eportfolio tools

Creating eportfolios as a course project is a good way to engage students in their coursework, if you present the eportfolio as an exercise in digital storytelling–specifically the story of their work and progress. If your institution has a campus-wide deployment of an eportfolio system, such as Epsilen or the Carnegie Foundation’s KEEP Toolkit (see comment below about availability), you can draw on common resources with which to introduce and support your students’ work.

There are a variety of free tools on the web, though, with which you and your students can be creative in crafting eportfolios to suit your course situation. Yours might be an essay-driven course, or perhaps yours requires students to create a lot of graphs and data-driven material. Or yours might focus on research and collaboration. Sometimes its easier to find the tools that work best for you than to reconfigure a template-based system.

Helen Barrett is a name you will run across in your research on eportfolios, and she not only provides expertise on the purpose of such work and lots of links to resources, she puts her money where her mouth is and has created a staggering list of eportfolios using all sorts of tools and methods, so that you have good models to view. Here are some of her resources:

Online Portfolio Tools (with links to models): http://electronicportfolios.org/web20portfolios.html

Portfolio and How-To on WordPress: http://hbarrett.wordpress.com/my-portfolio/

• Dr. Barrett’s Portfolio in a blog format with a special tab on how to create a portfolio in a WordPress blog.

Electronic Portfolios.org: http://electronicportfolios.org/

• This is a gateway site to many of her pages. She’s been at this for almost two decades and her examples are well worth visiting

I have used course portfolios in composition courses, in which students select drafts and graded papers, reflect on the process of creating them, and evaluate their own writing process and progress in a course. It is the truth that I find some of their best writing in their reflections and in their presentation of the portfolio. I have not asked students to use online tools for such a project, but look forward to doing it soon. Now that we can take advantage of more methods of telling stories, using audio, video, and photos, I think the results could be very interesting.

How would you use today’s tools to suggest creating an eportfolio?

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, education, grading, innovation, online learning, presentation , eportfolio

a new way to view data on TED Talks

A nice weekend visual post–just to make us wonder.

Filed under: aesthetics, communication, computers, innovation, technology , art, science

crowdsourcing, smart mobs, ideagoras: more collaboration or something else?

First a few terms.

crowdsourcing: from Wikipedia, “a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” Other terms for this act: “community-based design” and “distributed participatory design.” Some also call it spec work because members of the community can bid on doing the job or hope to be chosen for the job, instead of going through normal hiring methods. crowdSPRING is an online company that facilitates crowdsourcing for its members.

smart mobs: From Wikipedia, “A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior. The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.” Such mobs can physically gather just to create a scene, or they might have some social/political motivation, as in Meetups (remember how popular those were a few elections ago?). Are these virtual entities examples of the smart mob/crowdsourcing phenomenon: eBay (business built and powered by users), Second Life (a virtual world built by users), and Wikipedia, itself (an encyclopedia built and maintained by users)?

ideagoras: Depending on the context, a place/space/network/marketplace for ideas. Drawing on the popular concept of crowdsourcing, the focus is on innovation. Take the Innovate-Ideagora, related to the journal Innovate, it describes itself as “an open agora, where problems seek solutions, new visions are explored, and the status quo is challenged.” Or there’s this take on ideagoras in business that sounds a lot like any crowdsourcing article, but the concept in business often leans toward consulting services. I suppose the old think-tank is an instance of an ideagora.

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What’s in it for education?

Here’s an interesting section of the blog Education Innovation on Crowdsourcing. It’s more than one post, so scroll down through all. The first post looks forward to a crowdsourced type of wikipedia of video content that is that is educational and research driven. More likely to happen in the near future are the crowdsourced textbooks envisioned in the second post, and I expect that they would also take advantage of the participatory wiki format. Can you imagine a wikipedia-like site with tones of content on one subject? Let’s say you need course material (no longer called a textbook) for a course in Nursing and there’s a comprehensive and searchable wiki on the topic that allows you to pick and choose where to send students for readings and resources, like videos and images with Creative Commons licenses, links to professional organizations and journal articles. And you might even ask your students to work on editing a page or topic in the wiki as a way to both contribute to the profession and learn more through research.

You could have students experiment with crowdsourcing an idea on Twitter or some other microblogging service and reporting the results. Or introduce a group project using the concept of crowdsourcing to give students a fresh approach to the old group project that so many students dread. Have them create a wiki for the project or use Twitter to discuss it or let them decide what tool to use.

Lastly, as a professional concept, how do you feel about crowdsourcing a solution to a problem in teaching? Have you built a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter that could respond to your questions? Does your institution or department have a wiki or blog that can serve as an ideagora? Maybe if college committees were called Smart Mobs and allowed to behave like them, they would be more productive and would be more interested in meeting.

I knew there was one good example of using Twitter as a crowdsourcing tool for a library project: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2008/12/05/crowdsourcing_ideas_about_libraries_in_2

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, communication, crowdsourcing, ideagora, innovation, smart mobs, wiki

2009 Horizon Report

Download the 2009 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and let’s talk about it tomorrow.

[Sorry, got sidetracked by office visitors and I'm a day late with my response to the new Horizon Report.] Here are the six topics covered this year:

• mobiles
• cloud computing
• geo-everything
• personal web
• semantic-aware applications
• smart objects

I have some comments about three of them, but feel free to add your own comments about those or any on the list.

1. Mobiles carries over last year’s topic of Mobile Broadband, and I won’t be surprised to see it again until we all have mobile devices that have access to broadband and data plans. I think there are still too many people wearing blinders about our students’ access to both broadband and devices that can access the web. Many students are lucky to have laptops with which they can access our wireless on campus. So, I always take with a grain of salt ways of using cell phones in the classroom that require Web and email connectivity. So many recommended classroom uses are based on the iPhone, possibly the most expensive of the smart phones, without consideration of students’ actual devices, that I am wary of the success of such projects. I do agree, however, that we are moving closer to a time when the mobile device is commonplace and ubiquitous.
2. Geo-Everything: Again, the ability to use geo-location/GPS to tag locations, depends on mobile devices to a great extent, if you are in the field. And the report’s examples do illustrate that field work, particularly in the sciences, makes good use of geo-tagging. I’m grateful that they also include a use in literary studies of mapping out geographical locations in literary works. They use the example of The Travels of Marco Polo, and provide a link to an idea using Google Earth to explore literature. Much like recreating a virtual literary space in Second Life, this kind of visualization is engaging as it inspires students to think creatively in imagining more fully the author’s depictions.
3. Personal Web. This is particularly interesting to me, as I am thoroughly invested in having access to information at my fingertips and publishing my ideas, whether it be here on this blog, in Twitter or Facebook, on my personal Website, or my ePortfolio. The customization of personal Web space through widgets, for example, is a step in creating your own Personal Learning Network (PLN), part of the ability to educate yourself. Combined with tools like Zotero and Delicious that let you aggregate resources in links or bibliographic entries, and that let you have access to the collected resources of others, today’s students participate in their own development in ways we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago. Read a previous post about do-it-yourself sites, like PageFlakes for an example.

What I like about the Horizon Report is that is prods us to look to the future, says it’s okay to wonder about how technology might advance and how educators might use it. I think it can often have us thinking about what’s available now, as well, which is good, because now is where we are.

Filed under: digital literacy, education, innovation, learning, technology

a nod to the peanut gallery

From the comment on my recent post “yes yes, of course, the desk!” a homegrown innovation of the new touchscreen developments:

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, innovation, open source, software, technology

yes, yes, of course, the desk!

I’ve mentioned many times in this blog that the traditional classroom technology configuration offers a glorified show and tell for the instructor. Generally, there is a computer and projector, maybe a smart board, a DVD player at the head of the classroom in the instructor’s control. The layout of the classroom is still by and large in the old lecture-format layout: rows of desks facing the instructor. So, now instructors can visit website content in class in addition to showing films; they can open documents for whatever reason, perhaps to mark them up as examples of writing; if they have a document camera, they can show details of objects. Where are the students? Still sitting at desks watching the instructor interact with content, still taking notes or dozing off.

I often try to imagine the classroom of the future, and I see moveable desks and chairs, modular arrangements of computers and projection screens, video conferencing equipment that allows for live communication with distant resources. It’s a flexible and changing vision of a classroom.

The Chronicle reports on an innovation I hadn’t envisioned: smart desks! Yes, of course, interactive desks with interactive screens ready to receive tasks for collaborative work. Great idea in the search for effective learning environments.

Some say the classroom of the future is not a physical space at all, but the concept of anytime, anywhere education writ large–it’s everywhere. I see that as a viable concept, but also don’t think that physical space is going away anytime soon. For a while, I think we will be trying to adapt physical spaces to this new world through trial and error, letting in the new and moving around the desks and changing the content of the classroom experience.

In the meantime, if you are dealing with a teacher-centered arrangement of tools, think about how you can collaborate with students, creating tasks that get them up to the front, alone or in groups, to run the show and tell for a while.

Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, innovation, student-centered learning, technology

to read or not to read

Where are you when you hear interesting ideas?

Whoa! Don’t trot out your reading list of journals and organizations. You know that sometimes, as diligent as you are to read the high-brow articles and slosh through the low-brow culture of blogs, microblogs, newsfeeds, and listservs, you simply stumble upon an idea in a weird space.

Take about a half hour ago as I was walking/running on the treadmill listening to NPR on the radio (no, I don’t have an iPod; donations accepted). Here comes a story about book trailers. I swear I never heard of them before. If I want a book, I might as easily go to a bookstore as to Amazon, but at neither have I ever heard of or seen a book trailer.

Turns out they are like movie trailers, with actors and all, but meant to entice you into reading the book. Works for me, as I am the kind of reader who visualizes as she reads, concocting my own movie as I go along. Makes for slow reading, but that’s what works.

As suggested in the NPR piece, Googling “book trailers” brings up a host of sites, like Book Trailers. Apparently almost all books are promoted this way, although I have my doubts about the next critical theory tome, if those are indeed still published. Makes me wonder how this phenomenon can inspire student projects, perhaps a better version of the old book review. gather a group of your friends to rehearse an interesting scene from The Sound and the Fury and finish with your evaluation, sitting in an armchair in front of a fireplace. I’d much rather grade that effort.

Earlier today, I was reading “The Pleasure of Half-Read Books” by William McMillen in the paper version of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Now, I can relate to that. There are some books I can never finish and some authors I can never read (Bellow, for example). McMillen gives us permission to half-read away.

Well, here are these two stories rolling around in my head today, fed by the endorphins from the treadmill jaunt, I suppose. Half-reading books and watching trailers for new ones. At once, vindication and enticement.

Filed under: book trailers, digital literacy, innovation, reading, technology

TechCrunch asks about our place in the Hype Cycle

Read the post on TechCrunch first.

I like Gartner’s labeling of the hype trajectory, particularly the “peak of inflated expectations” followed by the “trough of disillusionment.” You might be surprised by what technologies they have still climbing up to the “peak” and which are already on their way to “enlightenment.” Do you agree with Gartner? I think I’d mostly like to be on that climbing side of the peak. You?

Filed under: Web 2.0, innovation, technology