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EUROPORTFOLIOEuropean Network of Eportfolio Experts and Practitioners
IN THIS ISSUE• New Portal for the ePortfolio Community
Feature! 2• Maintaining an ePortfolio will become
tomorrow's equivalent of achieving certification and polishing up one's resumé
• Does the use of a portfolio motivate learning?
• Punished by Open Badges?
On the Watch! 7• Empowerment goes ePortfolio: ICT &
entrepreneurship for girls• Developing competencies of occupational
therapists with ePortfolio• Everything you want to know about
ePortfolios
News! 10• Croatian Europortfolio Chapter• Nordic Europortfolio Chapter• French Europortfolio Chapter• ePortfolios in the UK• Lessons learned from ePortfolio
implementation at Nottingham University• Portfolio in Sweden – Alive and Growing• Badge the World, Badge Europe
Events! 14• Conference review: New visions on
Microlearning and OERs• ePIC 2013 Proceedings available• Open Badges Conference Calls• MoodleMaharaMoot 2014• Mahara UK Conference 2014• ePIC 2014: Evidence-Based Learning
New Portal for the ePortfolio CommunityWe have great pleasure in announcing the new version of the Europortfolio portal! The latest version of the portal reflects the gain in maturity of the Europortfolio initiative. During the first phase of the project we have invited the community to help us in establishing the map of ePortfolio initiatives, projects, organisations, people, publications, etc. Despite the imperfections of its first version, the portal now provides access to nearly 500 entries, many interconnected, which is a good enough number to start exploring further how to make this information more accessible and useful.
The new version also provides a dedicated space for each Europortfolio Chapter as well as for the projects Europortfolio will be supporting in the future. The recently created Nordic, Croatian and
French chapters have started to explore the new portal and publish information in their own language.
It is now also easier for those registered on the Europortfolio portal to publish and find information as well as contributing to discussions.
As we plan to continuously improve your portal, we are very eager to listen to your comments, suggestions and critiques. Your feedback helps us in shaping the Europortfolio portal to match YOUR needs! Our objective is to make it the most comprehensive and most user-friendly repository of information related to ePortfolios and ePortfolio-related initiatives.
The information collected in the portal will be freely accessible to other applications and services, so if you want to build your own portal using the Europortfolio data, it will be possible.
The new portal also means a change in the publication of the newsletter: the next newsletter should not be distributed as a PDF file (like this one) but in HTML. The articles and news will be published directly on the portal and accessible under the different rubrics (feature, initiatives, practice, events, etc.). This way, information will be accessible immediately.
The Europortfolio team wishes you a great holiday season!
Seasons Greetings
Serge Ravet & Igor Balaban, Europortfolio
Join us and follow us on @europortfolio!
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Newsletter 3 September-December 2013
Join Europortfolio
You want to be involved in shaping the future of the Europortfolio? You would like to be selected as a member of the Europortfolio Steering Committee or set-up a national/regional chapter of Special Interest Group?
Sign the Charter!
www.europor t fo l i o .o rg
F E A T U R EMaintaining an ePortfolio will become tomorrow's equivalent of
achieving certification and polishing up one's resuméBy Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada
The UOC asked Stephen Downes for a special contribution to the newsletter and we are very pleased to include his contribution in this issue of the Newsletter.
ePortfolios have been around for a number of years now and we're beginning to see how they may be applied in learning and development. An ePortfolio is a collection of digital materials uploaded by a student to an ePortfolio repository; the repository owners can then make this material available publicly to prospective employers or clients, as requested by the student. A good example of such a system is the Desire2Learn ePortfolio system. http://www.desire2learn.com/products/eportfolio/ A good ePortfolio system will not only allow storage and sharing, but also interact with social networks and support comments and annotations.
As Helen Barrett illustrates on her ePortfolio website http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/index.html the role of ePortfolios has developed in two major directions over the years. On the one hand, the portfolio may focus predominately on learning and reflection. Such a portfolio may come to resemble a student's journal or sketchbook. On the other hand, the portfolio may be used primarily for evaluation and assessment, becoming more a documentation of achievement that a personal workspace. As Barrett notes, the former model focuses on the ePortfolio as process, while the latter contemplates the ePortfolio as product.
In recent years discussion of ePortfolios has been eclipsed by the excitement around massive open online courses (MOOCs). I think this is a mistake. It is important to encourage students to create and share their own work. That said, the focus on taking many courses from multiple providers makes it difficult to reply on a single provider's ePortfolio service. Increasingly, students will have to manage the hosting of their online portfolios on their own.
In the MOOCs we have offered over the years, such as Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08), we approached this issue by encouraging students to use their own blogs or websites. In this case, the primary function of the central course management system was not to create and store student ePortfolios, but to aggregate from them and to facilitate the sharing of their contents with other students. In this light, a worthwhile project developed at University of Mary Washington called "a domain of one's own" is probably the modern version of ePortfolios.http://umwdomains.com/ It encourages students to establish their own web presence independently of service providers.
Increasingly in the future students will be responsible for managing their own online learning records and creative products. Though they may use a variety of services - such as Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Google Docs, and more - to store their work, they will need to manage these resources, index them, and enable access to them. This will enable them to balance between the process-oriented and product-oriented aspect of their work. This will become important as employers will over time rely less on tests and formal assessments, and will instead look for tangible evidence of personal achievement in web-based repositories. Maintaining an ePortfolio will become tomorrow's equivalent of achieving certification and polishing up one's resumé.
Stephen Downes works for the National Research Council of Canada where he has served as a Senior Researcher, based in Moncton, New Brunswick, since 2001. Affiliated with the Learning and Collaborative Technologies Group, Institute for Information Technology, Downes specializes in the fields of online learning, new media, pedagogy and philosophy.
Downes is perhaps best known for his daily newsletter, OLDaily, which is distributed by web, email and RSS to thousands of subscribers around the world, and as the originator of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). more ...
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Does the use of a portfolio motivate learning?
By Lise AgerbækResearch Assistant, Knowledge Lab, University of Southern Denmark
For 11 years, at Lillebaelt Academy of Professional Higher Education (EAL) in Denmark, we have been asking our students two create portfolios. One of the expectations with this practice was that students would be motivated to find their own meaning in their education. This article explores whether the portfolio, as a pedagogical method - scaffolding learning - is in itself motivating? Is it actually a way for students to find meaning while studying when looking back at the past semester?
Meaningfulness through narrationThe starting point of Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning (1990) is based on a shift of understanding of self from perceiving it as an inner entity to regarding it as a subject of continuous construction. He describes the praxis of constructing a narrative about oneself as a way to make one’s life meaningful. With Bruner’s words:
For stories have to do with how protagonists interpret things, what things mean to them. This is built into the circumstance of story - that it involves both a cultural convention and a deviation from it that is explicable in terms of an individual international state. This gives stories not only a moral status but an epistemic one. (Bruner 1990: 51).
From this viewpoint a portfolio can create a place and a frame to place the “story” about a student through showing his "things" - examples of his own work - and what he has learned from making them. So the epistemic or epistemological content Bruner refers to in the above quote is in the case of the portfolio a possibility for the student to construct himself as a learner with a learning goal.
Is it then motivating to make a portfolio?But does this mean that the portfolio as a pedagogical method - scaffolding learning - is motivational in itself? In a focus group study, conducted by myself and Ida Borch in 2008 among users of the electronic portfolio at EAL - both graduates 3rd and 4th semester students - it appeared to a number of the students that the use
of the portfolio was not motivating in itself. As one of the graduates expressed during the interview:
”While working with the portfolio I thought it was silly. But now – when reflecting on it – I can see that it did in fact lead to a better self-understanding. And it created a desire to set new goals for what I wanted to learn during the programme. If I should be philosophical about it, I have to say that it did indeed give me something; it has given me a more in depth view into myself”
A study of the relationship between motivation and the use of portfolio from 2010 by Laura de Bruin
among 156 future portfolio users who sought admission to the University of Utrecht also suggests that students do not, in itself, find the possibility of " self- construction" motivating. Rather, they find it challenging and difficult.
As Niels Henrik Helms puts it:
The pupil is in this formation process governed by a dual requirement for development. Double, because the pupil must be both in a self-observed development and at the same time should be able to put this development in relation to national targets for levels of development ... The modern school life therefore requires an enormous sensitivity on the pupil's side in terms of how he or she should place him/herself in levels of development, so there
is always room to showcase both progression and potential. This "enormous sensitivity" often has the result that the pupil gets stuck - and for example asks: How can I get good grades in portfolio? (Agerbæk, Ellmin, Helms, Qvortup 2010 : 61).
As teachers, we want to make the portfolio available as a potential self-construction platform; this means a place where students can test themselves - and for professional education programs, define themselves in relation to a future profession. The portfolio offers this because it is owned by the students themselves - and he or she manages (at least in the Multimedia studies) both expression and content.
The problem is that the students do not necessarily feel a self-construction need. As the earlier quote from the focus group suggested, it seems more meaningful or motivational retrospectively.
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Shall we leave it there?A 2011 study by Cindy P. Stevens from Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, however seems to confirm the outcomes of the EAL focus group interview: among 200 students, 80.7 % agreed or strongly agreed with the statement :
"After finishing my EP [electronic portfolio, ed.], I can tell that I have demonstrated significant improvements."
It would appear that we have sufficient evidence demonstrating the benefits of "forcing" students to learn with a portfolio, while it may be naive to imagine that it is, in itself, motivating. The above focus group interviews also ends with the students asking for a clearer understanding of what the benefits of the - quite large – work creating a
portfolio can be. They ask for a clear description of the intent and a clear scaffolding of their work.
In return, the portfolio as a learning technology has the potential to be a platform for a playful design of self.
ReferencesBruner, Jerome (1990) Acts of Meaning, Harvard University Press
Helms, Niels Henrik (2010) The modern project - and the portfolio as one of many successful technologies? In Agerbæk, Ellmin, Helms and Qvortrup Portfolio problematikker, Knowledge Lab
Wood, David Bruner, Jerome and Ross, Gail (1976) The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving, in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 17, Issue 2
Punished by Open Badges?Why Open Badges Could Either Kill or Cure Learning?
Serge Ravet, ADPIOS
As many Open Badges supporters, and self-appointed ambassadors, I had absolutely no reservation regarding Open Badges: I saw them as the natural development of the work I did on ePortfolios as a means to support, recognise and celebrate learning and achievements: I envisioned Open Badges as a means to create an open and distributed ePortfolio architecture.
I saw no evil in Open Badges. That is, until I learned about Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. As the book was written by Alfie Kohn in 1993, revised in 1999, it does not address Open Badges, nor ePortfolios. Yet, the book provides plenty of evidence from research eliciting the deleterious effects of awards and praises on learning (and work), one of the most noxious legacies of B.F. Skinner, the psychologist described by Alfie Kohn as the one who “experimented with pigeons and wrote on people.”
Why Open Badges Could Kill the Desire to Learn?The Problem with Open Badges as ‘Incentives’ to LearnWhat does research tell us regarding the use of awards and incentives?
Lepper and his colleagues set about conducting an experiment to figure out what had been going on in those Head Start classrooms. They gave fifty-one preschoolers a chance to draw with Magic Markers—something that most children of that age find very appealing. Some of them, however, were told that if they drew pictures they would each receive a special, personalized certificate, decorated with a red ribbon and a gold star. Between a week and two weeks later, the children were observed in their classrooms. Those who had been told in advance of the certificate they would receive, Lepper discovered, now seemed to be less interested in drawing with Magic Markers than the other children were—and less interested than they themselves had been before the reward was offered. (Punished by Rewards p. 70)
Why would anyone expect that replacing “a special, personalized certificate, decorated with a red ribbon and a gold star” with an Open Badge bring any different results? Yet, there are many initiatives where Open Badges are not that different from glorified gold stars…
The crux of the problem is that, from politicians to educators, many believe in the value of control through extrinsic rewards and incentives: if it works with pets, it should also work with humans! Probably the right thing to do, if the objective is subservience
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and conformity, less if it is to encourage innovation and authentic democracy.
More realistically, we must acknowledge that because pop behaviorism is fundamentally a means of controlling peopl.5e, it is by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants. Rewarding people for making changes in the existing order (which might include the very order that allows some individuals to be controllers and others controlled) is not merely unlikely but a contradiction in terms. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as one writer put it. (ibid. p. 30)
The Problem with Extrinsic IncentivesThere are a number of problems associated with the use of extrinsic incentives, whether they are physical or digital, verbal (praise) or monetary, delivered at schools, home or work. What are they?
One of the main problems with extrinsic incentives is that they are based on a view of mankind akin to pets —which should not come as a surprise for a theory built primarily on the observation of pigeons and rats! The function of rewards and incentives is to control the behaviour of the person it is offered to. Incentive systems are inherently asymmetrical (which a very unfortunate characteristic of the current state of the Open Badge Infrastructure…): there is the incentive (resp. badge) provider and the incentive (resp. badge) receiver. What is expected from the receiver is subservience, conformity to externally-defined standards, like the need to keep silent in class and do as your peers.
Some believe that the use of rewards in schools is a necessary preparation for the world of work where rewards is common practice. Unfortunately for the supporters of this argument, there are numerous examples of businesses displaying an inverse correlation between the use of incentive plans and profitability. And there is a very good reason for that: successful businesses rely on empowered employees, ready to take responsibility for their own actions and that of their colleagues, willing to take risks and contribute to innovation.
There is less inclination to take risks or explore possibilities, which helps explain why creativity declines when people are driven by rewards. Thus, as Philip Slater observes, “getting people to chase money … produces nothing except people chasing money. Using money as a motivator leads to a progressive degradation in the quality of everything produced.” (ibid. p. 139)
Another interesting point to observe in incentives-run systems is that they are based on distrust: schools do not trust that pupils really want to learn or are able to manage their own learning, or that their own
interest will lead anywhere useful, hence the need for rewards to ‘guide’ their learning path. This type of ‘guidance’ is now often embedded in Learning Management Systems (which should be called Teaching Management Systems or even Teaching Control Systems), some of them now equipped with automatic delivery of Open Badges.
Eventually, the individualistic nature of most incentives-run systems (pretend to) ignore that success and failures are systemic. Learning is individual and social. Schools are learning communities composed of people with many different abilities and talents that are not there just to consume knowledge to spit it out on command, but to create meaning and practice democracy (not just learn about it).
While the argument for using reward systems in education to prepare for the world of work is clearly a fraud, what could be a possible justification for using rewards to learn and practice democracy? The frontier between rewards and bribes is very thin; the main difference resides in who is trying to control you!
We have to conclude that the use of incentives and rewards, which is equivalent to treating children and adults as pets, is not just morally corrupt, but stupid and inefficient in the long run.
The main problem with the current Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI): AsymmetryAs much as I like OBI (c.f. below) I have to recognised that it suffers from a serious birth defect: asymmetry 1. This asymmetry matches and reproduces the asymmetry of institutional power. Different functions, issuing and receiving Open Badges, have been reified into different pieces of software running in different spaces (institutional / personal) used by different roles (teacher / learner) — despite some alternative initiatives, the vast majority of Open Badge issuers are teachers or representatives of institutions.
From an IT design perspective, there is no imperious reason for splitting functions into different applications — badger and backpack. Would it make sense to have a mail application to write emails, another one to store emails and yet a third one to read them? Yet it is what we have with the current version of OBI.
These words are not to be taken as a criticism of the tremendous efforts done by the Mozilla development team. Mozilla has made Open Badges possible. Without this team and the larger community, there would be no baby and no opportunity to ponder about a birth defect. What I hope is that the community will contribute and/or provide Mozilla with the means to address the technical challenges (and the even greater
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1 There are a number of other issues to be addressed, such as OBorrhea (the continuous flow of Open Badge delivery for the most minute events, like visiting a web page or answering a quiz) that could lead to OBesity (too many badges to display in a meaningful way), then OBfuscation (rendering the badge system unintelligible). The merging of xAPI (that I define as picture-less badges) and Open badges could be an elegant solution to address these issues.
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opportunities!) emerging from the very existence of Open Badges.
How Open Badges Could Contribute to Learning?How Open Badges can have a life of their own, beyond rewards, incentives and glorified gold stars? Looking at Open Badges as statements of trust might be the opportunity to escape from the risks associated with rewards.
One of the most interesting and undervalued features of the Open Badge Infrastructure is trust2: I have commented before that there is a risk for the Open Badges’ pretty pictures to become what the proverbial tree is to the forest of trust. I’ve also written that OBI is a native trust infrastructure, while most of the so-called trust architectures would be better described as distrust architectures (in a native trust environment, trust is by default, while distrust is generated by experience; in a distrust environment distrust is by default while trust is generated by experience).
What is the information (metadata) contained in an Open Badge?
I (badge issuer) trust you (badge receiver) to do this (criteria) based on that (evidence).
the picture is simply a means to wrap the metadata into a pretty package.
Looking at Open Badges as trust statements is more than re-branding, or sugar-coating. It is a means to put badge holders into full control of their trust network, such networks being intertwined with trust networks of peers, teachers, mentors, colleagues, etc. This means that there is no more formal distinction between badge issuers and badge receivers: we are a network of trust relationships. I can seek the trust of other people without having to wait for the pre-existence of a Badge. I can define my own statements and ask other members of the network (people and organisations) to issue that trust statement. I am not limited to my institution, school, university or work place. The graphical representation of this network of trust does not need pretty pictures anymore (there would be so many that they it would simply be impossible to display them altogether), but a dynamic display based on the connections with others, trust givers and trust receivers, i.e. people. This would be something entirely different from the “pat my back, I’ll pat yours” encouraged by Linkedin’s endorsements.
It is already happening in some of the most advanced Open Badges initiatives, like the Volunteer Centre Blackpool, where members of the community are invited to define their own badges that are then recognised by the community.
Of course, to empower everybody to build his or her own network of trust, something needs to be done: minor plastic surgery to correct OBI’s asymmetry birth defect.
From assimilation of Open Badges to accommodation to Open BadgesTo use Jean Piaget’s learning theory metaphorically, we can define two main modalities for the integration of novelty: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation of novelty keeps the system in a stable state; changes are quantitative.
Accommodation to novelty modifies the point of equilibrium of the system; changes are qualitative. Accommodation is about transformation. Of course, quantitative changes can lead to qualitative changes (the increase of unemployment rates and tax evasion could create the conditions for some serious qualitative changes…)
The first stage of Open Badges development was probably dominated by assimilation: new technologies are used to support existing processes, like the recognition of learning. While the intention of the Open badges initiators was to provide a means to recognise informal learning, Open Badges are now used to recognise informal as well as formal learning. Open Badges have increased the opportunities for learning recognition. Yet, schools and universities are rapidly assimilating this new technology into their traditional settings to deliver digital gold stars and digital grades.
Yet, Open Badges have much more to offer than improving or enhancing what we are used to. They can provide the means to transform how learning is recognised and organised, moving the locus of power from the institution to the individual and the community. This will not happen by itself. Open Badges are no magic wand or lamp. It will take time and effort to unweave the threads of rewards and incentives smothering innovation and free will.
Hence the urgency to end the Open Badges Infrastructure asymmetry!
This article is based on an original post accessible at learningfutures.eu where you will find a number of references to the issues addressed in this article.
If you want to contribute to this discussion and/or the development of a symmetrical OBI, please contact [email protected]
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2 c.f. Carla Casilli in Mozilla Open Badges: building trust networks, creating value
Here are some of the messages underpinned by award/
incentive systems
• Control / power asymmetry: sit, quietly, do as you are being told and you will get a reward (expect increased salivation).
• Learning: here are the facts and rules you have to learn for the exam/test/award (expect vacant gaze).
• Innovation: do not try to learn anything beyond or outside of the programme, this could create confusion and might embarrass your teacher (expect head nod).
• Risks: do not take risks, you might fail, so you won’t get your reward (expect a wagging tail; if the tail doesn’t move, then you might be facing a human being).
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O N T H E W A T C H
Empowerment goes ePortfolio:ICT & entrepreneurship for girls
By Birgit Wolf, Danube University Krems
The EU Comenius project ICT-go-girls! aims to empower secondary school girls with the knowledge, skills and values to encourage their participation and pro-active attitude towards innovation, entrepreneurship and quality ICT related employment. Providing effective, proven methodologies and tools which can make the difference in changing the worrying gap between boys and girls access to ICT jobs is seen a key to a more equal and stronger Europe and an increasing presence of women and girls in the ICT industry.
Social wire as encouraging ePortfolio toolThe experts behind this project belong to 7 institutions from 5 European countries. They have elaborated a learning toolkit for secondary schools based on the ePortfolio principles to increase ICT and entrepreneurship skills for educational issues among school girls in order to face their future choices in studies and work. The ICT-go-girls! project partners develop a methodological approach based on the gender perspective and implement the elgg based social wire as ePortfolio tool in school pilots for secondary school girls. On the project´s social wire platform, girls aged from 12 to 14 will be encouraged, step by step, towards ICT and entrepreneurship competencies. By completing different activities the girls will discuss their professional future, how and why they use technologies; they will create case studies of women experts in ICT professions and finally again reflect on their professional career preferences.
Image: ICTgoGirls´s Social Wire, by CESGA / USC, SpainThe social wire as an ePortfolio platform will allow them to reflect privately about their experiences and get feedback, provide them a space for representation and artefacts as well as for social networking within their class, school, country and the project community network in 5 EU countries.
This playful way of experiencing ePortfolio, on the one hand through a platform similar to Facebook, on the other hand through enabling reflection, representation, discussion, collaborative activities and promoting different technologies in a secure social network, is crucial as age, gender, and education remain the key challenges regarding digital competencies. According to the Digital Agenda Scoreboard 2012, older people as well as those with lower levels of education tend to have lower level digital skills and the same is true for women in comparison to men.
As a first result of the project, you can review the analysis-report “Girls, ICT and entrepreneurship. Learning from existing initiatives“, summarising reflections and experiences from Europe and abroad. The first testing phase of social wire and the teacher´s training starts this autumn, school pilots will be put in practice next year.
Further information: http://www.ictgogirls.eut.
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Excellent presentation from @ICTGoGirls about girls in technology. #OEB13
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Designer Suzanne Lee shares her experiments in growing a kombucha-based material that canbe used like fabric or vegetable leather to make clothing. The process is fascinating, theresults are beautiful (though there's still one minor drawback ...) and the potential is simplystunning.
ICT-Go-Girls! ProjectOur project will be presented in a few hours at the biggest e-learning conference inEurope, Online Educa Berlin. http://www.online-educa.com/ap/programme_detail.php?id=t3
Developing competencies of occupational therapists with ePortfolio
Interview with Urszula Chrabota and Anna Misiorek*
Agnieszka Chrząszcz AGH
I am meeting with Urszula Chrabota and Anna Misiorek iatn a large university campus, where around 4,000 students study in three faculties :Sports, Tourism and Rehabilitation. Anna and Urszula work in the Department of Occupational Therapy and coordinate a unique programme based on the ePortfolio approach.
AC: What has ePortfolio to do with rehabilitation? Is there any particular reason you have decided to create a programme based on that approach?
UC: Well, very much so! Health-related professions very often require portfolios as a part of professional development. They require constant development and evidencing of skills. Most of our teaching staff is gathered around the European Network of Occupational Therapy in Higher Education. We participated in their trainings where ePortfolio was an obligatory part for us. And only then did we realise how much it has to offer to the students of occupational therapy in Poland.
AM: The way we needed to document our progress and reflect on it was especially helpful, making us realise how much we actually learnt. That was the main motivation for developing a similar approach with our students.
AC: How long have you been running the programme?
AM: It is the second year now, so we have already gathered a lot of feedback from the students. The curriculum was modified, as we found out that 28 hours of face to face classroom in the first semester was too much, so we decreased it to 14 hours. In the second semester we still have 7 hours for meetings as for us individual contacts are really important.
UC: The curriculum focuses on 5 main competencies for the specialisation. So we initially proposed the students to build up their ePortfolios around them. This year we decided to give them more freedom, so that they have more independence and their work can be more personalised. Such a rigid division made it hard to match the evidence, so we abandoned it.
AC: Is that a lot of work for you?
UC: With 60 students each year, the number is not overwhelming, so a more individual approach is possible. I really think that personal contact is crucial, so apart from individual work, estimated at around 50 hours over the whole semester, we meet during classes. But no, it is not very time consuming.
AM: Of course the first year was the most busy; we needed to organise a working space for the students and also learn it ourselves. For ENOTHE courses, we worked mostly offline, but that would be hard to imagine now, and for the students!
UC: Yes, we decided to use Mahara. It has all we need, and it is free! It can be used in various ways, one can create very simple page or come up with multimedia collections. This flexibility makes us focus on the content rather than on a tool.
AC: So what do your students put inside their ePortfolios?
UC: This is truly personalised work; they can publish whatever fits their goals. Reports from their apprenticeships, their work, reflections and assignments, also photos. Then they realise what they have actually learnt! However, for some, the ePortfolio is just a collection of files.
AC: Is there any assignment, how do you mark students’ portfolios?
UC: As we said, personal contact is most important for us, and for occupational therapy too. So, at the end of the semester, the ePortfolios are presented during a meeting; it is an opportunity to discuss with the students their competencies, their professional plans and reflect about their learning. There is no failure, we both get to know each other better and help each other to understand what stands behind certain pieces of evidence. But after the third year, they will need to be able to present all the competencies required for the profession, so in the end it is really focusing on the job.
AM: The conversation is crucial: we discuss the development of certain skills and competencies. A student can focus on interviewing a patient then try to self-assess this competency against a scale. It is very subjective so our focus is on contextualising it in real life.
UC: Yes, so the base of the assessment is the conversation around the ePortfolio, not ePortfolio itself.
AC: So overall, is it worth doing?
UC: Of course it is! We can see how much it adds to the skills and competencies, to the self-esteem of the students!
AC: Thank you!
* Urszula Chrabota and Anna Misiorek are lecturers at the Department of Occupational Therapy at The University School of Physical Education in Kraków, Poland
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Everything you want to know about ePortfolios
From the Web
City University Hong Kong, has developed a very interesting site for those who want to learn more about ePortfolios, including a tutorial on how to create your own ePortfolio, interactive sessions to explore how to set SMART goals (if you don't know the acronym, visit the site to find the answer!).
There is not much to add, except inviting you to call at the site developed by our Hong Kong colleagues at: www.cityu.edu.hk/edge/eportfolio
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They too have adopted the slogan
ePortfolio for All!
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N E W SCroatian Europortfolio Chapter
By Igor Balaban, University of Zagreb
On Thursday, September 26, 2013, during the "Weeks of the Centre for e –learning“, the Croatian Europortfolio Chapter was launched. Europortfolio Croatia is one of the first Europortfolio Chapters and it shares Europortfolio's mission and objectives. The aim of Europortfolio Croatia is to synthesise ePortfolio related work in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia to create a virtual meeting place for all ePortfolio practitioners, experts and interested parties from the region.
Europortfolio Croatia will work as part of the Europortfolio community to provide support to all those involved in ePortfolios in the above mentioned region to support the localisation of resources and learning material, to act as a catalyst in the creation of a regional network of ePortfolio professionals, enthusiasts, projects and initiatives.
Europortfolio Croatia will start with a series of webinars on ePortfolios in teaching, learning and in planning personal growth and development. In addition, Europortfolio Croatia will work closely with the Ministry as well as with other Universities in the region to offer webinars to a wider audience.
More information about the Chapter is available on the portal at:
www.eportfolio.eu/community/chapters/croatia
Leaders of the Croatian initiative are Dr. Igor Balaban from Faculty of Organisation and Informatics Varazdin, University of Zagreb, and Sandra Kučina Softic, Head of Centre for e-Learning in Croatia.
Nordic Europortfolio ChapterOn Friday October 25, 2013 the Nordic Chapter of Europortfolio was launched. The Nordic chapter is based on the Nordic Portfolio Forum – which has been the main portfolio forum for the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden since 2005.
The general assembly chose to make the Nordic Chapter on the foundations of the Nordic Portfolio Forum to ensure, that there would be a continuation of the network and collaboration in this well-established organization.
The Nordic Chapter will work as part of Europortfolio community in order to provide support to all those involved in portfolio in the Nordic countries, to support the localization of materials, and to catalyze the creation of the regional network of portfolio professionals, enthusiasts, projects, initiatives, etc.
The Nordic Portfolio Forum has a website – eportfolio.dk – which we will keep updating in Danish, as this is readable by both Norwegians and Swedes. We are planning the creation of a localized page on this site for the Nordic countries, where we till tell the European portfolio enthusiasts what is going on in the Nordic region. This page will be in English.
French Europortfolio ChapterBy Serge Ravet, ADPIOS
Following a conference call in November, it has been decided to create the French Chapter of Europortfolio with a special focus on Badge France, a campaign inspired by Badge the UK. We will be inviting our Europortfolio colleagues to work with us in a similar campaign at European level: Badge Europe. More to come at the beginning of 2014!
The initial leaders of the French initiative are Samuel Nowakowski, Université de Lorraine,Lorfolio and Serge Ravet, ADPIOS. You can join us in the Europortfolio French Chapter working group:
www.europortfolio.org/community/chapters/france
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ePortfolios in the UK recent work of the Jisc
By Rob WARD, CRA
Formerly known as the Joint Information Systems Committee and now simply as Jisc, this body has been in the forefront of developing approaches to ePortfolio practice in the UK. Some of their key recent work is summarised here.
In 2012, Jisc launched a wiki-based ePortfolio Implementation Toolkit, developed by the University of Nottingham, which is freely available for use. The Toolkit has been designed to assist managers and practitioners considering large-scale ePortfolio implementation in a range of contexts, and includes 18 written case studies, five video Stories of ePortfolio Implementation, and guidance drawn from the experiences of the participating institutions.
The key messages from these resources are synthesised in a short publication, Crossing the threshold: Moving ePortfolios into the mainstream8 (Jisc 2012). The publication, aimed at managers and practitioners involved in implementing ePortfolios in further and higher education, outlines the key stages of a large-scale implementation and, using evidence from the ePortfolio Implementation Toolkit and video case studies, provides an overview of what has been learnt from the two studies.
In addition, the Effective Practice with ePortfolios Guide (Jisc 2008), introduces ePortfolios, and investigates the concept of ‘ePortfolio-based learning’ from different perspectives – those of the learner, the practitioner, the institution, a professional body and a potential audience, summarising key points of guidance in each case. The guide was developed in tandem with the online ePortfolios infoKit, and is a further source of ePortfolio guidance. It provides the main drivers, purposes, processes, perspectives and issues around ePortfolio use.
A series of introductory workshops on ‘How can ePortfolios support 21st century learning?’ were developed and are continuing to run around these resources. See here for details of earlier workshops, with access to workshop materials.
Jisc have also played a leading role in the development of the Leap2A ePortfolio interoperability specification. See the Leap2A site, article and briefing paper for further information.
Lessons learned from ePortfolio implementation at Nottingham University
From the Web
The University of Nottingham has recently reviewed its ePortfolio implementation based on Jisc's ePortfolio implementation model within the Toolkit and a brief review of lessons learnt about this process are provided within the Case study Home Page. A conference paper reporting on the evaluation is available.
Early pilots began through the Centre for Integrative Learning CETL (2005-2010) and from 2009 within the Centre for International ePortfolio Development (CIePD) through Jisc-funded project work. The University of Nottingham's use of Mahara as its centrally-offered ePortfolio system began in 2012. The University also developed ePars (2000-02), a digital system containing early elements of eportfolio within the Personal Evidencing Database and was more widely used for supporting tutorials. The School of Veterinary Medicine and Sciences and the School of Health Sciences use PebblePad which is embedded into their whole-school curricula.
More information at: link
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Effective Practice with e-Portfolios Supporting 21st century learning
Portfolio in Sweden – Alive and Growing By Roger Ellmin, fil.dr in Psykologi and Psychologist
In Sweden portfolios are still alive and growing toward more quality portfolios in spite of many time consuming school reforms, heavy work load for teachers and the complexity of the methodology. This article is an introduction to how the Swedish portfolio landscape looks from the point of view of one of its pioneers, Roger Ellmin.
Since the early 1990s in Sweden, both the social democratic and liberal governments have implemented many major reforms within the school area. They were about the decentralization of school, when the municipalities took over the main responsibility for schools, the possibility to choose schools (and not be assigned to one), establishment of independent schools, new curriculum, new courses, new system of grading and more grade levels, more national tests, the introduction of individual development plans and written assessments on pupil attainment, teacher certification, professional development for teacher’s competency lift and the new teacher training needs. According to research, several of the reforms appear to have done more harm than good and many reforms have been difficult to achieve in practice. Studies of the school atmosphere since the 1990s show that the trend has been towards increased demands and bureaucratisation of the teaching role, at the same time as the possibility to influence your work has declined. The many reforms have meant that teachers – trying always meet their students, respond to them, evaluate their needs, avoid conflicts and confrontations – are responding in a way where they forget to protect their own well-being and their own work situation.
Varied portfolio conditionsThe conditions with portfolio work vary greatly between schools. In too many schools, it is just about saving jobs in a binder - the portfolio as container with only unsorted and unreflected work. Who can individualise teaching with large classes, increased bureaucracy and workload for teachers? Some schools recognise the need to transform teaching towards dialogic teaching, with room for every individual pupil, balancing formative and summative evaluation and deepening cooperation with parents. These schools are succeeding developing portfolios of high quality. But these schools are relatively few. No statistics are available as portfolio work is not initiated from the top by the authorities. It took about 10 years before one could even find the word portfolio in their documents. My assessment is that about 20 % of schools in Sweden are working with some kind of portfolio, but only a few percent really have quality portfolios. Portfolio is a complex methodology and there is no quick -fix, managers and teachers need time and skills to pull this off.
The portfolio processIn Ellmin & Ellmin we believe that every pupil has the right to develop to the fullest his or her own personality, talents and abilities. We only work with schools that are willing to spend five full days over two academic years and do concrete work in between as part of an action-learning process. The schools will formulate a purpose with the portfolio work from three perspectives: the teacher, the pupil and the parent. They have to produce an implementation plan indicating how parents will be involved. For the student it is a matter of collecting, organising, discussing, reflecting on, and presenting their school work. The standard for reaching a certain level of education can be set in a uniform way, but the way the individual reaches that standard will always differ. With portfolios students are invited to write, verbalise and communicate about their learning process. It encourages dialogue on learning.
My next book will hopefully be about this - it is my plan.
ReferencesEllmin, Roger (2011) Elevens lärande : att erbjuda möjligheter, Liber
Ellmin, Roger (2008) Konflikthantering i skolan : den andra baskunskapen, Natur & Kultur
Ellmin, Roger (2006) Rätt DoS för lärande : dokumentation och samtal, Gleerups
Ellmin, Roger (2004) Portfolio sätt att arbetat tänka och lära, Gleerups
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Badge the World, Badge EuropeBy Serge Ravet
From Digital Me:
An exciting new ‘online badging’ initiative, ‘Badge the UK’ is using Mozilla Open Badges to enable the worldwide recognition of in-demand workplace skills and create new employment opportunities for young people.
Run by DigitalMe and supported by Nominet Trust, Badge the UK will help teachers, employers and social enterprises to badge their learning programmes and provide an easy way for any teacher to award the badges they create nationwide.
These badges will highlight the achievement of a range of skills that learners develop through real-life learning projects, after-school clubs and outside experiences. All of which are important to employers in today’s digital world, but aren’t recognised by traditional qualifications.
See more at: http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/what-we-support/projects/badge-uk#sthash.GlHHu0aD.dpuf
After the last Mozfest in London, this initiative has now expanded into Badge the World. Europortfolio is looking forward to contribute to this initiative and, at the initiative of the French Chapter will invite our community to contribute to Badge Europe initiative.
Stay tuned!
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E V E N T S Conference review:
New visions on Microlearning and OERsBy Birgit Wolf
The Microlearning 7.0 Conference 2013 took place in Krems/Göttweig (Austria) from 26-27 September. More than 30 experts presented their visions for microlearning, the needs and challenges, as well as the benefits and success stories. Strategies and case studies on mobile learning have been discussed intensivly, as well as topics like microlearning through crowdsourcing.
Dr. Davor Orlicma (Knowledge4All foundation Ltd, UK and Jozef Stafan Institute, SLO) presented a new microOER idea: a case study about enabling the creation, usage and remixing of video generated educational media fragments. On their platform videolectures.net, they provide 848 events, 11578 authors, 15219 lectures, and 17502 videos. Thus their idea is to develop a tool enabling users to remix fragments from different video, audios and texts, and in the best case in the language they want, on their OER platform videolectures.net.
Powerpoint presentation, abstracts, videos of the conference will be available soon: http://www.microlearning.org
ePIC 2013 Proceedings availableThe proceedings of the 11th ePortfolio & Identity Conference are now available at:
www.epforum.eu/proceedings/2013
They present contributions from 23 countries with for the first time a significant part of the conference dedicated to Open Badges.
Open Badges Conference CallsEvery Wednesday, 6:00 pm CET, online
The Open Badges community meets online every Wednesday. The weekly call is an opportunity to keep abreast of the developments and initiatives from all over the world. A great opportunity to meet and learn from the practitioners. The community call follows another one focused on research questions.
The links below provide access to all the previous conference calls and to the next one.
• Community call: openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/openbadges-community-2
• Research call: openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/research-calls
MoodleMaharaMoot 2014 25 to 28 February 2014, University of Leipzig, Germany
The University of Leipzig is the venue for the next German MoodleMaharaMoot from 25 to 28 February 2014. German MoodleMoots have had a long tradition since 2005. During the last years, Mahara has been a continuously growing discussion topic with its own conference slots.
For further information please go to MoodleMaharaMoot Leipzig 2014.
Mahara UK Conference 2014 Mahara UK Conference 2014, 17-18 July, Brighton
The Mahara UK Conference 2014 will be held in Brighton, East Sussex on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th July 2014. The University of Brighton and Catalyst IT are proud conference organisers of the 2014 Conference.
For further information please go to maharauk.org; Hashtag: #maharauk14
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ePIC 2014: Evidence-Based Learning9-10-11 July 2014, University of Greenwich, London UK
How digital technologies transform the way we collect, organise, visualise and exploit evidence to inform future learning.
ePIC 2014, the 12th international ePortfolio and Identity Conference, is inviting authors to submit research papers, case studies, work in progress, position papers, workshops and posters in relation to Evidence-Based Learning.
Evidence-Based Learning covers two different and complementary perspectives:
• Evidence-Based Learning in the sense of Evidence-Based Practice as pioneered in the field of medicine and psychology.
• Evidence-Based Learning to explore the wealth of new types of evidence at our disposal to lead and transform the learning experience.
ContextThe emergence of Open Badges, xAPI, Learning Analytics, MOOCs and Open Data challenges our current understanding of the potential of digital technologies to support and enhance learning, in particular ePortfolios as tools to collect, organise, interpret and make sense of evidence collected during the learning process.
CallTo take into account the transformation of the technology landscape on which current ePortfolio initiatives are being built, authors are invited to address the following issues:
• Evidence: how wide is the range of evidence we can collect to plan, support, assess and improve learning processes?
• Collection: what are the methods and technologies at our disposal to collect this potentially much wider range of evidence?
• Trust: how to insure and verify the validity of evidence collected?
• Visualisation: how to represent collections of evidence to make informed decisions?
• Interpretation: how good are we at making sense of this range of evidence?
• Practice : how the answers to the preceding questions should impact professional practice?
• Technologies : how the answers to the preceding questions should impact ePortfolio and ePortfolio-related technologies?
Open ePortfolios, Open Badges, Open Credentials, Open Identities, Open Data and Learning Analytics will be amongst the key discussions at ePIC 2014.
More information on the call for contributions at: www.epforum.eu/call
Calendar
3 March! Deadline for the submission of abstracts
31 March! Authors notification of acceptance*
9 June! Deadline for the submission of long/short papers
9-11 July! Conference
30 August! Submission of the final version of papers
October! Publication of the proceedings
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Editorial BoardIgor Balaban, University of ZagrebSerge Ravet, ADPIOS
Contacts:[email protected]@iosf.org
You have suggestions, comments or articles, write to: [email protected]
www.europortfolio.org
Project co-funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme
