Tales from the magic wand

Telling our stories (well)

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:12:10 -0500

Last week at Learning Design Summer Camp 2009, I made an offhand comment about how we (I) don't do a very good job of telling our stories. I've been thinking a lot about this. My sense is that as a tenure track faculty member, publishing these kinds of narratives may not be in our best interest. However, in terms of building capacity to do interesting work and having a serious impact on the change process, it is essential.

So with that said, I am migrating some content from the Blogs as Portfolio wiki to this space (written in summer 2008). The story is one of the history of e-portfolios in teacher education at Penn State. The purpose is to demonstrate how the current work has been shaped by a wealth of prior experiences.

_______________________________________

In the College of Education's Elementary & Kindergarten Education (EKED) Program, we have been using paper portfolios as a vehicle for students to demonstrate their developing understandings, abilities and dispositions associated with becoming a professional educator for many years. When I joined the faculty in 1997, I had already spent some time exploring electronic portfolios with teacher education students at The University of Michigan (Wisnudel-Spitulnik, Zembal-Saul, & Krajcik, 1998), and was interested in continuing the work here. My first attempt was in Spring 1998 using HyperStudio with SCIED 458 students. I developed a template and they selected artifacts from the course to demonstrated their learning (e.g., lesson plans, video of teaching, written reflections on teaching, etc.). These were burned to CD and given to students at the end of the semester to take with them.

With the help of Leigh Ann Haefner (now a professor at PSU Altoona), we attempted our first web-based portfolios in Summer 1998 with a small group of SCIED 458 students. This time, we gave students broad guidelines about the kinds of things they needed to demonstrate through their portfolios, and let them design and make decisions about the layout and organization. We used Claris HomePage and students published to their Penn State personal space. We integrated web=based teaching portfolios into all sections of SCIED 458 in the 1998-99 academic year. In this way, we were able to reach all 300+ EKED majors prior to their student teaching experience. During the early years of the project, we learned that we could trace the development of student learning using the e-portfolios, and that it was possible to differentiate among students on the basis of evidence provided in the portfolio (Avraamidou & Zembal-Saul, 2006, 2003, 2002, 2001; Zembal-Saul, Haefner, Avraamidou, Severs & Dana, 2002).

While working in the Elementary Professional Development School (PDS) Partnership [1] I was able to collaborate with a team of teacher educators, and we refined portfolio tasks to capture key aspects of learning and development. The portfolio tasks that we currently use make full use of what we have learned over our years of work together. These are the basic components of our e-portfolios as they exist today:

Collection of Evidence - In this section of the portfolio, students collect and organize their electronic artifacts, which includes course assignments, field observations, lesson plans, multimedia resources, and video of teaching.
Performance Framework - The performance framework is based on the conceptual framework for the teacher education programs at Penn State. The framework is organized around 4 main domains -- A. Planning and Preparing for Student Learning; B. Teaching; C. Analyzing Student Learning and Inquiring into Teaching; D. Fulfilling Professional Responsibilities -- with indicators in each domain articulating desired learning outcomes. Students revisit the framework several times throughout their program and use artifacts from their evidence collection to demonstrate learning. Justification for their selection is part of the task and engages students in reasoning about the alignment of evidence with particular indicators. This is coupled with a reflective writing task that asks students to discuss their growth in each of the domains (and over time). This is the central task of many teacher education programs that require e-portfolios.
Teaching Platform - Evidence-based Argument about Learning and Teaching - This is perhaps the most powerful of the portfolio tasks that we have developed. Students are asked to construct an evidence-based argument about teaching and learning. They generate a series of claims about supporting meaningful student learning, link and justify supporting evidence, and revisit and revise their arguments over time. As with the framework task, students are asked to reflect on prior iterations of their arguments and comment on their growth and development over time.

When Claris HomePage became a dead product around 1999, we migrated to Dreamweaver and quickly felt the consequences. For our students, the emphasis shifted from portfolio substance to the technology and making it work. We provided frequent and intensive support sessions where we focused on solving technical issues versus engaging in portfolio conversations about the quality of artifacts and the strengths of teaching and learning arguments. After 3 years with DW, it was time for a change.

We had evidence that our portfolio tasks were effective for supporting learning and set out to find a tool that would allow us to achieve our goals without the steep technology learning curve. We talked with out friends at Apple about what was on the horizon (this was prior to iWeb). You can imagine what that conversation sounded like. We explored the e-Portfolio tool in Angel and arranged demonstrations with LiveText and TaskStream. In the end, we settled on TaskSteam [2] for a variety of reasons. It's use has now spread from the PDS to the entire EKED program. In 2008-09, secondary education also will be experimenting with the tool.

In addition to a variety of powerful pedagogical tools for teachers (e.g., lesson and unit planning tools, standards tools, rubric wizard), TaskStream allows us to run reports on students performance for artifacts submitted and graded within the system. These reports are customizable and powerful in that you can dig down to the level of an individual students' work and associated evaluation. This type of data is useful in demonstrating program outcomes for accrediting agencies.

The first time I saw the Blogs and Penn State platform, I was intrigued by its potential to achieve many of the goals we have for e-Portfolio (and much more). In particular, I am drawn to the notion of having students participate in a professional discourse community that interacts around entries and artifacts, which both contributes to their thinking and learning about what it means to be a professional in their chosen field, as well as allows them to monitor their learning over time.

Sample e-Portfolios

Amy's e-Portfolio (developed using Dreamweaver)

Brittany's Performance Framework (developed using TaskStream)

Morgan's Teaching Platform (developed using TaskStream)

References

Avraamidou, L. & Zembal-Saul, C. (2006). Exploring the influence of web-based portfolio development on learning to teach elementary science. AACE Journal, 14(2), 178-205.

Avraamidou, L. & Zembal-Saul, C. (2003). Exploring the influence of web-based portfolio development on learning to teach elementary science. Journal of Technology & Teacher Education, 11(3), 415-442.

Avraamidou, L. & Zembal-Saul, C. (2002). Making the case for the use of web-based portfolios in support of learning to teach. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 1(2).

Zembal-Saul, C., Haefner, L.A., Avraamidou, L., Severs, M. & Dana, T. (2002). Web-based portfolios: A vehicle for examining preservice elementary teachers' developing understanding of teaching science. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 13(4), 283-302.

Avraamidou, L. & Zembal-Saul, C. (2001). Web-based philosophies: Making prospective teachers' personal theorizing visible. Science Education International, 12(4), 2-5.

Wisnudel-Spitulnik, M., Zembal-Saul, C., & Krajcik, J. S. (1998). Using hypermedia to represent emerging student understanding: Science learners and preservice teachers. In J. Mintzes, J. Wandersee, and J. Novak (Eds.) Teaching Science for Understanding. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

There is no secret ingredient

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:29:44 -0500

So I've had a moment of realization (inspired by King Fu Panda) -- there is no secret ingredient, just a missing one. For all of my seeking, the key to collaborative reflection has always been right in front of me. As much as we don't want to believe it, we still operate in an academic setting that rewards our students for right answers and conformity over dialogic inquiry and socially negotiated meaning-making. When that really begins to change, the technology tools necessary to support new forms of scholarship are already here -- at least in part -- the rest are coming.

Case in point, the conflicting data from the pilot study on e-portfolios in teacher education. Students did not value giving or receiving comments as much as other aspects of the e-portfolio experience, but yet they generally commented well beyond what was required by the instructor. Why? My hypothesis is that students have been conditioned to focus on the quality of their own work and not on how their contributions to the discourse within the community actually serve to move the collective forward in their thinking and practice.

What can we do about this unfortunate situation? It's all just talk if we don't fundamentally value students' voices and contributions -- then we need to make sure our practices are in sync with our values, not the norms of higher ed. How long does deprogramming take? What's the critical mass necessary to change a world view? Which experiences are most powerful in the change process? No answers today -- merely questions.

Meaning making across the community

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:32:51 -0500

After my lament about the mere evolution of e-portfolio spaces in light of emerging affordances of technology, I left things hanging with my question about how the notion of revolution becomes part of the picture. My focus on collaborative reflection within the blogs as portfolio project this summer probably provides some solid clues, but there is more to the story.

Early on in round two at ETS, Cole and Brad introduced me to the idea of "horizontal contribution" and tools, like DISQUS, that can capture it. Cole does a much better job of explaining it than I ever could, but the basic idea is now you can track your contributions across blogs. Whereas previously comments resided in the blog owner's space, now the commenter "owns" their intellectual work in ways that were not possible before. Consider for example that you wanted to use a comment or series of comments as evidence of your own development as a professional in your e-portfolio. Now it is possible. All of this is very exciting and opens the door to possibilities that were not imaginable a year ago when I was encouraging students to make a brief comment and then trackback to their own posts in order to capture contributions.

Still, there is something left wanting. This is where I believe we need to flip the entire system on its head and think differently - revolution. If meaning is negotiated in social settings, then we need to be able to trace ideas and concepts through conversations among bounded groups over time, thus breaking down the silos of individual reflection. In other words, we need to figure out how to place the interactive nature of meaning-making in the driver's seat. The question becomes, how?

Bear with me now because I am venturing out of my depth. What if we could identify an idea (via tags) and track its evolution within a community of learners (across blogs)? We would need to be able to constrain parameters, such as identifying the members of the community, setting a time window, and designating the tags of interest. Imagine a Twitter Wheel, which provides a visualization of who your tweets are connected to and the extent to which you interact with various contacts. A topographical map might be another way to visualize this. Consider the peaks to be analogous to members of the community, and the height of the peaks to be the frequency with which members contribute via posts or comments around a particular concept. Now connect peaks to represent interactions across spaces. An interactive representation could be powerful in that you could "zoom in" and link to a particular post or blog. Again, the idea here would be for instructors and students to follow the discourse associated with a concept through a community space.

Crazy talk? Maybe. Maybe not.

Evolution of e-portfolio spaces

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:55:58 -0500

As a TLT/ETS Faculty Fellow I have had the opportunity to participate in some exciting ventures that otherwise would not have been possible. In that past year, we were able to craft a few features within the PSU blogging platform - teacher education framework template and pack it up - that allowed us to explore the potential of blogs as professional portfolio spaces. Very exciting! In a recent post, I provided an overview of some of the things we learned during the pilot study with elementary education majors participating in the Elementary Professional Development School Partnership.

My current musings, however, are centered on the premise that this has merely been an evolution of e-portfolio development driven by emerging technologies and their affordances. I recently came across slides of my early presentations about e-portfolios from a dozen plus years ago. All the key ingredients were there - multimedia, non-linear, multiple versions over time, reflection - including an emphasis on pursuing an evidence-based approach. Put another way, I continue to view portfolios as dynamic spaces for students to make a case for their development as professionals using evidence from multiple sources collected throughout their experience at Penn State, including coursework, field experiences, internships, etc. So while we marched through various platforms for e-portfolio construction (i.e., Hypercard, Claris HomePage, Dreamweaver, Taskstream, and now blogs), the spirit of e-portfolio work has remained fairly consistent.

*Amy's e-portfolio from 2004-05 constructed in Dreamweaver (above). Amy's e-portfolio re-constructed in the blogging platform (below).

Click here to view a sample portfolio from the pilot study.

The big lessons from these experiences are: (1) connecting reflections to artifacts/evidence enhanced their meaningfulness in terms of learning; (2) engaging in reflection on development in an ongoing way, rather than as summative assessments, was more powerful in terms of learning; and (3) when e-portfolios became private by default, it made the already challenging process of "portfolio conversations" next to impossible.

The single space around e-portfolios that continues to perplex me is connected to the notion of reflection. At the end of the day, portfolio spaces belong to the individual, and reflective practice fails to take up social aspects of learning. Why is this a problem for me? As a teacher educator who studies reflection and learning, I buy into the role of evidence-based analysis of thinking and practice as being integral to the process of learning to teach. However, I also hold commitments about knowledge and learning that emphasize its social, situated and distributed nature. Currently, blogs as portfolios support the personal reflection space, but remain largely silos given their roots as "personal publishing platforms."

So where does revolution enter the picture? Stay tuned for the next post.

Swimming up the Twitter stream

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:28:51 -0500

I spent last week at University of Missouri co-facilitating (with Sandra Abell and Patricia Friedrichsen) and mentoring at the inaugural NARST (National Association for Research in Science Teaching) Summer Research Institute. Twenty-three science education doctoral students from across the country (and around the world) , whose research focuses on some aspect of teacher learning and development, gathered for an intense week of work. It was exhausting, but extremely valuable in a variety of predictable and also unexpected ways. I could not be more impressed with our new colleagues, who are bright, passionate and creative. The future of science education is in excellent hands!

A quickly emerging theme at SRI was that of community. I am certain that this would have happened regardless of the technology we used given the need to get to know each other as scholars and as people in a very short period of time. However, I will admit to adding some social tools to the mix. When I suggested to mentors that we make use of Twitter, there was an audible groan in the room, followed by numerous negative comments. Nevertheless, the #narstsri09 tag was coined and introduced to participants at the first whole group session -- for aggregating comments and media using Twitter and Flickr. Use of the tools was billed as "completely optional" and Lis Boyer and I seeded the space with a few posts and photos, respectively.

What happened next was completely unexpected in terms of the amount of time it took to engage in powerful applications of the space. We were split into 3 teams that met in different rooms. By Monday afternoon, students (and some mentors) were sharing resources, ideas, and encouraging comments via Twitter. The pinnacle event of the first day was when one student gave feedback to someone on another team that resulted in the refinement of research questions in a mixed methods study. The rest of the week only got better. By Wednesday, Lis and I modified a workshop (by request) to introduce participants to online tools for supporting their research. Consider that no one in the room had ever subscribed to a RSS feed of a key word search, only one used Zotero for grabbing citation information from the web, and none used social bookmarking.

In no way am I suggesting that we use these tools without applying a critical lens. I do advocate trying them on in professional settings in ways that help us understand their affordances in context. In the end will participants continue to use Twitter beyond the institute? I'm not sure that matters. They will have seen and experienced a professionally viable application of the tool to document ideas, collaborations, and exchanges that help capture the nature of community at SRI, which otherwise would have been difficult to articulate to others.

Postscript: I learned from the very best. Huge thanks to Cole Camplese and Scott McDonald for their leadership in this space.

Teacher education e-portfolio pilot project

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:48:15 -0500

Part of what I hope to be able to do this summer as a Faculty Fellow is to capture what we learned from the pilot work with blogs as portfolio in teacher education. I was able to introduce 59 senior undergraduate students in the Elementary Professional Development School Partnership to the professional website and teacher education framework template in Fall 2008. These students were required to make at least 4-5 posts and 2-3 comments in their science education course. This served as an introduction to the blogging platform and associated tools. Students were then offered the opportunity to continue the development of their professional portfolios via their blogs throughout their internship year. By choice 40 students voluntarily agreed to participate.

As part of the pilot project, students posted written reflections on their learning experiences (coursework and field experiences) regularly and connected their posts to the teacher education program framework using a tagging system developed by the ETS team. In this way, students were able to monitor their own learning and development over time associated with particular performances, such as fostering an engaging learning environment and attending to children's thinking. In addition, students were able to select particular entries, include them in a "show portfolio" and write a "meta-reflection" across entries in each key area of teacher learning (4 domains of the teacher education framework).

At the time of the pilot project, 50% of our students had not activated their Penn State web space, 85% reported not having an electronic portfolio, and 66% had never read a blog.

We surveyed students about their use of the blogs as a professional portfolio at the end of the fall semester. Part of the survey required students to rate the importance of various aspects and affordances of blogs as portfolio on a Likert scale with 5 being "extremely important." What follows is a brief summary of their responses.

The 2 most highly rated items (92.5% of students selecting 5) were the ability to easily organize their work in relations to the teacher education performance framework and the ability to take their portfolios with them when they leave Penn State.

Other highly rated items are provided below. For these results categories 4 and 5 were collapsed to generate the percentage response.

Using tags to organize work (97.5%).
Linking multimedia artifacts to entries (97.5%).
Personalizing portfolio to reflect individual development as a teacher (97.5%).
Ease of use of blogging tools (92.5%).
Saving to personal PSU web space (80%).

Items that students thought were of least importance were related to the public nature of the portfolio and commenting. However, most students participated well beyond the minimum number of required comments. In addition, the comments were generally serious and substantive. More to come on this interesting contradiction.

The potential of collaborative reflection on practice

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:23:29 -0500

An interest of mine has been the role of reflection on professional growth and development. During my time as a faculty fellow at ETS this summer, I hope to trouble the role of reflection in learning, particularly when it comes to collaborative interactions around artifacts that are grounded in professional practice (e.g., lesson plans, video of teaching). It is my sense that the potential of reflective practice is not realized when the focus remains on the individual and reflection is interpreted as generic and non-analytic.

Blogs as e-portfolio seem particularly well-suited as a platform for making public not only practice-based artifacts, but also one's thinking about those artifacts. Features of blogs, such as comments and trackbacks, can then be used to support meaningful interactions among developing professionals who are attempting to tackle similar problems of practice. While it is not merely the tools, but rather the affordances they provide that matter, blogs as e-portfolio create interesting opportunities to support more collaborative and practice-based forms of reflection.

How might this influence learning and development among beginning teachers? That's one of the issues I hope to explore.

What's our brand?

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:25:29 -0500

Last Friday (2/20/09), the SCIED faculty at Penn State met for an all day retreat at St. Joseph Institute -- a magic wand event. The setting was lovely and it was nice to get away from campus and spend some uninterrupted time discussing program issues. A centerpiece of discussion was defining who we are as a group and what we hope to accomplish through our graduate programs in SCIED. In many ways, we were talking about our "brand."

When I first came to Penn State, there was a strong emphasis on teacher education in SCIED. It was part of the draw for me and it is where I have placed my energy over the years. Colleagues have come and gone over time, but I think we are still seen as a faculty who take teacher education seriously -- whether it is through our partnerships with teachers and schools, our collaborative efforts with scientists to develop meaningful science learning opportunities for future teachers, or our use of technology to support learning to teach (video analysis, e-portfolios, etc.). True, we have more folks who study the discourse and practices of science, as well as science learning and learning environments. So how do we capture this new brand in a way that makes sense for the group? More to come as we work this one out.

Faculty in photo (left to right): Deb Smith, Greg Kelly, Annmarie Ward, Kate Sillman, Rick Duschl, Leigh Ann Haefner, Scott McDonald, Carla Zembal-Saul (with wand) and Bill Carlsen.

My top 5

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:54:00 -0500

I am serving on a science teaching video consensus panel. In preparation for our first meeting in March, the following prompt was put to us by Kathy Roth of Lesson Lab, the project PI.

At this point in time, what would you nominate as the top 5 features of science teaching that would benefit from a shared coding language within the science education community? In thinking about your nominations, please consider:

(a) the wide usefulness of your nominated feature (e.g., many researchers would be interested in this),
(b) current confusion about how to define/codify this feature of science teaching, and
(c) potential/evidence that the nominated feature is predictive/supportive of student learning.

Here's my short list.

1. Assessing and attending to students' prior knowledge of science concepts (children's thinking and ideas)
2. Giving priority to evidence and explanation in science teaching (explanation-driven inquiry)
3. Classroom discourse (norms of making claims, supporting claims with evidence, challenging claims on the basis of evidence, etc.)
4. Questioning for the purpose of assessing and monitoring students' conceptual development AND for scaffolding learning (identification of patterns in data, construction of claims, etc.)
5. Coherence among content representation (content storyline)

What do you think?

Tech Cafe: The start of something interesting

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:07:29 -0500

We held the inaugural session of Tech Cafe this morning. The idea is a simple one -- get faculty, field supervisors, teachers, and graduate students together to share innovative pedagogical ideas in teacher education that involve technology in one way or another. The issue that complicates matters is that engaging in this kind of community-building is not necessarily rewarded (or even recognized) in higher education contexts. Thus, there is a critical need to nurture a community in which members participate because they want to -- intrinsically motivated and inspired by sharing and learning from one another.

So what does this emerging community look like? I am hoping a lot like the group that gathered today. A diverse crowd -- 2 faculty members from the field experience office, 3 PDS colleagues, 2 graduate students, the director of EDUCATE, 3 colleagues from Altoona, 3 colleagues from the methods block, and one classroom teacher via Skype. Several members of the group shared their uses of blogs to organize course content, capture negotiated ideas from their courses, engage preservice teachers in reflecting on their developing understandings and practices, and more. The discussion that followed was one of genuine interest in the blogs and their applications, as well as intentional ways to address professional publishing considerations in our teacher education program.

We have a lot to learn from each other, and I am excited by the prospect of carving out the time and space to do it. Stay tuned to see how the community evolves.

Note: This was a magic wand event. The actual wand can be spotted in the group photo. Whenever you see it, you will know that the Kahn endowment was involved in some way. Thank you Donna and Gilbert!

Pack it up!

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:34:43 -0500

After months of planning and programming, the Pack It Up tool is now available as part of the Teacher Education Performance Framework template. A HUGE thank you to Brad Kozlek and other colleagues at ETS at Penn State for making it happen.

Download the 4 minute screen cast to learn how to make use of this exciting tool.

TEPFportfolio-stream.mov

Here is the screen cast for submitting your work on TaskStream.

submitTS.mov

What did you do this summer?

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:03:30 -0500

In grade school, this was always the question the teacher asked on the first day back at school - What did you do this summer? As I approach my last formal day as a faculty fellow with ETS, I have discovered the need to try to articulate what I have learned this summer, and how it will benefit me as I move forward in my career.

First, having dedicated time to think and work allows for greater creativity and productivity. At this point you are allowed to say, "Duh?!" Simple as it may sound, I lost sight of this in the hectic day to day race to meet deadlines and spread myself increasingly thin across a mountain of responsibilities. I had to re-experience it to remember, and now I hope to hold this lesson close as I return to my former life.

Second, being surrounded by smart, passionate people who are excellent at what they do makes all of the difference. The folks at ETS are great! I've enjoyed working with the team, as well as getting to know people through the informal interactions that happen as a result of close daily contact. It's not that I don't have good colleagues in the College of Ed - I do. We are just often too busy working on unrelated projects to spend quality time together (see first lesson above).

Finally, a series of small pieces can lead to substantial progress. By documenting our accomplishments this summer via the wiki, I am pleasantly surprised at what we have been able to achieve in a relatively short time. Take a look for yourself below. The next 10 days will provide multiple opportunities to talk with others about blogs as portfolio and get their insights into next steps. I am looking forward to learning more -- and of course uncovering better questions.

Anticipated Outcomes

Best practice for blogs as portfolio use
Open tracking of progress
Multiple samples of portfolios as blogs
Demonstration of blogs being used for administrative/program assessment purposes

Actuals Outcomes

3 pilot projects set for Fall 2008, including the SHC
Adoption of blogging platform as primary vehicle for e-portfolio at Penn State (starting with MT 4.2 professional website template)
Tool development
- Program outcomes evidence aggregator
- Pack-it up tool (prototype anticipated October 2008)
- Community interaction monitor (modeled after a Tweet wheel; still being conceptualized)
Collection of sample portfolio blogs, starting with a "mock-up" and building from Fall pilot projects
Presentation to the "ID and beyond" community at Penn State - Learning Design Summer Camp
Emerging research agenda around social aspects of blogs as portfolio
Collection of blogs as portfolio literature
Open documentation of progress via wiki

Identity crisis

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:55:10 -0500

Since we began working on the "blogs as portfolio" project, I think everyone on the team has been struggling with the baggage associated with the notion of portfolio, as well as with blogs. Perspectives on portfolios are often limited by their most common definition, "a collection of evidence." Research and practice, however, suggest that it is when we move beyond the collection itself to using it for demonstrating some aspect of personal or professional growth and/or competency that it becomes a powerful vehicle for learning. This is further enhanced when evidence/artifacts in the portfolio are made public and fuel professional discourse within a community (e.g., portfolio conversations). Similarly, blogs are often reduced to a mere an online diary of daily events. Once again, there is so much more potential there if you can get beyond the initial take and harness social interactions and professional discourse.

Our current language about the Blogs at Penn State does not reflect what we are trying to convey about the potential of the platform. This became apparent at our meeting this week when Chris, Brad and I were attempting to bring Erin Long, our new ETS ID teammate, up to speed on the project. We officially abandoned the name "Blogs as Portfolio" (sorry Erin). While we don't have a new catch phrase yet, here's where we may want to go and why.

The Blogs at Penn State are most commonly referred to as a "personal content management system" or a "personal publishing platform." While these labels convey fundamental meaning about the tool, they fall short in terms of social interactions and professional discourse. At several points this summer, Cole has asked whether folks are going to just scratch their heads in confusion when we begin to push the social angle. The more I have talked to colleagues, the more I realize he may be right - at least initially. People need a compelling place to start, which I think the idea of a personal publishing platform provides. However, we should make an intentional attempt to move the discourse and practices associated with blogs beyond this entry point in order to harness their full potential for teaching and learning.

While I don't have "the answer, " I do have a few ideas that keep me awake at night. As a start, how about "blogs as public scholarship communities." What I am trying to convey with this is that publishing personal artifacts of learning to the blog is an initial contribution to the community for the ultimate purpose of engaging peers/colleagues in professional discourse that may result in moving the collective understanding of the group forward (or prompt new and better questions, etc.). Your turn. Share your insights here and help us redefine the blogs as portfolio project.

Smart people make me happy

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:14:55 -0500

Okay. Truth be told, not ALL smart people make me happy. I like to be challenged in my thinking, but in ways that are collaborative and generative. To date, that has been my experience at ETS. My colleagues here are helping me think hard about blogs as portfolio, particularly how to take full advantage of features that support social interaction and learning. As Brad Kozlek passionately asserted at a recent meeting, blogging (at least the version we are talking about) encompasses much of what higher education experiences should be about -- creative expression, critical reasoning, professional discourse, collaboration and communication. Read more about Brad's views on blogging at Blog of Brad (of course).

For all of the talk about 21st century learning, I still don't see too much of it in action. We often teach our students to use technology tools when our time and energy might be better spent adjusting the norms of participation in learning communities. What does it mean to be accountable to the community through your interactions and contributions? What role does technology play?

This afternoon I am exploring some tools (small pieces, loosely joined -- I get it now and will never laugh about it in public again) that might help us get there. The first is trackbacks, and I was happy to hear from Cole and Brad that they are widely misunderstood. I was clearly one of the folks misunderstanding them. I had been solely focused on comments as the primary vehicle for demonstrating social interaction and discourse. This presents a few problems. The biggie is that when you comment on someone else's blog, the content is no longer yours. What if I am writing a meta-blog on my development in a particular professional domain and a crucial piece of evidence turns out to be a comment I made? As an alternative, consider that instead of merely posting a comment that I post a reflection on how reading a peer's blog and commenting on it advanced my own thinking about something I was grappling with AND I include a trackback to that blog post. This approach seems to me to render a much more useful form of evidence when it comes to examining my own learning over time and the kinds of experiences, assignments, social interactions, etc. that influenced it. It also takes advantage of one of the most powerful features of the web -- interconnections. Thanks, Brad, for helping me understand the potential of this blog capability.

The second toy/tool I am playing with is the embed feature which Brad activated on my blog earlier this week. Forgive my techno-ignorance here, but my understanding is that it allows you to create a live feed to the original post. If the original gets updated, it is updated on your blog automatically. Pretty cool. Of course there are all sorts of copyright issues that will need to be addressed. Imagine the possibilities, though. Once again, keep the focus on discourse communities and social perspectives on learning. If the blog post of a peer (or instructor, or expert, or...) has a significant impact on my thinking and professional development, I can write a reflective entry and embed the original post. I am including Brad's post on the embed feature here as an example.

Learning theory [re]considered

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:01:37 -0500

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the extent to which my theoretical framework fits with the work on blogs and portfolio. For a number of years now, I have been building on a framework that integrates theories of learning as being social, situated and distributed to make sense of my work in teacher education. This has been productive in that it guides my pedagogical decisions and informs my research (questions, design, data collection, analysis and interpretations of data). Social perspectives on learning (Driver, Asoko, Leach, Mortimer & Scott, 1994; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Resnick, 1998, 1991) emphasize the role of interactions in learning and the significance of discourse communities. This keeps my focus on crafting experiences in which students negotiate meaning through relevant social experiences and professional discourse (as opposed to me telling them the one right way of doing things). Situative perspectives on learning (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989; Greeno, 2003, 1997; Greeno, Collins & Resnick, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) suggest that learning is by nature intertwined with the contexts in which it occurs. In light of this, the need to create authentic learning activities is essential. Another important element is the connection between knowledge and participation in social practices. Finally, distributed perspectives on learning (Pea, 1993; Resnick, 1987) suggest that knowledge and learning (and expertise) does not reside in the individual, but rather the discourse community (or community of practice -- see Scott McDonald's work here). Please excuse my gross oversimplification of some very complex theories.

I am also a big fan of John Dewey -- "Reflection is the hallmark of intelligent action." "It is not from our experiences that we learn, but from reflecting upon them." [Quotes are from memory. Don't take them too seriously.] Point of clarification: I am not referring to the warm and fuzzy brand of reflection here, but rather Dewey's notion of reasoned interactions within a problem space that have a generative impact on conceptions that guide the interactions. For this to apply, in my work teaching is approached as a complex, problem-solving activity.

So what does all of this mean in terms of blogs as portfolio? I am still working on that, but the connections appear to be strong. How do we make the most effective use of social features of blogs, such as commenting and trackbacks, in ways that support and advance the discourse community, as well as novices' enculturation into that community? In what ways does engaging students in publishing artifacts that were developed in authentic contexts (and considering their relevance to professional standards) influence their development as professionals? What approaches are most successful in terms of creating norms for engaging in professional discourse through/around blogging? There are many more questions and ideas swimming around in my head. It is exciting to have dedicated time as a TLT faculty fellow to consider them.