tech-ed collisions

ePortfolios for Lifelong Learning

Here's a presentation I did some months ago on ePortfolios for Lifelong Learning.  I lost this presentation and have just found it so I am really just making sure it is 'more' available or discoverable to me.  There are better ways of doing it but anyway....

 

ePortoflios for lifelong learning

View more presentations from jerryl.

 

 

Filed under  //   eportfolio  
Posted July 26, 2010

ePortfolio trademarked?

Not sure what this means but it seems that the University of Iowa has trademarked the term ePortfolio™. On their website they claim to have built the first eportfolio in 1996. I don't know if that is true or not but the following statement is certain to raise some interest and concern:

The College of Education designed the first ePortfolio™ in 1996 and The University of Iowa now holds the trademarks for the following terms: ePortfolio™, Digital BackPack™ and Cyber ToolBox™.
Now, as you can see the term ePortfolio in this instance has an italic red 'e' at the front. I am not sure if this is part of the trademark's definition or they have trademarked the word eportfolio. Some more information would be useful. At first glance, and without any further information, it seems quite worrying to me that someone would be doing this. The term digital backpack is one that I have heard quite often too. The other trademarked terms there do not seem to have colours/italics etc associated with them. ePortfolio is a generic term that is often used to describe an array of functionality and applications. A lot of time and effort has been spent in this area and I am wondering what the implications of this are for those who rely very heavily on the term. I wonder if this will finally stop me switching between the spellings eportfolio, ePortfolio and e-portfolio?

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Can our workforce compete in an increasingly digital world?

Australia prides itself on being an advanced society with a sophisticated information economy but how true is that and how well equipped are our citizens to excel in a 21st century characterised by rapidly changing technologies? The Digital Education Revolution (DER) is an unprecedented program aimed at improving access to information and communications technologies (ICT) in schools across the country to help raise digital literacy in our school children. This is seen as essential for our future. Children however aren’t the only members of our society to be impacted by these rapid changes and there are other initiatives in place to support learners in VET and Higher Education. But what about the rest of us? We are all lifelong learners, all striving to survive and hopefully succeed in what are turning out to be extremely challenging times. Being ‘digitally literate’ is essential to that survival. Those who understand and can exploit technologies will do far better than those who do not. Having a ‘digital presence’ that you can manage and exploit will no doubt be very helpful. It is hard to conceive of an advanced society in just a few years time where its citizens do not have a digital presence of their own. Eportfolios will play an important role in establishing such a presence. Many institutions offer eportfolio services for their students that assist them throughout their time with the institution and transitioning out to further education or employment. However, over a lifetime we make many such transitions and very few eportfolios readily support this lifelong process. Globally, this challenge and also the opportunities that it presents are starting to be recognised. In parts of the USA, Europe and the United Kingdom we are starting to see an increase in regional eportfolios (to support lifelong learners/workers) and also industry specific eportfolios to support professions such as nursing, architecture etc. Given the changing nature of work, industry specific eportfolios might not really be considered lifelong as many people will work in a number of vocations/professions over their lifetime. We may change the regions that we live in too but generally we still retain citizenship of a given country. What is Australia doing to support lifelong learners, those already in the workforce/trying to re-enter the workforce, and those who are not part of formal learning environments, in developing and managing their own ‘digital presence’ so that they can plan and work towards their aspirations and make meaningful contributions towards society as we transform into a (largely) digital world?

Filed under  //   eportfolio  
Posted July 8, 2009

Reflection - is eportfolio's biggest asset also its biggest problem?

ePortfolio 2009 has run its course and participants from all over the world will start heading home hopefully filled with ideas and enthusiasm for moving the eportfolio agenda forward. During the conference Dr. Helen Barrett mentioned that reflection was at the heart and soul of eportfolios and this was a recurring theme throughout the various workshops and presentations that I attended. Reflection is a core process in many types of eportfolios and it is through this process that we come to learn much about ourselves, what we have achieved, what we are capable of, what our hopes and aspirations are. Another recurring theme during the conference was the personalisation of learning and there was much debate on that. As one keynote speaker noted, 'learning always has been and always will be a personal experience...it is the organisation of education that is impersonal. The impediment has been economic scalability. Technology is making personalisation achievable at scale.' Many at the conference also noted the problem of definition for eportfolios 'ask ten people and you will get ten different answers'. It was interesting to see in the presentation from the University of London's Computer Centre that they actually offer two eportfolios in the online environment that they provide to their students. One is for assessment and the other is for their learning experience - it is through this one that students are able to reflect. Speaking of reflection, the closing session offered an opportunity to reflect on the conference, on eportfolios in general and to ponder the future for eportfolios. While there are many outstanding implementations of eportfolios in educational institutions of all sorts around the world and an increasing number of regional or industry specific eportfolios emerging, eportfolio as a concept remains a difficult sell for many. In the business of education, they are often not seen as essential as say a student record system, LMS or accounting system for example. What value do they offer? Those at the conference obviously have a keen interest in eportfolios and understand the profound impact that reflection can have in learning but is this view more widely supported? Do eportfolios really make such a difference and if so, why aren't they more widely adopted or appreciated? Eportfolios seem to have gained quite some ground in Europe, the USA, New Zealand and arguably Australia but what about the rest of the world? There would seem to be many more very technologically advanced economies and societies that don't seem to be pushing the eportfolio agenda much at all when compared with these regions. Is it that reflection is not valued as highly in areas where eportfolios have not been adopted with the same vigor? In regional or industry specific eportfolios, is the takeup and continued use of eportfolios as high as their providers originally envisioned? If not, what are the reasons preventing such use? What value do users see in them? If they see no significant benefits they are hardly likely to use them. Even in institutional eportfolios strong motivations need to be provided. Do users understand or value reflection? Given a blank page on which to reflect how and where do you start? Are your thoughts/reflections going to remain private once they are in the system and does this matter to you? So... is the very thing that makes eportfolios potentially so beneficial also a real barrier to their widespread adoption (something to reflect upon)?

Filed under  //   eportfolio  
Posted June 26, 2009

Is Google my ePortfolio? (revisited)

Quite some time ago (way back in June 2007) I posed this question in a post and while the intent was never really to answer the question with a yes, but to highlight some of the features that are important to eportfolios and their owners, it's interesting to see that in some sort of manner, Google is now offering functionality that eportfolio owners would find useful. It has been possible to create a Google site for quite some time and call it your eportfolio (and many people do so very successfully). Just recently however, Google has released Google Profiles allowing you to create your own profile on Google and have it appear in Google search results. More information on the service can be found at the Google blog. I guess what's interesting or useful about this is that it does give you some control over what is displayed about you in a Google search results page when someone searches your name so you at least get one search result linking to something that you have created and hopefully it has a pretty good page rank. I haven't seen this yet - still working on my profile. So... one of the first things I went to do was to test out where I appear if I do a search. It seems to get a public profile you need to supply Google with quite a bit of information. A name, location and company is not enough. I got a message telling me that to have a public profile I need to supply more information. So I added a bit to the 'short bio' area and created a link to my work blog. For the moment this was all I wanted to be public in my profile. Still, this wasn't enough to satisfy Google. According to the blurb about Google profiles, it:

allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are
and
You have control over what others see
What's not obvious is just how much information I have to add so that I can 'control' it. At the very least it would be nice to know what are the 'mandatory' bits of information I have to hand over or even what percentage complete I am (eg 70% would at least let me know that I am getting close to the threshold that they want). One interesting aspect of creating my profile is that Google had selected an image of me from somewhere and gave me the option of changing it. The interesting part of this is that while the image was me, it was not one (as far as I can tell, and I am pretty confident in that) that I use on my Google account. It seems to have sourced it from somewhere else and I would really like to know where. I know of three social networks where I use this image and none of them have anything to do with Google. This begs the question of permissions and rights and what exactly I have signed up to in all those networks. Those terms and conditions are far to voluminous and complex for most users to really understand but that's a whole other issue.

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Filed under  //   Google   eportfolio  

reflection on AeP2

I have just attended the Australian ePortfolio Symposium 2009 and would like to acknowledge all the hard work and effort put in by the team at QUT who made this such a worthwhile event. On the Sunday I was privileged to be able to participate in a panel session on 'Technical issues and opportunities in eportfolio practice'. Given my interest in this area, the big take away for me was the recognition of the importance of the work by various organisations trying to map out the eportfolio space and create standards for us. Specifications development is hard work when addressing topics like eportfolios that have many layers of complexity. As important as this work is though, more needs to be done in enabling end-user communities exploit their eportfolios as they see fit in a Web 2.0 oriented world. On to the main conference and there was no shortage of really interesting presentations. The scene was really set by a great presentation from Marij Veugelers and Wijnand Aalderlink on the work they have been doing for coming up ten years on the development of sustainable communities of practice. One of the great lines from their very informative and entertaining presentation 'things change at the speed of education'. Without going into detail on each of the presentations given, there was some great coverage on updating us with a number of initiatives in both the Higher Ed and VET sectors and also some really interesting work from international speakers from the UK, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The UK and Netherlands seem to be at the front when it comes to eportfolios and we can learn a lot from their systemic, regional and local approaches. As the organisers of this conference said, learning from these efforts will enable us to fast-track our own progress in this area and hopefully we will have something to contribute back to the international community as well as each other. Developing communities of practice is going to be pivotal in this work. The highlight of the conference for me was listening to the inspirational work that Ruth Wallace is doing with disengaged learners on identity. I look forward to seeing presentations from the conference online. It was great to see that there were some Twitterers at the event and you can probably get some interesting snippets using the #AeP2 hashtag. Cheers, Jerry

Filed under  //   eportfolio  

Another twist in defining eportfolios

Great post from Serge Ravet on the EIfEL team blog. After recently commenting on the confusion I feel in this area it's nice to see an expert in the field posting on the subject. Some really interesting ideas are expressed in the post. As mentioned in previous posts I am exploring the notion that everyone (that wants one) should have an eportfolio and the article seems to suggest that perhaps I should be thinking of that in terms of an 'e-self' or digital identity. I think I understand the concept being put forward here and it is an interesting one. The problem I think with this is that it is really difficult to come up with a term that is not value-laden with other meanings.

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Confusion reigns with ePortfolios

If I was to do a word association test on eportfolios the first word that I would think of is confusion. Almost every substantive article I have read on eportfolios starts out with the author(s) defining what they mean by eportfolios. I have had to do this myself and can relate to this need. Eportfolios mean so many different things to people. And so it continues... a great article appeared the other day on the Campus Technology website entitled "The Portfolio Enigma in a Time of Ephemera". The article starts out describing just how confusing the eportfolio landscape is and then quickly moves into the problem area of assessment and how that is adding to the confusion. The author (Trent Batson) then quite nicely defines eportfolio as a learning approach rather than a technology. I think there is quite a lot of merit in this statement, at least in terms of many types of eportfolios. For me, eportfolios generally consist of a number of technology services that are combined in some way to support and demonstrate aspects of learning. My main interest in eportfolios is how they can be used to support and enhance lifelong learning. In this sense, I am especially interested in how eportfolio services can support those of us who are not part of any formal educational organisation. To some extent this alters how assessment is viewed (assessment takes on a different perspective at least). However, although I have thought for some time that 'eportfolio for all' would be a good thing (am desperately trying to find out how successful various regional implementations actually have been), I am struggling with how to maximise the benefits obtainable from the idea. If eportfolio is a process, or approach, any sort of regional 'eportfolio for all' will face some significant challenges. Firstly, getting it noticed at all is challenging enough, then creating a compelling enough message to be seen as something useful would be an interesting challenge in itself. Finally, how do you ensure that the 'eportfolio process' is well understood by all. The service will have to be extremely well designed, simple and intuitive to use. The article then goes on to an interesting discussion on the temporal value of eportfolio artefacts and challenges how we construct knowledge and then how to manage it over time. Interesting views if you are considering eportfolios of your own.

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on the future of ePortfolio - Roundtable

Found this interesting discussion on ePortfolios courtesy of a Stephen Downes post. It's a transcript of a panel discussion from a conference held by LaGuardia Community College in April last year but has just appeared on the Academic Commons site. Over quite a period of time now we have been researching the application of ePortfolios and ePortfolio policy from a number of perspectives and it is interesting to see just how often LaGuardia appears on our 'horizon' in relation to ePortfolios. Anyway, back to the discussion. It starts off with the age old tension between student centred ePortfolios and institution centred ePortfolios or as Helen Barrett, one of the panel members refers to it:

the Assessment OF Learning on one hand, and on the other: assessment FOR learning, assessment AS learning.
The conversation moves on to discussing how LaGuardia went about implementing their approach to ePortfolios and as one of the panel members says:
We did a lot of planning before we started talking about systems. So the systems supported the process, as opposed to buying a system and then tweaking the process to fit. And we were lucky. We had so much support from the administration. And faculty development was key. We got buy-in from all the stakeholders, from the administration to the faculty to the students. Each had its own level of challenge, of course. But without all of this falling into place, I don’t think it would have blossomed the way it has.
It seems, from the discussion, that LaGuardia is doing very well in balancing the needs of the institution with the needs of the learner. Panel members then start talking about transformation and if you like 'light bulb moments' they had along the way on their own ePortfolio journeys. There seems to be general agreement on a change in the educational paradigm, where educators are learning along with their students and what this means in their approach to teaching. The panel then moves onto lifelong and lifewide learning, which is one of my areas of interest and Helen Barrett throws out the challenge of what can you do for students after they graduate (in relation to ePortfolios in a lifelong, lifewide context). Now this interests me because many, many of us are lifelong learners with no current affiliations with educational institutions or have multiple (e)portfolios scattered all over the place. I have been wrestling with the benefits that systemic or regional ePortfolios may or may not provide for all of us. Provision of ePortfolio tools/services such as that which can be provided through a great many Web 2.0 type services are simply not enough. Some people will be able to exploit and benefit from such services far better than others. Importantly, it seems to me (from the transcript of the panel discussion at least) is that what LaGuardia and others like them may be doing is providing their students with the skills and competencies to benefit from the 'things' that ePortfolios provide. This is a real challenge for regional implementations that are trying to reach out to members of the public that have no connection to an environment where they can learn about things like reflection. I have rambled on a number of times about ePortfolios and mentioned a number of regional implementations from around the world and it is hard to gauge what, if any, success they are having. I wonder what strategies they are employing to help their populations develop the skills necessary to really take advantage of the services they are offering. Anyway, this is getting seriously sidetracked from the panel discussion. It starts to get really interesting then as panel members start to examine the narrative/story telling aspect of ePortfolios and what that means for assessment. It seems that it is here that panel members become really passionate about what they are saying. At about this time it seems that the panel opens up for questions from the audience which seem to be focussed on implications for faculty and how to get buy in from the faculty. All in all, an interesting discussion touching on some of the big challenges and potentials for ePortfolios.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio  

I blog, therefore I am

Or perhaps that should be 'I think, therefore I (can) blog'. Not perhaps an accurate use of Descartes' method, but it would be interesting to see what great philosophers of earlier times would have made of 'digital identities' or the 'digital self'. Stephen Downes posts a really interesting article 'My digital identity' and relates aspects of identity to e-portfolios. I am keenly interested in e-portfolio services that support life-long learners so institutional e-portfolios, while often serving institutions really well, fall short of my personal ideals from a life-long perspective. Which is why I love to see thoughts such as the following 'borrowed from Downes, who borrows some comments from Helen Barrett, who cites Gary Brown' when he says:

'one aspect of e-portfolio technology is a shift from the idea that a learner takes a course from a particular institution or that a learner has a particular source or a particular authority that is teaching them or representing the state of the world to them. (Grush, 2008) More and more learning is happening online and, according to Brown, 50 percent of students are studying from multiple sources, multiple institutions, often at the same time. So the very idea that any system like a learning management system or an e-portfolio system as something that is created and managed by the institution seems in a way seriously misguided. If people are taking things from multiple institutions, then if we have an application that is a single point of reference for their learning, then that application must be of multi-institutional'.
I consider myself to be an avid learner yet have no current affiliations with any educational institution. Learning takes place formally, informally within and across multiple institutions and outside of any institutions and my e-portfolio should support this. We use Web 2.0 services to attempt to address this limitation on e-portfolio systems but is there anything else the education system can do to better support our needs? While I am a great fan of Web 2.0 services many of them are commercial operations and part of my digital self only exists at the whims of commercial operators and often short-lived services/fads. What happens when Flickr gets taken over by Yahoo! who may or may not get taken over by an even bigger company? For a start, part of my digital self may get dumped, lost, issued with new identities etc. I have no control over it. The article by Stephen Downes goes on to look at how we traditionally try to establish or assert our identities using the principles of:
  • something I know (eg password)
  • something I have (eg card key)
  • something I am (eg fingerprint)
Many authentication systems rely on having at least two of these in place. The article points out flaws in this approach and then goes on to discuss trust and motivation. It suggests that we are thinking of trust in the wrong way. Rather than proving our identity to someone else's satisfaction, we should be asking whether we can 'trust the resource provider'. There is then an introduction to the concepts behind OpenID, a service that helps or seeks to establish a 'single identity' for you across the Web.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio