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When Theron DesRosier met Margo Tamez in the fall of 2006, she was under a heavy weight; an agent from Department of Homeland Security had recently told her mother, Eloisa Garcia Tamez, that her land would be “taken either by signed waiver or by force”, she had 30 days to decide. Eloisa lives on El Calaboz Rancheria, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. These are ancestral lands that were passed down to Eloisa by her Apache foremothers /forefathers. Originally, 22,000 acres were designated for the family but over hundreds of years the land has been snatched bit by bit until now only a few acres remain.
Margo felt isolated from the struggles of her community and detached from her research. She began looking for a way to unite the two. She had no financial resources but she was determined to find a way to help her mother. In desperation she decided to go onto the Internet and share her struggle with the world. She wrote a post entitled URGENT CALL!, before thanksgiving, on a prominent blog and included her cell phone number to contact. As she was traveling home for thanksgiving people from all over the continent began calling. Her voice mail filled up. People told her stories, gave advice and encouragement. She made a point to answer every voice message.
Soon after this experience Margo wrote, “I was getting the sense that my journey home, to El Calaboz, and my ‘research’ journey were joining…suddenly keeping the two in separate spheres wasn’t appropriate anymore,”
The initial success encouraged Margo to develop the strategy further. She describes it as the Web 2.0 version of a basket communication strategy her foremothers used: designs on the baskets they carried communicated important information to the community as they worked. The key elements of this strategy are transparency and utility.
She wrote in Wikipedia and Native Wiki. She nurtured, organized and mobilized a dispersed community using blogs, myspace, facebook, and text msging. She asked members of her group to document the struggle with video cameras, then upload the videos to youtube so they could be broadcast to the world. She calls these tools her “palettes, paints, glitter”
Over the next six months her organization grew to over 300 individuals including NGO leaders, legal experts, tribal Elders, media professionals, environmentalists, artists, activists, policy makers, scholars, and Native American and Indigenous organizations. They have set precedent in two landmark federal and international legal cases and have received official organization status at the UN. And her mother still lives on her homeland.
The ePortfolio that she continues to build chronicles this journey. This experience has dramatically changed the way Margo thinks about teaching, learning, and research. Her course space is now a world accessible blog that acts as a hub for student blogs. Margo’s work has been the focus of many hours of reflection at CTLT. Our understanding of eportfolios, social networking, and distributed learning has been greatly enrich by her example. Margo’s accomplishment is also encouraging in this time of limited financial resources. With tools free to anyone on this campus, she has created a vibrant global network that joins community, research and action.
“CTLT is a core lab for my writing, thinking and being process as a researcher.”
Margo Tamez
Dr. Patrick Pedrow has been working closely with the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology over the last two years to re-vision the Electrical and Computer Engineering senior design sequence to integrate the development and direct assessment of key engineering professional skills, all of which can be considered global competencies and which are critical to preparing our graduates for success in the interdisciplinary, multicultural interactions that characterize 21st century engineering careers. In addition, his new course is offered as an electronic portfolio, with nested team and individual student portfolios. CTLT applauds his enthusiasm, commitment to collaboration and risk-taking that comes with trying out the new.
We have been writing about an idea for a new approach to assessment of student work taking place in Web 2.0 environments. Gary Brown coined the term Harvesting Gradebook to describe this idea.
You are invited to try the Harvesting Gradebook as a member of the world community. This time-sensitive opportunity is part of a Washington State University course happening during Spring 2009.
Please understand that you are working with real students and an instructor in an actual running course. We appreciate your thoughtful and sensitive feedback. This blog also welcomes your meta-comments on the idea and the experience.
PROCESS
The instructor’s blog contains the assignment a series of posts which serve as the assignment prompt beginning here and adding some style guides and then some clarifications about the blog content and the assessment criteria and then a topic list. The balance of the instructor’s blog are personal reflections and modeling of activities in the assignment.
The instructor’s blog roll provides a link to the student blogs. In them you will see multiple posts by students, inviting traditional blog comments, and (in many cases) with an invitation to a “survey” that will look something like this:
Please evaluate this post:
http://skylight.wsu.edu/s/xxxxx.srv
You can preview the survey (opens in new window) (don’t post review data here, this is a just a preview ). Previewing is worth while because you will be asked to reflect on the assignment prompt, the student work and the value of the rubric itself. This 360-degree review is a reason we are calling this a transformative assessment approach.
Understand this is a work in progress, we are revising based on feedback and our own reflection. Also, understand that we are attempting to model the process by which this kind of process is evolved by the community using it, so your feedback to us (comment or trackback) is valuable. Please give us meta-comments on the process that are not appropriate for the feedback form itself.
If this experience whets your appetite to learn more about our thinking, a collection of materials can be found in a round table we prepared for AAC&U in January .
Nils Peterson, Gary Brown, Jayme Jacobson, Theron DesRosier
The AAC&U 2009 conference, Global Challenge, College Learning, and America’s Promise asks a series of questions about “the relationship between college learning and society” and the Call for Proposal notes “[College and university] failure to fully engage our publics with the kinds of learning best suited to our current needs…” [For further evidence of this failure, see Boeing to Rank Colleges, Chronicle, 9/19/08 (comment added 9/18/08)]
[Additional evidence of this challenge comes from the students themselves, in this manifesto Innovate or Die, Student2oh.org, accessed 10/7/08, Anthony Chiveta argues that this generation of students understands the Web 2.0 concept and wants it applied to education (see also Learning 2.0) (comment added 10/7/08)]
The following is an abstract submitted in response to the Call above. It served as an opportunity to “rise above” our work on these topics and reflect on its implications.
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Assessment of learning by a community inside and outside the classroom is a key component to developing students’ global competencies and building a strong relationship between college learning and society.
In 2007-08 Washington State University conducted an ePortfolio Contest to demonstrate ways to harness the interests and expertise of the WSU community to address real world problems encountered by communities both locally and globally. It called upon contestants to collaborate with community members – institutional, local, or global – to identify a problem, explore solutions, develop a plan, and then take steps toward implementing that plan. Contestants were asked to use electronic portfolios to capture and reflect on their collaborative problem-solving processes and the impact of their projects. Judges from industry, the local community, and WSU used a rubric based on the WSU Critical Thinking Rubric to evaluate the portfolios. Since the contest, we have been distilling design principles for portfolios that facilitate learning.
This exploration has taught us to value the learner consciously leaving a ‘learning trace’ as they work on a problem, and we believe the capturing and sharing of that trace is an important part of documenting learning. A striking example illustrating a learning trace in a portfolio is one of the winners in our contest. Not only does this portfolio exhibit a learning trace, it captures feedback from the community regarding the quality of the work. A recent AAC&U survey of employers supports this bias for richer documentation of learner skills.
Our thinking about portfolios for learning is moving us away from traditional ideas about courses contained in classrooms and toward Stephen Downes’ eLearning 2.0 ideas: “Students’ [learning portfolios] are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students [work in this way], is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network, and much like Wenger’s community of practice.” And far from being trivial social networking, our portfolio contest captured rich and substantive learning happening in the community outside the classroom.
But documentation of learning, without feedback, guidance and assessment leaves the learner to work without the support of a community, which has led us to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of a Learning 1.0 model. To address that, we have been exploring ways to transform the grade book (see this and this) to support learners working simultaneously within the university and within their communities of practice. This approach to a grade book has the additional benefit for the scholarship of teaching and learning of gathering feedback on the assignment, course and program from the community at the same time that it invites the community to assess a learner’s work. Such feedback can help the university engage its publics in a discussion of the kinds of learning most suited to current needs.
The questions in the AAC&U Call will be used to help the audience highlight and frame the discussion of our ideas.
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The Call “invites proposals of substantive, engaging sessions that will raise provocative questions, that will engage participants in discussion, and that will create and encourage dialogue–before, during, and after the conference itself.”
In the spirit of the AAC&U call, you are invited to engage this discussion before or after the conference by posting comments here, on the related pages, or by tracking back from your own blog, and then meet us in Seattle to further the conversation.
Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson, Nils Peterson
Previously we described ideas on Transforming the Grade Book, by way of elaborating on Gary Brown’s ideas of a “Harvesting Gradebook.”
Here we demonstrate an implementation of those ideas in the form of a website with student work and embedded assessment. This demonstration is implemented in Microsoft SharePoint with the WSU Critical and Integrative Thinking rubric as the criteria and a Google Doc survey as the data collection vehicle, but other platforms could be used to contain the student work and other assessment rubrics delivered in other survey tools could be developed. (Note- this implementation is built with baling wire and duct tape and the implementation would not scale.)
There are four examples of student work (a Word document with track changes, a blog post, a wiki diff and an email), to illustrate the variety of student work that might be collected and the variety of contexts in which students might be working. This student work might be organized as part of an institutionally sponsored hub-and-spoke style LMS or in an institutionally sponsored ePortfolio (as WSU is doing with SharePoint mySites) or directly in venues controlled by the student (see for example the blog and email examples below) where the student embeds a link to the grade book provided by the academic program.
Examples of Assessing Student Work (aka transformed ‘grading’)
The first example is a Microsoft Word document, stored in SharePoint, and included in this page with Document Viewer web part. You are seeing the track changes and comments in the Word document. In some browsers you will see pop-up notes and the identities of the reviewers.
To the right of the document is the rubric for assessing the work. Clicking on “Expand” in the rubric will open a new window with details of the rubric dimension and a Google Doc survey where you can enter a numeric score and comments of your assessment of the work with this criteria.
This survey also collects information about your role because it is important in our conceptualization of this transformed grade book to have multiple perspectives and to be able to analyze feedback based on its source.
In our description of the workflow that for this assessment process we say:
Instructors start the process by defining assignments for their classes and “registering” them with the academic program. Various metadata are associated with the assignment in the registration process. Registration is important because in the end the process we propose will be able to link up student work, assessment of the work, the assignment that prompted the work, and assessments of the assignment.
This demonstration shows one of the important impacts of the “registration” — as a reviewer of the student’s work, you can follow a link to see the assignment that generated this piece of student work, AND, you can then apply the assessment criteria to the assignment itself.
Finally, as an effort in ongoing improvement of the assessment instrument itself, the survey asks for information about the learning outcome, its description and relevance, with the assumption that the rubric is open for revision over time.
In this demo, you can complete the survey and submit data, but your data will not be visible in later parts of the demo. Rather, specific data for demonstration purposes will be presented elsewhere.
The second example is a blog post, in Blogger, included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right of the post is the rubric implemented in the form of a survey. With the Page Viewer web part the reviewer can navigate around the web from the blog post to see relevant linked items.
While this demonstration has embedded the blog post into a SharePoint site, that is not a requirement. The student could embed the rubric into the footer of the specific blog or in the margin of the whole blog. To demonstrate the former of these ideas, we have embedded a sample at the bottom of this post. Adding criterion-based feedback extends the power of comment and trackback already inherent in blogging.
The third example is a Wiki Diff, again included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right is a rubric implemented in the form of a survey.
The fourth example is an email the student wrote. This was embedded into the SharePoint site, but as with the blog example, the author could have included a link to criterion-based review as part of the footer of the email.
A subsequent post will address visualization of this data by the student, the instructor, and the academic program.
Nils Peterson, Theron Desrosier, Jayme Jacobson
CTLT has been thinking about portfolios for learning and their relationship to institutionally supported learning tools and course designs. This thinking has us moving away from the traditional LMS. It has also led to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of Learning 1.0. In a recent Campus Technology interview Gary Brown introduced the term “harvesting gradebook” to describe the grade book that a faculty needs to work in these decentralized environments.
“Right now at WSU, one of the things we’re developing in collaboration with Microsoft is a ‘harvesting’ gradebook. So as an instructor in an environment like this, my gradebook for you as a student has links to all the different things that are required of you in order for me to credit you for completing the work in my class. But you may have worked up one of the assignments in Flickr, another in Google Groups, another in Picasa, and another in a wiki.”
This post will provide more definition and a potential implementation for this new kind of transformed grade book. It is the result of a conversation between Nils Peterson, Theron DesRosier and Jayme Jacobson diagrammed here.
Figure 1: White board used for drafting these ideas. Black ink is “traditional” model, Blue is a first variation, Red is a second variation.
The process begins with a set of criteria that is agreed by to be useful by a community and is adopted across an academic program. An example is WSU’s Critical Thinking Rubric. This rubric was developed by the processes of a “traditional” academic community. How the process changes as the community changes will be discussed below.
Instructors start the process by defining assignments for their classes and “registering” them with the program. Various metadata are associated with the assignment in the registration process. Registration is important because in the end the process we propose will be able to link up student work, assessment of the work, the assignment that prompted the work, and assessments of the assignment. More implications of this registration will be seen below.
The student works the assignment and produces a solution in any number of media and venues, which might include the student’s ePortfolio (we define ePortfolio broadly). The student combines their work with the program’s rubric (in a survey format). The rubric survey is administered to either a specifically selected list of reviewers or to an ad hoc group. (We have been experimenting with two mechanisms for doing this “combining.” One places the rubric survey on the page with the student’s work as a sidebar or footer (analogous to a Comment feature, or the “Was this helpful?” survey included in some online resources). This approach is public to anyone who can access the web page. The other strategy imbeds a link to the student’s work in a survey, it can be targeted to a specific reviewer. This example comes from the judging CTLT’s 2nd ePortfolio contest.
In either case the survey collects a score and qualitative feedback for the student’s work. We are imagining the survey engine is centrally hosted so that all the data is compiled into a single location and therefore is accessible to the academic program. Data can be organized by student, assignment, academic term, or course. A tool we are developing that can do this is called Skylight Matrix Survey System, which is rebranded as Flashlight Online 2.0 by the TLT Group. The important properties of Skylight for this application are the ability to render a rubric question type and the ability to have many survey instances (respondent pools) within one survey and both report instances individually and aggregate the data across some/all the instances.
Audiences for this data
The transformative aspects of this strategy arise from the multiple audiences for the resulting data. We have labeled these collections of data, and the capacities to present the data to audiences “assessment necklaces”
Figure 2: Diagram of rubric-based assessment. Learners, peers, and faculty are shown collecting data from rubric-based assessment of portfolios, then reflecting on and presenting the multiple data points (necklaces) in contexts important to them.
Students can review the data for self-reflection and can use the data as evidence in a learning portfolio. We are exploring ideas like Google’s Motion Chart gadget (aka Trednalyzer/Gapminder) to help visualize this data over time. They can also learn from giving rubric-based reviews to peers and by comparing themselves to aggregates of peer data.
Instructors can use the data (probably presented in the student’s course portfolio) for “grading” in a course. It’s worth noting that the Instructor’s assignments can be assessed with the same rubric, asking, “To what extent does this assignment advance each the goals of this rubric?” With the assignment rated, instructors can review the data across multiple students, assignments, and semesters for their own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Here the instructor can combine the rubric score of an assignment with the student performance on the assignment to improve the assignment. Instructors might also present this comparison data in a portfolio for more authentic teaching evaluations.
In this example the assignment might be rated by students or the instructor’s peers. Below, the rating of the assignment by wider communities will be explored.
Academic Programs can look across multiple courses and terms, for program-level learning outcomes and SoTL. They can also present the data in showcase portfolios used for recruiting students and faculty, funding and partners. This is where the collective registration of the assignment becomes important. The program can access the assignment in the context of the program, with an eye to coordinate assignments and courses to improve the coherence of the program outcomes.
The community, which might include accrediting bodies, employers and others, can use the data, as presented in portfolios by students, instructors, and the academic program, to reflect on, or give feedback to, the academic program. Over time, an important effect of this feedback should be to open dialogs that lead to changes in the rubric.
Variations on this model
The description above is still traditional in at least two important ways: the program (ie faculty) develop the rubric and the instructor decides the assignment. Variants are possible where outside interested parties participate in these activities.
First variation. WSU and University of Idaho run a joint program in Food Science. We have observed that the program enrolls a significant number of international students, from nations where food security is a pressing issue. We imagine that those nations view training food scientists as a national strategy for economic development.
We have imagined a model where the students (in conjunction with their sponsoring country), and interested NGOs, bring problem statements to the program and the program designs itself so that students are working on aspects of their problem while studying. The sponsors would also have an interest in the rubric, and students would be encouraged (required?) to maintain contacts with sponsors and NGOs and cultivate among them people to provide evaluations using the rubric.
The processes and activities described above would be similar, but the input from stakeholders would be more prominent than in the traditional university course. Review of the assignments, and decisions about the rubric, would be done within this wider community (two universities, national sponsors and NGOs). The review of assignments and the assessment of the relationship of assignments and learning products creates a very rich course evaluation, well beyond the satisfaction models presently used in traditional courses.
Second variation. This option opens the process up further and provides a model to implement Stephen Downes’ idea in Open Source Assessment. Downes says “were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.”
In our idea of this model, the learner would come with the problem, or find a problem, and following Downes, learners would present aspects of their work to be evaluated with the program’s rubric, and the institution would credential the work based on its (and the community’s) judging of the problem/solution with the rubric. This sounds a lot like graduate education, the learner defines a problem of significance to a community and addresses that problem to the satisfaction of the community. In our proposed implementation, the ways that the community has access to the process are made more explicit.
In this variant, the decision about the rubric is an even broader community dialog and the assessment of the instructor (now mentor/learning coach) will be done by the community, both in terms of the skills demonstrated by students that the instructor mentored, and by the nature of the problems/approaches/solutions that were a result of the mentoring. The latter asks, is the instructor mentoring the student toward problems that are leading or lagging the thinking of the community?
Examples
For some sense of learning portfolios created by the processes above, consider these winners from CTLT’s 2007-08 ePortfolio contest.
The following two winners are examples of the second variant, where students were paired with a problem from a sponsor:
The Kayafungo Women’s Water Project documents the efforts of Engineers Without Borders at WSU (EWB@WSU) who partnered with the Student Movement for Real Change to provide clean water to 35,000 people in Kayafungo, Kenya.
The EEG Patient Monitoring Device portfolio follows the learning process of four MBA students who collaborated with faculty, the WSU Research Foundation, inventors, and engineers to develop a business plan for a wireless EEG patient monitoring device.
The next two are examples of the second variant — student defined problems assessed by the community. In the latter case, the student is using the work, both her activism in the community and her study-in-action as her dissertation:
The Grace Foundation started with a vision to create a non-profit organization that would assist poor and disenfranchised communities across Nigeria in four areas: Education, Health, Entrepreneurship and Advocacy. The author used the UN online volunteering program to form a team to develop a participatory model of development that addresses issues of poverty eradication from a holistic manner.
El Calaboz Portfolio chronicles the use of Internet and media strategies by the Lipan Apache Women’s Defense, a group that has grown in national and international prominence the last 75 days, from less than 10 people in August, to an e-organization of over 312 individuals currently working collectively. It now includes NGO leaders, tribal leaders, media experts, environmentalists, artists, and lawyers from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. It recently received official organization status at the UN.
The next steps in this work at WSU are to build worked examples of these software tools and to recruit faculty partners to collaborate in a small scale pilot implementation.
This is one of the “portfolio patterns” (borrowing from the “Pattern Language” of Christopher Alexander) we have distilled from our case study of users creating learning portfolios
The goal for, and perhaps a defining characteristic of, a learning portfolio is to be a workspace in which to solve a problem. That is the feature that makes it like a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and unlike the common showcase portfolio.
In an article in the Chronicle appearing March 7, 2008, James Barker gives an example of this type of workspace as a physical place, the architecture studio:
“In my view, the architecture design studio is the best learning experience ever invented to produce the kind of deep, engaged learning and creative graduates that are so needed today. Small groups of students work with a master teacher on a semester-long or yearlong team project to design solutions to a specific problem or to meet a particular need…“For example, our students in planning and design have helped communities throughout our state preserve historic buildings, revitalize dying town centers, and plan new parks, bikeways, and green space. For every project, they interview the key people involved; gather statistics on demographics and traffic patterns; collect previous plans, deeds, and plats; photograph the site from every conceivable angle; and put all of those data on a computer.
“Eventually they brainstorm ideas, discuss them, refine them, and present them to their teachers and clients in a process that we, in architecture, call a “design charette.” Then, and only then, are the best ideas sifted through the filter of what is possible…
“In the process of doing such public-service projects, our students learn about research, communication, interpersonal relationships, culture, politics, municipal government, creativity (its power and its limits), and teamwork.”
The studio space in which this work is done becomes a walk-in portfolio, with sketches, photos, models displayed on every surface and open for comment by all passers-by.
Here are some examples of learning portfolio questions
- How should Public Broadcasting respond to Web 2.0? – Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO NPR
- What makes a Global University? – Theron DesRosier
- Unlocking the Apple iPhone – George Hotz
- Resisting the dividing of Apache Homeland and community – Margo Tamez
- Patterns, Systems and designing a sustainable world – Justin Griffis
- Eclectons – spontaneously assembled art – JaymeJ
- Exploring economic development and a land grant university – John Gardner, Vice President for Economic Development and WSU Extension
A Learning Portfolio tracks growth over time
In order to be an aid to the learner solving a problem, the portfolio needs to track the artifacts of the work, and needs to facilitate and encourage the learner to look at their growth over time. As we will see, this same property of tracking growth will play a role in assessing the learning outcomes.
Carol Dweck writes in The Secret to Raising Smart Kids: “Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a ‘growth mind-set,’ which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.”
So what implications, if any, would these concepts have on the design of learning opportunities. For starters, what if the interface to view growth focused more on learning over time instead of grades on high stakes tests? We have been looking at tools like Gapminder (Trendalyzer) and Microsoft’s Photosynth for inspirations of tools could allow learners to see patterns hidden within the data of their learning record. We are imagining a learning tool that would provide the student a way to view dynamic representations of their approach/efforts/ learning over time instead of a series of grades in a drop box.
Learning inside/ Outside the University
Self-directed vs Teacher Directed Learning
In Imagine there’s no courses, Jeff Cobb points at George Seimens’ World without courses (voice over slides) and each explore the question of how organizations and institutions measure and derive value from unstructured, informal learning activities. Examining learning portfolios has us looking an these issues and the ways informal learners (e.g. Hotz) create learning communities and tackle and solve complex problems and how they derive rewards from the learning gained.
Stephen Downes’ writing on the ‘ideal open online course’ concludes that it would ‘not look like a course at all, just the assessment.’ He postulates, “were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.”
And Clay Burrell echos some of Downes’ ideas when he writes about learning writing in a a blog (aka learning portfolio) situated in community and in context, “students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set… assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking… self-assessment (italics added) and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles.” Here Burrell is rephrasing Downes “in a non-reductive system [of assessment] accomplishment in a discipline is recognized.”
It is this latter behavior that we are seeing in some of the learning portfolios we are studying, coaches within the institution helping students learning outside of it but the measure of accomplishment is recognition by and among communities.
And this thinking leads us to rethink the relationship of the institution and its students to its alumni. For example, graduate student Dana Desoto met with Theron Desrosier and Jayme Jacobson recently about an alumni web site for the WSU School of Communications. This led to a good brainstorm about the goals of the project, the value for the university and for the alumni, and the assumptions we have about the relationship of the Alumni to the university.
The idea they developed was a collaborative learning portfolio that connects alumni and students with common interests and promotes the flow of intellectual capital between the Communications School and the professional community.
Value to Alumni:
- Alumni use comm. students as a economical source of innovation.
- Alumni propose projects for teams of students (build a web 2.0 marketing strategy for my company)
- Alumni who are looking for new employees get a more authentic picture of skills and abilities.
- Alumni are valued as more than a deep pocket.
Value to Students:
- Comm. students use alumni as a source of authentic activities, advice, connection to the profession, and feedback.
- Comm students build eportfolios around real projects as evidence for learning and/or hiring.
Value for Communications School:
- Comm School uses this symbiosis as a source of feedback on the alignment and relevance of curriculum, learning outcomes, and activity design.
- The professional community is a partner in the continual improvement of the program.
Who is the Learner/Who is the Audience?
Blurring the boundaries of the university by facilitating students working on authentic problems situated in communities outside the university, and assessing their work, not with reductive tests, but with the level of recognition and accomplishment the student achieves does something else. It blurs the line between the learner and the audience.
We are seeing this blurring in the portfolios we have studied. We are beginning to talk about learning communities where members play differing roles in supporting the learning growth of the whole. George Hotz honors this learning community when he credits his collaborators even as the national press is focused on him.
This is the first in a series of posts describing some work funded by Microsoft. We are posting in this format to invite reader comment and trackback. The work described below is an example of a learning portfolio, and this post is our problem statement.
Nils Peterson, Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson, Gary Brown
Introduction
We have written about students’ changing technology proclivities and the changing landscape for Learning Management Systems (LMS) in this Microsoft white paper for EDUCAUSE 2007, in JOLT, Innovate, this blog, and in this interview). This document begins a case study of learners who use electronic portfolios to advance their learning. It does not explore uses of electronic portfolios as “showcases” of best work. The latter uses are facilitated by ePortfolio tools in several of the common LMS products and in several widely used Student Information Systems whose common trait is to facilitate institutional assessment, not learning.
The kinds of uses of ePortfolios we are examining are closely aligned with Personal Learning Environments (PLE). What we are finding in the cases that follow are users implementing what is suggested in Scott Wilson’s Future VLE diagram; an ad hoc, assemblage of Web 2.0 components (the term “Worldware” applies to the components). (Scott refers to a “VLE” (virtual learning environment) which might be either a personal or institutional learning environment. For our purposes here, read Scott as proposing a PLE.)
One of the questions we are exploring in this work is the potential of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 MySite Subsites (WSS) to serve as the central building block in Wilson’s Future VLE, a hub for the learner, and potentially a collaboration and/or presentation space for the learner or learner and segment of the community.
In this document, we prefer to retain the term “portfolio,” rather than PLE, for these activities because we want to connect to a body of literature on portfolio practices, including the commonly offered mantra: collect, select, reflect, connect and project (into the world). We draw a sharp distinction between the learning portfolio discussed here and the “showcase” or summative portfolio, especially when the creation of the portfolio is at the request of a third party for summative assessment purposes.
We also prefer the portfolio language to that of PLE because we value the learner consciously leaving a ‘learning trace’ as they work on a problem in the space, and we see the capturing and sharing of that trace is an important part of documenting learning. A recent employer poll supports this bias for richer documentation of learner skills. Some of our interest in this work began by documenting the learning trace that is evident in Hotz’ blog of his collaboration to unlock the iPhone.
In addition to Hotz, we have been examining electronic learning portfolios created by students and professionals at Washington State University, conducting interviews of them, which were captured with audio recordings, white board diagrams and/or both.
Several themes arise from studying these cases:
- Learning portfolios have a goal, or problem to solve;
- They adopt strategies that are public;
- They are implemented in multiple tools and spaces where collaborators are already present, or can be expected to congregate;
- They understand Social Capital, and the portfolio practitioner seeks to develop and leverage it;
- A key use of Social Capital and a reason to work in public is to develop an assessment community that can provide feedback and insights;
- The portfolio, especially its repository strategies attempt to facilitate reflection and synthesis to move the learner (and community) from information to idea to action;
- Users of Learning Portfolios work in multiple modes, including the arts, to convey their synthesis and call to action.
Other posts in this series can be found in this blog, under the category Learning Portfolio.
