e-Portfolios and Learning

Earlier in this blog and I believe somewhere on the portfolio.psu.edu website we asked the questions, "Can a blog be an e-portfolio?" or  "Can you just call a website an e-portfolio?" If you had to draw a line between these different things, how would you go about doing this?

It has to do in part with purpose.  This is the answer that I typically would have given.  But how "real-world" realistic is this?

Don't get me wrong - I think a presentation portfolio - a snapshot in time of what you have accomplished is a wonderful thing, i.e., the ability to add the link, "Oh, by the way here is a link to my e-portfolio." and a new window opens into your world...

But then again, this is my point.  What is your world?  How have you captured this?  To what degree is your eportfolio a representation and how much of it is the actual activity that is really going on right now!

How many of us work with computers and never connect to the web.  What would this say about you and your habits of work?  There are so many opportunities and examples of how we store, share and interact on the web these days, why can't we use this as the real thing instead of a representation of this. 

I'm thinking, why not? How more authentic can you get?

For those Penn State faculty, students and staff that have been waiting for a tool that would allow them to keep a protected online journal, your wait is over.

(Notice I used the word protected and not private - understand that if you really want something to remain private, the last place that you want it is on the internet!)

This caveat aside, there certainly exist instructional instances where the contents of a journal needs only to be read by the author, their mentor and perhaps a selected few others.  If this is the case, then selecting the protected option makes sense. 

Essentially, instead of writing your website/blog files to the 'www' directory in your PASS space selecting the protected option writes these files to your 'www_protected' directory within your PASS.  In this way you can use the wizard to select which Penn State userids have access to view your files in this space.  The Penn State blog tool provides connections directly to this ability.

The first brochure that we published as a part of the Penn State e-Portfolio Initiative stated that the allocation in PASS for faculty, students and staff was 50 MB.  Last week ITS expanded this allocation to 10 GB!  This is a considerable increase over a short period of time and exemplifies the Penn State's commitment to the computing and web publishing infrastructure as a part of the mission of the university.

Ample storage allocation and improved tools.  What effect will this have on teaching and learning across Penn State's campuses?

First there was EPAC (supported through EDUCAUSE), AAHE took a turn but went defunct, now we have AAEEBL


I like the fact that this group:

1. has learning at its core
2. is trying to reach out to vendors to in mutual support

Visit their new web site at: http://aaeebl.wetpaint.com/

One of the things about Web 2.0 content is that it gets us to begin thinking about content in more creative and less static ways.  Just because something is published to a web page does not mean that it has to stay there...

Let's think about how this could be useful...

We know that some web pages contain content originally published someplace else.  This content reports to this page, sometimes because a tag was used to indicate this relationship.

What if we could put this functionality into the hands of every user?

What if we created one page, a master page that serves as the container looking for certain tags. 

Now, we can have users create a blog entries that include this tag.  These blogs entries would report not only in their blog listing along with all their other blog entries, but more importantly report to the master page as well.

Let's make the master page focus on the learning outcomes for a course or even a program.  Let's use tags that are associated with learning outcomes.  Will this help use organize what we do and share this more efficiently?

At the International Coalition of Electronic Portfolio meetings in late February conversation centered around Web 2.0 types of tools - i.e., web tools that go beyond simple publication and encourage participation.  I would certainly consider the Blogs@PennState tool as belong to this category.

What roles do these new web apps play in educational arenas and in particular as they relate to electronic portfolios?  Helen Barrett is always reminding us to look back to our purpose.

I shared this diagram with participants.  This is my own perspective on this question and includes a lot of what I learned from my conversation in these meetings.

Purpose? ...  Would fostering the development of an active and intelligent citizenry (life-long learning) be a reasonable end goal?  This would necessarily involve one's looking back and thinking about what happens in life and why (reflective practice), which stems from a sense of legitimate agency (self-authorship).  Ok, but how do we get there... 

Given this end goal, in working with undergraduates in a variety of curricular and co-curricular experiences does higher education provide opportunities for students to learn and make connections between theory and practice?  Yes, and in many cases we do this very well.  But what e-portfolios has brought to my attention anew is the lack of experience and confidence that these pre-professionals bring to their newly discovered academic or professional contexts.  How do students move from pre-professional to professional?

How do these individuals become accepted members in these new networks?  Can we use the participatory features of new web apps to provide students with a mode of personal expression that instills a sense of identity, but more importantly within this context, access to a community that can help validate their contribution?  Are these strategies that will assist students in gaining ownership in what they have to contribute - better yet - membership in their chosen field of professional endeavor? 

In a recent EPAC chat a page in the EPAC wiki was shared that had a list of the e-Portfolio tools that are in use across the world. 

How many can you name?  While I recognize many of these I was still surprised by how many ways technology has been engineered  to provide solutions in this space.

A keynote at a recent conference mentioned that on his campus there were 6 different e-portfolio tools deployed and that at the University of British Columbia there are 13 different solutions.

I guess this would make you think about what purposes they support.  Kind of reminds me of one of the closing lines in the children's story book Stellaluna, "How can we be so different and yet be so much alike?"

What,  ...   oh yes ...  here is the list.

I have been asked by a number of individuals how to embed video here.  So, here are a couple of methods.

FIRST - you must have captured video and made it available in a web playable format.  For instance, web browsers will most likely automatically recognize movie files with the extensions .mov (Quicktime) or .wmv (Windows Media Player) and use the proper player.  But it depends on how the user has configured their browser.

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EASIEST OPTION:  Link to the movie file

Use the 'Insert File' option in your Moveable Type Dashboard editor to upload and insert the file into your page or blog entry.

Example: Introduction to e-Portfolios: A Short Movie welcome.mov (1MB)

Notice that I let the user know how large this file is!

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EMBED OPTION: Here you want the player to show up right in your web page or blog entry.  If this is the case then you need to use the following code.  Copy and paste this into the source code (<A> icon in your Moveable Type editor) - you will have to decipher the HTML code you find there and look for a good place to place this code.

<embed src="moviename.mov" width="240" height="196" controller="true" autoplay="true" type="video/quicktime"></embed>

Where:

• src is the name of the movie file.
• height and width correspond to the dimensions of the movie.
  (Add 16 pixels to height for a movie controller.) A controller can be true - present, or
  false - absent
• autoplay set to true lets the movie begin playing without user intervention
  if so saved.
• type helps browsers recognize QuickTime when the page is opened locally, not
  from a web server.

Example: Introduction to e-Portfolios: A Short Movie



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YouTube OPTION: This option is the best of both worlds it seems, you share your video on your site, but the video is being stored elsewhere! 

First, create an account at YouTube, then upload your video there.  You have up to 10 minutes or 10 MB for each video I believe - check the fine print - but once your video is processed and available, copy the embed code (upper right of the YouTube page) and paste this in the source code of your Moveable Type web page or blog entry, again deciphering the HTML to figure out where a good place for this to go might be.

Example:  Introduction to e-Portfolios:  A Short Movie





Need help with any of these options?  Check with the Digital Commons at your Penn State campus location.

Just announced out of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has contracted with eFolio to provide for every resident of Pennsylvania the ability to create and store an electronic portfolio!  This is the same system that the state of Minnesota has been using for quite some time now so it looks like its track record has been positive!

The use of this system is free of charge for all residents of Pennsylvania and students enrolled at Pennsylvania educational institutions - free of charge!  50 MB storage limit and a fairly sophisticated web application allows users the means to include a range of different information types about themselves and a fair degree of personalization of a some standard templates.

Check it out at:  http://www.efoliopa.com/

The best thing is that this system reaches all corners of the state and tells us that this phenomenon of individuals using the internet to publish information about themselves as a value-added means of telling their own story is not going away anytime soon!

Get started on your e-portfolio today Pennsylvania!

EPAC stands for Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication. This organization has had various sponsors such as the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative/Educause Learning Initiative and the American Association for Higher Education and over the years its visibility has varied. For those that have followed EPAC throughout this time, it has served as a clearinghouse of resources and information about e-portfolios and professional opportunities related to these.

It is open to all and free to join. Of late EPAC's presence on the web has taken the form of the EPAC wiki.

Want to find a conference with tracks associated with e-portfolios, others interested in e-portfolios, teaching and learning or opportunties to submit scholarly works on topics related to e-portfolios, this is the place.