a tool – it is a way of handling learning and competence challenges within a rapid changing world.

This is a great opportunity to meet researchers, people with practical experiences and explore new technical possibilities.

Call for Papers
We invite practitioners and researchers to sign up with papers for the various workshops.

All abstracts are to be submitted to the conference secretariat March 21, 2005.
Acceptance will be announced April 1, 2005.

Themes for papers:

* E-PORTFOLIO – An organisational challenge?
* E-PORTFOLIO – As a tool for professional development
* E-PORTFOLIO – Scaffolding learning in the school
* E-PORTFOLIO – New progress in beneficial software

Notification of acceptance of a full paper: End March.

The enclosed programme tells you the basic – a full programme will be available late march.

The conference takes place On May 30 – 31, 2005 in Odense, Denmark

For further information: contact Niels Henrik Helms nhh@ipfu.sdu.dk

We’re very pleased to have Dr. Kathleen Yancey coming to campus next week to give a talk and lead a workshop as part of UBC’s Teaching & Learning with Technology (TLT) series. The title of Dr. Yancey’s talk is “Outside the Course Box: Digital Portfolios as New Spaces for Learning.” Dr. Yancey is well-known for her work with e-portfolios and writing in higher education and is currently based at Clemson University.

To register for the talk and to see a full description, please visit TAG’s website.

Recently, a friend of my sister created a VCD photoalbum. The photoalbum consists of all the pictures they’ve taken over the past few years. It’s funny that the “photoalbum” sort of become a digital story to me when I was watching it. It is like a documentary of their friendship… and they even “reflected” that they improved their skills in posing…

She used a software called InAlbum (http://www.inalbum.com).

I tried out the tool and it’s very user friendly and easy to use. I managed to create a quick movie (with 3 pictures due to the limitations of the trial version of the software) in less than 10 minutes. Overall, the experience is fun. IT’s always good to do fun things at work 🙂

The software allows you to export the movie into different formats including: Flash, VCD/AVI, Wallpaper, Screensaver, or even in print.

Here’s my first try of digital storytelling:

This is cross-posted on the Alison’s Blog as well.

EPAC will host it’s next chat this Thursday, March 3 @ 10AM PST.

This chat session will focus on the next EPAC face-to-face event, which will take place at AAHE’s National Conference on Higher Education (March 17-20 in Atlanta, GA). The group will be meeting on Friday, March 18th, from 3 to 5 p.m

I have found these chat sessions a very valueable way to connect with colleagues at other institutions and, also, to hear about others’ experiences. I highly recommend them!

Some of the topics that will be discussed (from Helen Chen’s post to the EPAC listserv) at both the F2F event and in the chat include:

• Eportfolio case study/design review: For as much as we talk about eportfolios, there’s nothing more useful than to actually “see” an example. This would be an opportunity for eportfolio programs to spend a few minutes describing their eportfolio programs and share an example or two. But instead of just being a “dog and pony show,” we would invite programs to pose a question or issue for which they would like to have some input or feedback on. This issue could be related to the technical design of the eportfolio, implementation issues such as student motivation or faculty support, etc.
• Best practices: Building upon the above, there is always strong interest in eportfolio tools — who’s using what, what are the advantages/disadvantages — as well as best practices for implementation into the curriculum. Again, we would invite programs to share examples and questions perhaps in discipline-specific small groups.
• Resource sharing: What eportfolio resources have been especially useful to you? Please bring a resource to share and discuss with the group.
• Eportfolio Assessment: As a group, we will review a ePortfolio according to a rubric or we can try to design our own, considering questions addressing, for example, the context, reflection, and evidence of learning.
• Pre-conference reading/resource sharing: Here’s an opportunity for us to explore a topic in greater depth such as digital storytelling.

* See extended entry for directions on joining the chat.Directions for joining the chat (with thanks to the Practical Assessment
COP for the instructions):

1. Enter the following address into your browser:
http://webcenter.aahe.org/chef/portal. This takes you to the AAHE WebCenter.

2. If you do not have a Username and Password, click on Create New Account
and fill in the information requested. (Record your Username and Password
for future use.) If you do have a Username and Password, enter them in
the spaces provided and then click on the Login button.

3. You are now in an area called My Workspace. If you have already joined
the EPAC COP, the name will show up at the top of your screen next to the
label My Workspace. If you don’t see EPAC with a hot link, the system
doesn’t recognize you as a member. No problem. Just go to Membership on the
left side. Up pops several groups you can join. Scroll down to find the
EPAC COP, check the box, go to the bottom of the screen, and click Join.
From now on when you enter My Workspace, you will have a EPAC Tab at the
top of your screen. Click on it.

4. Click on Chat in the menu on the left.

5. In the Box called ?Main Chat Room? click on Click to join now.

6. Say hello and away we go!

I attended the Northern Voice: Canadian Blogging Conference on February 19.

It was a very different experience. This conference was run under a more casual setting. Some of the attendees just blogged along as it goes. Others just took pictures and posted it on thier blog or flickr-ed it.

Volunteers and speakers at the conference also received a very pretty “Bloggable” T-shirt, too.My notes at the talks can be found here:
Keynote: Tim Bray – What’s in That Soup Pot?
Robert Scoble

This is a document we shared at our last Community of Practice Meeting on February 23rd. The table summarizes scope of the various e-Portfolio pilot projects at UBC.

File: project_summary.pdf