no more band-aids
My ePortfolio is something of a constant and endless work in progress. It’s a subset of my blog posts, photos I’ve posted to Flickr.
My ePortfolio is something of a constant and endless work in progress. It’s a subset of my blog posts, photos I’ve posted to Flickr.
The Teaching & Learning Centre has been involved with some ePortfolio-related projects, most notably a pilot project conducted by the Faculty of Education's Master of Teaching Program. This pilot was designed to evaluate the technical and pedagogical implications of an online ePortfolio, as well as a community website, as part of the MT curriculum.
We have also been fortunate to play a lead role in the development of the Pachyderm interactive presentation authoring software, which was used to create the published ePortfolios in the MT pilot project.
Some of the issues regarding the description, creation, and use of portfolios are outlined below…
The Teaching & Learning Centre has been involved with some ePortfolio-related projects, most notably a pilot project conducted by the Faculty of Education's Master of Teaching Program. This pilot was designed to evaluate the technical and pedagogical implications of an online ePortfolio, as well as a community website, as part of the MT curriculum.
We have also been fortunate to play a lead role in the development of the Pachyderm interactive presentation authoring software, which was used to create the published ePortfolios in the MT pilot project.
Some of the issues regarding the description, creation, and use of portfolios are outlined below…
In the process of getting ready for our session on Thursday, I started to put together an ePortfolio for myself using Pachyderm. I’ve done several “sample” ePortfolios before, but not a full-blown attempt. Something about eating your own dogfood… So I gave it a shot. It’s still pretty rough, and the “Projects” and “About this…” sections are still empty, but it’s a start. I need to flesh out most of the pages as well, as I’ve currently just got command+c command+v content migration from blog posts and wiki pages.
I found the process difficult – not because of the software (Pachyderm actually worked really well for this, aside from one minor bug I found) but because I kept thinking “But, that’s what my BLOG is for!” – many of the pages are just vectors for links to pages on my blog.
In the process of getting ready for our session on Thursday, I started to put together an ePortfolio for myself using Pachyderm. I’ve done several “sample” ePortfolios before, but not a full-blown attempt. Something about eating your own dogfood… So I gave it a shot. It’s still pretty rough, and the “Projects” and “About this…” sections are still empty, but it’s a start. I need to flesh out most of the pages as well, as I’ve currently just got command+c command+v content migration from blog posts and wiki pages.
I found the process difficult – not because of the software (Pachyderm actually worked really well for this, aside from one minor bug I found) but because I kept thinking “But, that’s what my BLOG is for!” – many of the pages are just vectors for links to pages on my blog.
Patti and I are putting a wiki page together to support our ePortfolio session at Interface 2006 in Lethbridge this Thursday. The session is nominally about the ePortfolio pilot project we’re doing with our Faculty of Education, but I’m hoping we’ll get to have a discussion about ePortfolios (HATE that “e”) in general.
I just added some “What is a ePortfolio?” content, and it feels like it could turn into a thesis pretty darned quickly. Not sure I want to go down that road, though…
The wiki page is really rough at the moment, and woefully incomplete, but we’ll be polishing it up over the next day or so.
Patti and I are putting a wiki page together to support our ePortfolio session at Interface 2006 in Lethbridge this Thursday. The session is nominally about the ePortfolio pilot project we’re doing with our Faculty of Education, but I’m hoping we’ll get to have a discussion about ePortfolios (HATE that “e”) in general.
I just added some “What is a ePortfolio?” content, and it feels like it could turn into a thesis pretty darned quickly. Not sure I want to go down that road, though…
The wiki page is really rough at the moment, and woefully incomplete, but we’ll be polishing it up over the next day or so.
Helen Chen posted a notice about an upcoming webcast by Jude Higdon for ADCE about the nature of ePortfolios in an environment where people are already using blogs and social software. The session will be a quasi-interactive Elluminate production.
Who needs an ePortfolio? All my coursework is on my blog…
EPortfolios have been defined in various ways by vendors, professional organizations, and institutions of higher education.
With emerging technologies such as social software that include the ability to freetag and syndicate across multiple resources and environments, the need for standalone ePortfolio “software” is perhaps called into question. This discussion will raise issues regarding the NetGen student, and how she is already using technology that has natural affordances that allow her to collect, aggregate, and syndicate content into portfolio views that can be useful to herself, other students, faculty, departments, colleges and universities, accreditation agencies, funding bodies, and potential employers.
I’ll hopefully tune in live, because this is exactly the stuff I’ve been thinking about for our ePortfolio project…
Almost forgot – it’s on Friday, March 17th at 11am MST.
Helen Chen posted a notice about an upcoming webcast by Jude Higdon for ADCE about the nature of ePortfolios in an environment where people are already using blogs and social software. The session will be a quasi-interactive Elluminate production.
Who needs an ePortfolio? All my coursework is on my blog…
EPortfolios have been defined in various ways by vendors, professional organizations, and institutions of higher education.
With emerging technologies such as social software that include the ability to freetag and syndicate across multiple resources and environments, the need for standalone ePortfolio “software” is perhaps called into question. This discussion will raise issues regarding the NetGen student, and how she is already using technology that has natural affordances that allow her to collect, aggregate, and syndicate content into portfolio views that can be useful to herself, other students, faculty, departments, colleges and universities, accreditation agencies, funding bodies, and potential employers.
I’ll hopefully tune in live, because this is exactly the stuff I’ve been thinking about for our ePortfolio project…
Almost forgot – it’s on Friday, March 17th at 11am MST.
I’m involved with an ePortfolio project with our Faculty of Education – aimed at getting student teachers to build a series of high quality, interactive, personalized portfolios outlining their development as professionals. It’s more about the journey (self reflection, writing, documenting) than the destination (the final website) so we were looking for tools that wouldn’t require technical know-how in order for the students to produce interesting products. When the project got off the ground (in the fall of 2005), there wasn’t really any off-the-shelf product that fit the bill, so we started to implement an instance of Pachyderm so the students could start authoring in it.
But, things changed recently, when Apple announced and released iWeb. It’s a dead-simple app to use, and comes with some great design templates. The output is just standard HTML, which can be served from anywhere.
To help figure out if iWeb would serve as an adequate ePortfolio management platform, I just whipped up a quick and dirty skeleton of my own ePortfolio to see how it works out. After about 15 minutes of play time, I’m really impressed. Built-in blogging (with multiple "blogs" in a site, each with their own RSS feed). Great content-agnostic templates that let you basically do anything you want to.
I’ll be trying it out a bit more over the next few days to see if we should switch strategies, but if I was to start this project over now from the beginning, I’d have recommended iWeb as our first choice. It’s not perfect – things like the generated URLs make me want to cry – but it’s so simple to use, and flexible enough to let you be as creative as you can be.
There are 3 issues with this solution, that I see:
I’m involved with an ePortfolio project with our Faculty of Education – aimed at getting student teachers to build a series of high quality, interactive, personalized portfolios outlining their development as professionals. It’s more about the journey (self reflection, writing, documenting) than the destination (the final website) so we were looking for tools that wouldn’t require technical know-how in order for the students to produce interesting products. When the project got off the ground (in the fall of 2005), there wasn’t really any off-the-shelf product that fit the bill, so we started to implement an instance of Pachyderm so the students could start authoring in it.
But, things changed recently, when Apple announced and released iWeb. It’s a dead-simple app to use, and comes with some great design templates. The output is just standard HTML, which can be served from anywhere.
To help figure out if iWeb would serve as an adequate ePortfolio management platform, I just whipped up a quick and dirty skeleton of my own ePortfolio to see how it works out. After about 15 minutes of play time, I’m really impressed. Built-in blogging (with multiple "blogs" in a site, each with their own RSS feed). Great content-agnostic templates that let you basically do anything you want to.
I’ll be trying it out a bit more over the next few days to see if we should switch strategies, but if I was to start this project over now from the beginning, I’d have recommended iWeb as our first choice. It’s not perfect – things like the generated URLs make me want to cry – but it’s so simple to use, and flexible enough to let you be as creative as you can be.
There are 3 issues with this solution, that I see:
I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between “portfolios” and “dossiers”. I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a “Teaching Dossier” system as part of its offerings. I’m not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant – it’s the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.
There has been a lot of effort into producing systems to facilitate the authoring and publishing of Teaching Dossiers – what appear to be a variation on the traditional CV, but with different headings and fields that get filled in. Essentially an online Word document template with some supporting documentation. It’s billed as a great way to document teaching philosophy, practices, successes, and history. Well, yeah. In the same way that Word can do that, too.
The system I saw this morning was literally a set of online forms that eventually spit out a single html file (no images, some links to external stuff though). No personal creativity – just fill in page after page of forms, and it will distill that info into a web page.
It just hit me that the process is just so, well, uninteresting – you get a web page, sure, and you’ve followed some guidelines about what to document and what to write about. But that’s no more than “Save as .html” It’s not even useful as an interchange format – if it was magically talking with various institutional systems, it might be cool, but it’s a proprietary silo of data, generating a simple web page. They could have just as easily created a Word template to do the same thing, and might have wound up with a better result. Or, a Dreamweaver template, or iWeb, or…
It’s also pedagogically uninteresting. It tells nothing of yourself as an individual. You can fill in a form on a web page. Goody. Now, can you communicate? Can you tell the story of your teaching (and learning)? Can you show video clips? Photos? It’s impossible for an individual’s personality to be captured through this process.
The dossier may have a place in an old-school paper-pushing regime, but we’re in a different century now, and the documentation of what we do (and how we do it) needs to reflect that. A simple text-only web page can’t possibly capture the various activities and media types.
The presentation I saw completely validated the approach we’re taking with our “ePortfolio” pilot project, where we’re essentially handing the students and professors a set of flexible tools (Drupal and Pachyderm) that will let them do what they want. There are no constraints or rigid boxes to fill in. Heck, Pachyderm doesn’t even have the concept of “ePortfolio” in the software – it’s being used because it’s a freeform generic authoring environment. And Drupal is being used because of the fluid nature of users and communities. Put the two together, and you have the antithesis of a “Teaching Dossier”.
I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between “portfolios” and “dossiers”. I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a “Teaching Dossier” system as part of its offerings. I’m not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant – it’s the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.
There has been a lot of effort into producing systems to facilitate the authoring and publishing of Teaching Dossiers – what appear to be a variation on the traditional CV, but with different headings and fields that get filled in. Essentially an online Word document template with some supporting documentation. It’s billed as a great way to document teaching philosophy, practices, successes, and history. Well, yeah. In the same way that Word can do that, too.
The system I saw this morning was literally a set of online forms that eventually spit out a single html file (no images, some links to external stuff though). No personal creativity – just fill in page after page of forms, and it will distill that info into a web page.
It just hit me that the process is just so, well, uninteresting – you get a web page, sure, and you’ve followed some guidelines about what to document and what to write about. But that’s no more than “Save as .html” It’s not even useful as an interchange format – if it was magically talking with various institutional systems, it might be cool, but it’s a proprietary silo of data, generating a simple web page. They could have just as easily created a Word template to do the same thing, and might have wound up with a better result. Or, a Dreamweaver template, or iWeb, or…
It’s also pedagogically uninteresting. It tells nothing of yourself as an individual. You can fill in a form on a web page. Goody. Now, can you communicate? Can you tell the story of your teaching (and learning)? Can you show video clips? Photos? It’s impossible for an individual’s personality to be captured through this process.
The dossier may have a place in an old-school paper-pushing regime, but we’re in a different century now, and the documentation of what we do (and how we do it) needs to reflect that. A simple text-only web page can’t possibly capture the various activities and media types.
The presentation I saw completely validated the approach we’re taking with our “ePortfolio” pilot project, where we’re essentially handing the students and professors a set of flexible tools (Drupal and Pachyderm) that will let them do what they want. There are no constraints or rigid boxes to fill in. Heck, Pachyderm doesn’t even have the concept of “ePortfolio” in the software – it’s being used because it’s a freeform generic authoring environment. And Drupal is being used because of the fluid nature of users and communities. Put the two together, and you have the antithesis of a “Teaching Dossier”.
In the background thinking/planning for our own “ePortfolios” project (man, I hate that “e”) we realized that many/most of the off-the-shelf portfolio packages were really just simple fill-in-the-blanks templates. Not really a portfolio, at all. Essentially a simple dossier. A collection of standardized data about a person, with no real creative input required or allowed.
A portfolio (e- or otherwise) is about as far from a simple templated dossier as I can imagine. Ok. Flying monkeys with laser guns on their heads would be farther, but you get the point. Portfolios are a process of creative expression. Of reflecting on what you’ve done, how you did it, and hopefully, where you’d like to go. Every person’s portfolio should be different. Different content, different presentation, different context. Things that a dossier just can’t capture. Dossiers are good for comparing batches of nearly-identical things, and helping to highlight differences between them. I imagine a hiring committee sitting at a big table with a stack of 500 of these templated dossiers, sorting them by some criterion to get to the Right Person To Hire.
That’s not really what a portfolio should be – it’s best used as a showcase for an individual. I picture the portfolio as being closer to the job interview than the resume. It’s a creative proxy for an individual, not a standardized data transmission vector.
So, when we were deep in development of Pachyderm, and tossing ideas around about how it could be used academically, the idea of a dynamic, interactive, person-centric portfolio management tool seemed pretty cool. It’s totally not what Pachyderm was initially designed or intended to do, but because it’s basically content-agnostic, it doesn’t care how you use it. And that’s pretty much what we need from an “ePortfolio” authoring tool.
I’m very interested to see how the first batch of students use it, and what they come up with. Should be interesting…
In the background thinking/planning for our own “ePortfolios” project (man, I hate that “e”) we realized that many/most of the off-the-shelf portfolio packages were really just simple fill-in-the-blanks templates. Not really a portfolio, at all. Essentially a simple dossier. A collection of standardized data about a person, with no real creative input required or allowed.
A portfolio (e- or otherwise) is about as far from a simple templated dossier as I can imagine. Ok. Flying monkeys with laser guns on their heads would be farther, but you get the point. Portfolios are a process of creative expression. Of reflecting on what you’ve done, how you did it, and hopefully, where you’d like to go. Every person’s portfolio should be different. Different content, different presentation, different context. Things that a dossier just can’t capture. Dossiers are good for comparing batches of nearly-identical things, and helping to highlight differences between them. I imagine a hiring committee sitting at a big table with a stack of 500 of these templated dossiers, sorting them by some criterion to get to the Right Person To Hire.
That’s not really what a portfolio should be – it’s best used as a showcase for an individual. I picture the portfolio as being closer to the job interview than the resume. It’s a creative proxy for an individual, not a standardized data transmission vector.
So, when we were deep in development of Pachyderm, and tossing ideas around about how it could be used academically, the idea of a dynamic, interactive, person-centric portfolio management tool seemed pretty cool. It’s totally not what Pachyderm was initially designed or intended to do, but because it’s basically content-agnostic, it doesn’t care how you use it. And that’s pretty much what we need from an “ePortfolio” authoring tool.
I’m very interested to see how the first batch of students use it, and what they come up with. Should be interesting…
One of my tasks for the next few weeks is to investigate Drupal, and specifically its ability to support the online interactions of a community of practice. We have a few projects that will involve some form of online interaction by students and professionals who are spread throughout southern Alberta, and it looks like Drupal may provide most, if not all, of the functionality to support these communities. I’ll be specifically looking at Drupal in the context of:
I’m actually pretty excited to be working on this stuff – it feels like I’ve been working so long on media-production-supporting-utilities that I’ve been out of the loop on the whole community side of things. We’ll be looking at integrating Drupal with Pachyderm (likely via a download/upload process, rather than a direct tie-in), and the institutional WebDAV storage/sharing system. Should be fun.
One of my tasks for the next few weeks is to investigate Drupal, and specifically its ability to support the online interactions of a community of practice. We have a few projects that will involve some form of online interaction by students and professionals who are spread throughout southern Alberta, and it looks like Drupal may provide most, if not all, of the functionality to support these communities. I’ll be specifically looking at Drupal in the context of:
I’m actually pretty excited to be working on this stuff – it feels like I’ve been working so long on media-production-supporting-utilities that I’ve been out of the loop on the whole community side of things. We’ll be looking at integrating Drupal with Pachyderm (likely via a download/upload process, rather than a direct tie-in), and the institutional WebDAV storage/sharing system. Should be fun.
I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment – I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).
A quick Google search turned up a WebDAV project as part of the Google Summer of Code, but it’s intended to expose the Drupal database via WebDAV (for backup, or alternate interfaces…)
Any ideas on how a file uploaded into Drupal could be placed into a user’s institutional WebDAV space, rather than in Drupal’s /files/ directory?
ps. this was posted using Flock, and I think it took me longer to enter it via the WYSIWYG interface than it would have taken to just enter the HTML. Perhaps once I get used to the editor… Oh, and no place to enter categories? wtf?
Update: Apparently, editing an existing post using Flock’s editor makes the post disappear from my blog. Have to go in and manually re-publish the post after editing in Flock…
Technorati Tags: drupal, lazyweb, eportfolio, webdav
I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment – I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).
A quick Google search turned up a WebDAV project as part of the Google Summer of Code, but it’s intended to expose the Drupal database via WebDAV (for backup, or alternate interfaces…)
Any ideas on how a file uploaded into Drupal could be placed into a user’s institutional WebDAV space, rather than in Drupal’s /files/ directory?
ps. this was posted using Flock, and I think it took me longer to enter it via the WYSIWYG interface than it would have taken to just enter the HTML. Perhaps once I get used to the editor… Oh, and no place to enter categories? wtf?
Update: Apparently, editing an existing post using Flock’s editor makes the post disappear from my blog. Have to go in and manually re-publish the post after editing in Flock…
Technorati Tags: drupal, lazyweb, eportfolio, webdav