Hope's Centre-Table

Online journal on teaching and learning. They plan to publish “articles, essays, and discussions about the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and its applications in higher/tertiary education today.”
In their request for articles they request research-based, not opinion, pieces.
International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Watch for the conference program, conf in early November

Finally, some of the ideas discussed at “Paying the Piper” are dancing their way into reality.
This one presents a nice amalgam of traditional and modern publishing possibilities: keep it virtual until someone requests and is willing to pay for physical. But otherwise the model is the traditional model of editing, review, and self-contained objects of scholarship (books).
Rice University | News & Media

In a previous posting (Aug. 8, 2006: e-portfolios, preliminary thoughts) I summarized the state of eportfolios, provided some links to colleges that are using them, tried to map out a definition, and asked some questions.
Two of the over-arching questions are not technical, though how they are answered might drive the technological decisions about which applications to pursue:
1) who owns the portfolio
2) who is the audience
For example, if the portfolio is to be owned by the student both while at UVM and beyond, it cannot be hosted by a system or within an account that expires after the student leaves UVM.
If the portfolio is to reflect the student’s entire UVM career, it cannot be composed in a system that ties the portfolio to a single course. (Blackboard/Vista’s portfolio program seems to have finally figured out the limitations of a course-based approach. The demo appears to show that each student has a MyPortfolio folder to which they can save material from any of their Blackboard courses. That material can then be presented, as desired, to a number of outside constituencies. Bears further exploration…can one also save materials from courses that have no corresponding Blackboard component?)
If the portfolio is to be used for assessment as well as reporting for accreditation purposes, it should easily integrate with UVM’s current student information systems.
And none of this addresses how to build a “portfolio culture” within UVM…

“All Things Considered” on NPR ran a marvelous story yesterday that resonates nicely with the remarks from Dr. Rosenthal, one of the candidates for CTL Director. The story was described by ATC as follows:
“August 15, 2006 · Robert Sapolsky, a distinguished neuroscientist in his 40s, had a young assistant who played different music every day, from Sonic Youth to Minnie Pearl. That made Sapolsky crazy — and curious about why his aging ears still crave the music he loved in college. Is there a certain age when the typical American passes from the novelty stage to utter predictability?”
NPR : Does Age Quash Our Spirit of Adventure?
The concusions were, essentially, that people (and other mammals, apparently) have a window of time when they actively seek out, or at least do not avoid, trying new things. For humans that window is generally the few years before and after 20.
Now, the common perception is that people get “set in their ways” as they get older, but the story had some additional insight into this process, especially how it is not a general resistance to any change. It is pockets of resistance to some kinds of change, or rather, a desire to cling to some areas of the familiar. The ‘resonation’ with Dr. Rosenthal’s remarks is this:
mid-career teachers may know that they need to adapt and change in their teaching. They may even want to. But to do so they must overcome a natural discomfort with, and resistance to, change in certain areas. (Technological change is probably one major area.)
The question thus becomes: how can the CTL shape its offerings so that they start from, or are mindful of, this phenomenon? In other words, when we work with faculty to determine what we offer can we frame those offerings in ways that start from their point of comfort rather than ours?
As a group of ed-techies, trying new technologies is obviously not our particular area of resistance to change. We’re comfortable with that and so may often feel frustrated that others are not. (“Why wouldn’t anyone want to jump in and try xyz? It’s so cool! Can’t they see how it would benefit teaching and learning?”)
What specific approaches can we take to ensure that we are starting from a place that is comfortable for more faculty but that leads to experimentation with or adoption of all those “cool, new” teaching ideas that may involve new technologies?

The subject of electronic portfolios has surfaced again here at UVM. Meanwhile, clearing out some old stacks of folders, Steve came across a flyer for the 1997 Graduate Student Reception activities that included this session: (It was an abbreviated version of one I had taught for EDSS395)
“Portfolio Design: Make the Web work for you. Many graduate students maintain a portfolio on the Web to organize or display their work. This 1/2 hour session will describe a sample graduate portfolio and outline the steps involved in creating and maintaining one.”
As is usual with ideas that have been developing over time, ‘everyone knows’ what an e-portfolio is, while in actuality the definition is mutable, malleable and sometimes misunderstood. This seemed like a good time to check out the current climate on e-portfolios. How are they defined now? How are they used? Is there software available for making e-portfolios? Does that software emphasize one definition of portfolio over another?
What are portfolios? According to current definitions, they fall into several categories, based on their perceived use and audience:
Assessment – the portfolio consists of samples of students’ work that evidences their evolution of learning over time. Materials are compiled based on students ‘best work’ and often are chosen to highlight mastery of core standards. These portfolios are also used as evidence of student achievement, for institutional reporting purposes.
Reflection – the portfolio is a place for students to gather their work and then provide commentary on it, reflecting on what they have learned and using that reflection to shape future learning. In this sense the portfolio acts as both a self-assessment tool and as an environment that helps students synthesize what they have learned.
Presentation – the portfolio is geared toward an outside audience. It displays the best work of the student and is shaped to highlight achievement. In that sense it acts as an annotated resume, and indeed is often used as such.
Organiziation – the portfolio is for the student’s private use. That is, it is a place where students gather all their work, all assignments, papers, bibliographies, projects, even class syllabi, etc. and stores them as an archive. This archive is then used for future reference both in the creation of new work and as a source for drawing out “best work” to be used for externally-directed portfolios as described above. (The Portfolio Design workshop mentioned above defined portfolios in this way.)
Of course, combinations of all these are also possible. In recent years, pre-service teacher education has been at the forefront in developing the Professional Portfolio that combines the assessment, reflection and presentation models. In 2003, the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative defined electronic portfolios as:
* a collection of authentic and diverse evidence,
* drawn from a larger archive representing what a person or organization has learned over time
* on which the person or organization has reflected, and
* designed for presentation to one or more audiences for a particular rhetorical purpose.
How are portfolios created?
The evolution of e-portfolios mirrors the evolution of available technology tools. An examination of papers and conference sessions on e-portfolios in education finds that early portfolios were usually digital surrogates on non-digital works: scans of images, photographs of projects, etc. As hypercard applications gave way to web applications, portfolios followed suit, being composed of ‘born digital’ artefacts linked together and presented in web form. More recently, social web applications and spaces like blogs, or MySpace and Facebook have provided yet another arena in which to build portfolios, though these are often misconceived as “non-professional” spaces.
The last few years have also seen the development of commercial and open source portfolio creation tools. Some of these tools take the constructivist approach to e-portfolios, where the portfolio is seen as a student-created work to aid student reflection and learning, while others emphasize the positivist appraoch, seeing portfolios as assessment tools that can also be mined to provide institutional data to support accreditation reporting. In “Conflicting Paradigms in Electronic Portfolio Approaches,” Barrett and Wilkerson explore these conflicting approaches, pointing out the difficulty for a single software product to reconcile these disparate functions. They point to the following institutions as models for how this might be acheived:
Teacher Education Programs

* working portfolio (digital archive)
* assessment portfolio
* Directed Response Folio example
Campus-wide implementations

Other commercial products that have recently leaped into the frey are:

Resources:
Electronic Portfolios in Teacher Education, dissertation, by Carla Hagen Piper – Chapter 2 is especially useful for an overview of the interplay between the ‘multiple intelligences’ theories in cognitive research, the performance-based assessment movements of the 1990s, and federal and state education initiatives of the past decade.
http://www1.chapman.edu/soe/faculty/piper/EPWeb/
Conflicting Paradigms in Electronic Portfolio Approaches, by Dr. Helen Barrett –
http://electronicportfolios.com/systems/paradigms.html
Introduction to Electronic Portfolio Assessment, by Dr. Helen Barrett
http://ali.apple.com/ali_media/Users/147/files/others/intro.pdf
Open Source Portfolio Initiative
http://www.osportfolio.org/
Handbook of Research on Electronic Portfolios, ed. by Ali Jafari and Catherine Kaufman – a book, but also e-book, that UVM doesn’t have. However, the chapter titles and author names should provide leads.
http://www.idea-group.com/encyclopedia/details.asp?ID=5072&v=tableOfContents
More to come…

Research on Portfolios
A brief summary of kinds of portfolios including links.

Proceedings for the 2006 JISC/CNI Conference are available.
Topics include digital libraries, repository interoperability, etheses, massive digitisation, Fedora, etc. and many of the usual suspects including Wilkins, Lynch, Choudhury.