ePortfolio articles in Transformative Dialogues (2009)

Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal
http://kwantlen.ca/TD.html
Volume 3, Issue 2, November 2009
New Media and Ways that it Supports Scholarship

Curriculum Leadership Portfolios: Enhancing Scholarly Approaches to Undergraduate Program Reform - Harry Hubball & Marion L. Pearson, University of British Columbia
http://kwantlen.ca/TD/TD.3.2/TD.3.2_Hubball&Pearson_Curriculum_Leadership_Portfolios.pdf

Encouraging Integrative Learning through Current Events and Learning Portfolios - Marice E. Rose, Ph.D., Fairfield University
http://kwantlen.ca/TD/TD.3.2/TD.3.2_Rose_Encouraging_Integrative_Learning.pdf

Using Electronic Faculty Course Portfolios to Showcase Classroom Practices and Student Learning - Paul Savory and Amy Goodburn, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
http://kwantlen.ca/TD/TD.3.2/TD.3.2_Savory&Goodburn_Faculty_Portfolios.pdf

Article: ePortfolios and Lifelong Learning

Here, There, & Everywhere
By Dian Schaffhauser
11/01/09
Campus Technology
http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2009/11/01/ePortfolios.aspx

Electronic portfolios can follow a student beyond graduation into careers and other life pursuits-- but not if the university can't guarantee access, or if the data won't transfer from one system to another. A look at how ePortfolios can be true repositories of lifelong learning.

Article: Course Requirement: Friend Your Professor on Facebook

From The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 12, 2009
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Course-Requirement-Friend/8827/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Some professors don't let students see their Facebook pages. Peter Juvinall insists students "friend" him.

The Illinois State University instructor decided the best way to connect with a bunch of freshman business students in a short 8 a.m. class was to conduct much of the course where they are anyway—on Facebook.

So, as he explained during last week’s Educause conference and in a subsequent interview, he uses Facebook as a course-management system by instructing students to “friend” his personal page on the first day of class.

...

Teaching on Facebook works with one of Mr. Juvinall's main messages: that students should think of their online presence as a digital resume. Employers have been known to ask alumni to check out the Facebook pages of job candidates, he points out, since some Facebook users allow anyone within their university's network to view their profiles.

Article: Implementing Electronic Portfolios: Benefits, Challenges, and Suggestions (2008)

© 2008 Barbara Meyer and Nancy Latham.

EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1 (January–March 2008), pp. 34–41

This research describes the lessons learned during initial implementation of e-folios at four teacher education programs

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/ImplementingElectronicPortfoli/162514

Occasionally, we'll highlight ePortfolio-related articles that might be of interest to EPAC members. Some of these articles will be current but we may also revisit publications from the past that address issues that are still relevant today.

If you have an article to contribute, please let us know!

Article: The Limitations of Portfolios (10/16/09)

October 16, 2009
Inside Higher Ed
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/10/16/shavelson

Electronic collections help show the range of students' work, but are not standardized or scalable enough to be used for broad assessment purposes, write Richard Shavelson, Stephen Klein and Roger Benjamin.

A provoking perspective...thoughts, comments, reactions? The comments to the article are also worth reading as are AAC&U President's Carol Schneider's response here: http://blog.aacu.org/index.php/2009/10/19/the-proof-is-in-the-portfolio/ and Dr. Helen Barrett's blog posting here: http://electronicportfolios.org/blog/2009/10/limitations-of-portfolios.html

Article: Employers, Students May Both Be To Blame For Soft Skills Disconnect.

Familiar themes: Employability. Oral and written communication skills. Making connections. It's not enough to have these skills but being able to articulate what you know to other people.

Employers, Students May Both Be To Blame For Soft Skills Disconnect.
http://www.cityam.com/city-focus/pbj1ca62vs.html

The UK's CITY A.M. (9/24, Barber) reports, that both in the UK and internationally businesses are bemoaning the lack of soft skills in new hires. Yet some schools do offer training in this area, and offer opportunities such as "small consultancy projects" that give students real-world experience. "So if students know that soft skills are valuable, why do employers complain that they don't have them? The fault, perhaps, is on both sides." Students, on one hand, "can be bad at recognizing and articulating the skills they have," and for that reason "PricewaterhouseCoopers launched an employability skills clinic last year, to help students identify skills picked up in part-time work or extra-curricular projects – and learn how to put them in words that employers understand." A PwC official said that "employers also have to clarify what they require from graduates," noting "a disconnect where employers have said grads don't have the skills we need, and students say 'we don't know what you're looking for.'"

From ASEE First Bell

Article: New Literacy and ePortfolio Audiences

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
Wired Magazine
August 24, 2009

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson

This brief article includes an interview with Professor Andrea Lunsford and a compelling conclusion that has obvious implications for ePortfolio reflections and audiences.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

The downside of encouraging peer feedback and critique?

As we've tried to scale student ePortfolio use in the classroom and encourage reflective thinking, there has been great interest in the idea of creating an environment where fellow classmates would be invited to offer feedback and critique on each other's work. Is there a downside to this? Read on...

Court fails Toronto professor’s grading on a budget
Emily Senger, National Post
Published: Thursday, June 18, 2009
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1710436

A University of Toronto professor who got students to grade their peers’ work has seen the practice blocked by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

From George Siemens' e-Learning Resources and News:

Article: The $5,000 Approach to Teaching Writing

An interesting take on motivating students, external validity and relevance of classroom work with implications for how we might scaffold and support reflection.

The $5,000 Approach to Teaching Writing
By Bob Kunzinger
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 29, 2009
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i40/40kunzinger.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Article Med School 'Senioritis' - Learning outcomes and medical education

Med School 'Senioritis'
Inside Higher Ed
June 25, 2009
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/25/fourthyear


Last March, Washington and Lee University's Law School dean told Inside Higher Ed that, "We wouldn't dream of training doctors only from a book," as a justification for his then newly unveiled plan to transform the third year of law school with experiential courses. Well, medical schools may have taken the hint. In a study and corresponding editorial published Wednesday in the July issue of the Association of American Medical Colleges' Academic Medicine journal, experts are calling for a reform of the traditional senior year medical curriculum. The report -- which was co-authored by six medical school professors, five of whom are from the University of California at San Francisco -- argues that medical curricula often fail to fully utilize the fourth year of medical school, succumbing instead to what some might call "senioritis." With students interviewing for residency programs throughout the year and senior grades usually not a factor in residency applications, many claim that students lose the self-motivation that makes their first three years successful. Moreover, medical students are often close to being done with their core requirements.

From The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - News You Can Use

Article: Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers (6/15/09)

Emerging findings from the "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students, have important implications for how and where written reflection occurs in students' lives and the role of ePortfolios in supporting these activities.

STUDY EXPLORES WHETHER INTERNET MAKES STUDENTS BETTER WRITERS
The Chronicle for Higher Education
June 15, 2009
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=Mr9MvgS2wzmnzwTKdqfgDgdfh9nQMpVp

As a student at Stanford University, Mark Otuteye wrote in any medium he could find. He wrote blog posts, slam poetry, to-do lists, teaching guides, e-mail and Facebook messages, diary entries, short stories. He wrote a poem in computer code, and he wrote a computer program that helped him catalog all the things he had written. But Mr. Otuteye hated writing academic papers. Although he had vague dreams of becoming an English professor, he saw academic writing as a "soulless exercise" that felt like "jumping through hoops." When given a writing assignment in class, he says, he would usually adopt a personal tone and more or less ignore the prompt. "I got away with it," says Mr. Otuteye, who graduated from Stanford in 2006. "Most of the time." The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

From The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The First Year at LaGuardia Community College

AAC&U's Diversity and Democracy Newsletter
Volume 12(2), Spring 2009

The First Year at LaGuardia Community College
By Paul Arcario
http://www.diversityweb.org/DiversityDemocracy/vol12no2/arcario.cfm?utm_source=news&utm_medium=blast&utm_campaign=divdemspring09

Report: Investigating the Application of Social Software to Support Networked Learning

From George Siemens' eLearning Resources and News (6/8/09)


Investigating the Application of Social Software to Support Networked Learning (.pdf at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18476/1/c18476.pdf) suggests that "university students need to learn new network and software literacies to become digital citizens". In addition to being literate (and therefore be able to participate in the consequential conversations occurring through, or mediated by, technology), authors state students spend surprisingly limited time in socialization (p. 17).

As background, Vincent Tinto has produced a model that promotes academic and social integration as key requirements to student retention. Students who feel connected to each other an the institution are less likely to drop out. I'm not familiar with studies to date that have looked at social networking services as a resource for reducing attrition...but it's a worthwhile concept to explore... Later in the report, the authors share a view that innovators on many campuses likely hold: "Centralised ICT Services departments have proved a barrier to the exploration of innovative emerging online technologies and services being explored in this project."

Washington Post: Alternative Testing on the Rise (6/8/09)

Alternative Testing on the Rise
Washington Post
June 8, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/07/AR2009060702227.html

Portfolios have long been used for in-depth evaluations because they can gauge more skills and higher-order thinking. Many educators say the year-long portfolios are a fairer way to measure what some students know, but pass rates for portfolio tests are relatively high, which helps educators meet academic benchmarks but raises questions about the tests' value in rating schools. Portfolios also are expensive, not to mention thousands of teacher hours spent compiling them. This article is in The Washington Post.

(From The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)

Competencies in Medical Education - Are ePortfolios not far behind?

Competencies Over Courses in Medical Education
Inside Higher Ed
June 5, 2009
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/05/medical

The American Association of Medical Colleges, in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on Thursday released a report aimed at defining scientific competencies for doctors. The paper, "Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians," identifies eight competencies in the medical school curriculum and eight in pre-med programs that all students should master on their way to becoming doctors.

This clearly follows the trend we're seeing in higher education towards outcomes-based assessment. The article mentions both Alverno College (one of the earliest institutions to implement ePortfolios) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) which is already developing a learning portfolio tool for residents.