E-Portfolios -- What's the Point?

It's not very original of me to keep playing off of someone else's blog, but Will Richardson's post, No Child Left Without a Portfolio, inspired me to write on something that I've been thinking about quite a bit over the last couple years.

I recently took part in a technology roundtable discussion with members of my institution's faculty and staff (and a couple of students) about the future of our technology proficiency requirement for our undergraduate students. A couple of colleagues from our graduate campus noted that they were beginning to use electronic portfolios to assess computing proficiency, as well as present pedagogical skills. I commented that I thought most undergraduate students already had a default portfolio of projects (papers, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, and other electronic materials), but it was sitting on their computers, unorganized and unused since the assignments for which they were created. Certainly those materials might be collectively used to demonstrate the array of technological proficiencies that our students learn.

Still, that use of electronic portfolios seems rather limited. What is the point of electronic portfolios, why would we want to use them, and why has there been such resistance to the idea of them on many campuses? I think the answers to these questions are connected.

Reasons for an electronic portfolio (in no particular order)

• Demonstrate competence in some skills
  
• This gets at what my colleagues from CGPS and I were discussing before.
  
• Many teaching programs require paper or e-versions of these now.
• Gather and reflect on one's work
• This might be one way of encouraging a kind of self-reflective (or self-repairing) learning. "Here's all of the papers you've written for your classes in the history department. Reflect on what worked, what didn't, what you learned about yourself, your researching, and your writing."
• In the ideal form, such e-portfolios might even come to serve as a central theme to the liberal arts experiences, a kind of connective tissue between individual classes and between courses and the larger collegiate experience. "Why am I taking all these classes? What's the point of this array of courses, within my major and outside it and how do they relate to each other?"
  
• Serve as long-term online storage for student work (and faculty comments?) that could be used by both the student (for reference, as part of a job or graduate school application) and the school (evidence of student learning, data source for assessing outcomes, examples of projects for future students)
  
• Due to privacy the latter uses would depend on selective approvals by students.

Broadly speaking, I think the variety of uses of e-portfolios actually hinders their acceptance. They mean too many different things to too many different people (and/or disciplines). Some see them as demonstrations of competencies (often of very specific skills or ideas); others see them as reflective tools to discuss progress and learning (a reflection which some people see as not relevant to their discipline).

Then there are the practical issues about online portfolios. What responsibility does the school have for keeping these portfolios? How long is long-term? Ten years? Twenty? Permanently? Sure, hard disk space is cheap, but servers and personnel to maintain them aren't. Given the numerous problems with privacy and data thefts lately, how much responsibility would schools have in safeguarding access to this material?

None of this is to reject the idea of e-portfolios--I'm especially attracted to the notion of reflective/self-correcting consumers of information and I think they can serve practical goals in demonstrating competencies--only to note that if a school is to take on such a project it would need an extremely clear set of goals (and a long-term plan) to deal with the practical issues.

Digital Literacy in Higher Education

As part of the ongoing reexamination of our curriculum and approaches, my department has been working on the goals for our major, on what we hope students will have learned by the time they graduate.

We discussed writing and speaking skills, knowledge acquisition and critical thinking, familiarity with a diverse set of methodologies, times, and places, and a perspective on the place of the self in the larger society. Although not always expressed in such ways before by us, these are fairly common sentiments in history departments. What was unusual was the addition of a section on what we're calling "digital literacy." Here's what we came up with:

• As the amount of information available online increases at near-exponential levels, the need for students’ digital literacy grows as well.
• The ability to find reliable, scholarly, information on a topic
• Within gated, subscription databases and in the larger, disorganized online world
• Finding and searching the collections of online archives, museums and institutions of higher education
• The ability to assess and evaluate the reliability of online sources
• This is a new facet of the approach historians and history students have long employed, that of judicious skepticism.
• The ability to produce creative, yet scholarly materials for the digital world
• These require the same level of rigor applied to traditional papers and presentations.

What have we left out? Probably something about encouraging active participation in an online world (hat-tip to Jerry on this), though I'm still working on ways to write that section. Other suggestions?


We decided the following was what we wanted for our students:

Students who become fluent in all these areas will be adaptable, reflective consumers and producers of information, critical thinkers able to take on any number of occupations, aware of the diversity of thought and opinion in the study of the past, and ready to move forward into the larger world as responsible, productive citizens of local and global communities.

None of this is finished yet (and we still are in the midst of curricular discussions), but I can't help but be excited about the direction the department and the institution is taking. We are looking to the future in useful ways, for us as teachers/mentors/learners and for our students as learners/mentees/teachers.

The implications of an on-demand future

Almost every morning when I get into the car to take my 3-year old daughter to day care she asks me to play "Puff the Magic Dragon" for her on my MP3 player. [I do have thousands of other songs, but she never seems to want to hear Son Volt or U2.]

This repetitious request by children for the same song over and over is the bane of many a parent's existence (and perhaps the jackhammer between sanity and insanity). That is, the repetition of children's songs is not a new experience.

However, it's begun a thought that's been rattling in my brain (along with the chorus to Puff) about the delivery of media today and its effect on society, children in particular.

My daughter also always has children's shows to watch because my wife and I have Tivo'ed a number of them and can play them on demand (well, not literally, since we try to limit her TV watching time, but you get my point).

Sure, other parents have played Puff on CD or cassette tape (or probably 8-track), and they've got VHS or DVD versions of their kids' favorite shows and movies, but it seems to me there is
a fundamental psychological difference to children between getting a tape or cassette or DVD out to put in and play, and just using a couple of button presses on a screen or click-wheel to start exactly what she wants. Will this raise her expectations? Will she demand information and entertainment to just appear with a few clicks? Yes, of course she will.

And so will our students.

"Quit, Complain, or Innovate"?

This title come from a post on the reliable Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed. Though most of the post is positive and forward-looking, the title clearly reflects a sense among many people about the choices surrounding the implications and impact of new technology in education.

Yet as my institution grapples with the implications of a new president who has asked the faculty to be forward-thinking, creative, and innovative, I wonder if this same sentiment is an appropriate description of our curricular and institutional choices (and I think some of my colleagues fear it's our future).

Now, to be honest, among faculty, quitting is rarely an option, at least in the form of leaving one's job, since the market is so tight right now, especially if one has roots of family and friends in a particularly geographic region. However, there's quitting and then there's quitting.

Complaining is always an option of faculty. [Some might say it's an area that we've claimed and reclaimed over and over.] Still, despite succumbing to this myself at times, it's hard for me to see this as the only option. [Does this have to be a single choice? Can't I do both? Well, why not!? -- See how easy it is for complaining to start? And how quickly it turns into whining, which is even worse.]

So that leaves us with innovate. To me this is exciting, exhausting, invigorating, and downright scary. What we do with this is left to us (though likely with significant leadership from our administration). We have to live with it. But we also have to live with ourselves, our students and our institution if we don't change things now, if we don't adapt, if we don't look towards the future of higher education and learning in general....

Podcasting Lectures--Some thoughts

Steve and Jerry have both been writing about the idea of podcasting lectures.

I think part of what faculty members don't say when they flinch back from the idea of posting their lectures (as notes, full text, or podcasts) is that they are afraid that their lectures will be revealed to be less polished, less original, less important than their published scholarship.

However, we need to also be careful about dismissing the concerns about people not coming to class (and certainly there are ways to address that). But I've had a number of conversations with students who have told me (confidentially...) that if there were podcasts or lecture notes that they would come to class much less, or not at all, even if they took the hit for class participation. [I might add that some institutions of higher ed discourage or even prohibit professors from requring attendance.]

I would also add that if one runs a truly interactive lecture, then students are missing a great deal by not being there to participate in that process. Like it or not, posted materials suggests that active learning is less important than passive learning (even if the hope is that posting such materials would result in a more active engagement with the material).

I understand the appeal that broadening the podcasting or vidcasting of lecture series to all class lectures might have. But remember, most of those lectures in something like Great Lives required weeks of preparation by those scholars for one 75-minute presentation. The harsh reality is that most class lectures are composed in an hour or two and don't come close to the quality in content, presentation and delivery of a formal lecture.

None of this is to reject the premise of podcasting lectures, but merely to explain that such a process should be undertaken carefully, especially for junior faculty members who have their professional reputations (and future employment) to consider.

"Teachers as Learners"--An Initial Response

http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/teachers-as-learners-part-27/

Will at weblogg-ed.com has an amazing post ("Teachers as Learners") that I'm still trying to figure out an appropriate response to that goes beyond, "Yes, that's it. That's what I've been trying to say...." Here's the most relevant paragraph.

In a world where knowledge is scarce (and I know I’m using that phrase an awful lot these days), I can see why we needed teachers to be, well, teachers. But here’s what I’m wondering: in a world where knowledge is abundant, is that still the case? In a world where, if we have access, we can find what we need to know, doesn’t a teacher’s role fundamentally change? Isn’t it more important that the adults we put into the rooms with our kids be learners first? Real, continual learners? Real models for the practice of learning? People who make learning transparent and really become a part of the community?

This notion of teachers constantly learning, of modeling for students a notion of the process of learning is incredibly appealing to me. It's part of why I've created 11 different courses in 5 years, and why I have several more waiting to pop out when I have time and opportunity to do them. Not because I want to impart wisdom to my students, but because I want to share with them the excitement I feel when creating a new vibrant course, when learning more about a topic and figuring out how to share that process with them. That excitement for learning is why I have several scholarly projects on the backburner, waiting for my last project to finish. It's why I find so many of the posts of my blogger colleagues Gardner and Steve so provocative and evocative of all I wish to do.

Okay, so I have plenty of passion, but to what end? Look for future posts for more thoughts on this....

Faculty Academy 2006

I'm struck by how many people are here at the Faculty Academy this year. Several high-level adminstrators, and probably 80-90 people attending. That's great and I hope that it's a sign of a larger, broader committment on the part of the faculty and staff to the ideas (and openness) espoused here.