I attended a JISC-funded Netskills event on Monday 9th March 2009 on the topic "How can e-portfolios support 21st century learning?"
Definitions of e-portfolios tend to include the following elements:
- A collection of digital resources
- that provide evidence of an individual’s progress and achievements
- drawn from both formal and informal learning activities
- that are personally managed and owned by the learner
- that can be used for review, reflection and personal development planning
- that can be selectively accessed by other interested parties e.g. teachers, peers, assessors, awarding bodies, prospective employers.
The discussion stressed that effective practice with e-portfolios isn't just about the final product - the process of arriving there is crucial.
This diagram from the JISC InfoKit summarises the relationship between process and product from a slightly more systems oriented perspective:
We mapped the current or planned uses of e-portfolios at our own institutions onto a useful matrix designed by Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and Gordon Joyes. I found it particularly helpful to identify how different projects and initiatives I was aware of fitted in to the matrix.
view a version of this matrix, partially annotated by me in relation to local projects
This was a helpful activity because it clarified the different kinds of purposes that e-portfolios are used for, along with the different tools that are used as part of the process of building a portfolio.
The focus on purpose was maintained in a presentation by Geoff Rebbeck, which I'll make the topic for a separate post.
The "Effective Practices with E-portfolios" handbook outlines 6 steps for e-portfolio based learning:
- define: what is the purpose of your initiative, what are the issues you are aiming to address, think about the support needs of the users and the nature of the learning environment
- understand: how will this impact on other pedagogic practices in the institution, what kind of learning outcomes do we require, will this impact on practitioners, admin staff, technical staff?
- prepare: e-portfolios raise issues around ownership of data. There are questions of accessibility, copyright, IPR that need to be addressed in advance. Risks and benefits can be identified
- engage: what is your strategy for engaging and sustaining commitment of learners, staff and everyone who is involved in supporting the initiative?
- implement: identify factors such as timing, involvement of champions etc that might influence the outcomes
- review: use a range of methodologies to explore how people feel about the service
Useful resources:
Effective practices with e-portfolios publication : "investigates current good practice in the use of e-portfolios as a support to learning and as an aid to progression to the next stage of education or to employment" - gives a good overview and a series of case studies
E-Portfolio InfoKit : recently launched from JISC, with background, policy drivers, purposes, case studies and support for selecting and implementing an e-portfolio system
http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/e-portfolios : a useful page with links to all audio resources etc from the InfoKit
Evaluating the learner experience : resources from JISC
3 comments:
Hi, Carol,
Thanks for your post. It fills out some of the spaces between the lines of 'effective practice' for me.
However, I still need clarifiaction on one area: Step one referes to ‘Which tools, systems or approaches should we adopt?’ - What I want to know is, what is meant by tools? Does it mean different e-Portfolio systems as 'tools' or does it mean tools within the e-Portfolio, such as surveys, polls, peer reviews, search engines etc?
I have not so far read of any work that clarifies this for me.
see my blog at: www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com
Hi Ray,
Thanks for your comment and for passing on the link to your blog; full of interesting posts and I'll be visiting regularly (or aggregating your feed)!
In terms of the question you pose about "tools" - that's an interesting one. I took a look through the whole of the "Effective practices with e-portfolio" pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/elearning/eportfolios/effectivepracticeeportfolios.aspx
and it looks to me as though JISC would see the 'tools' as being tools within an e-portfolio, or as a collection of separate tools that together provide functionality:
"Tools to support these processes may be incorporated within a single e-portfolio system or selected independently by learners for particular task" (p.6)
Does the distinction around the meaning of 'tools' relate to some issues that you've faced in your work with e-portfolios?
Hi, Carol, Kind of you to get back to me!
Yes, this issue about tools has been around for a long time as far as I am concerned. Helen Beetham’s Diagram, or was it originally Helen Barrett’s, originally quoted by Becta, does not really clarify. Inside my eFolio I have ‘tools’ such as polls, questionnaires or feedback comments which can be used within a closed or open ePortfolio community. Other more powerful assessment tools are better used within the MIS/VLE configuration. So, what tools are we talking about? - A wordprocessor, music/video editor etc or are we talking about the simple facilities to upload, link or manage documents within our e-Portfolio?
Another real issue for me is the idea of having separate e-Portfolios for different purposes. That would mean uploading or linking files into the different e-Portfolios when I can do all of that within the one eFolio and present different ‘faces’ or ‘views’ to my different audiences.
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