Thoughts about learning, assessment and e-portfolios

e-portfolio model

2007-09-26T11:16:00.000+02:00

The model I started on Mindomo some months ago, on different modes of expressions in portfolio development, has had nearly 200 views (Norwegian and English version). I have had a lot of feed-back on this work. Some of the viewers have used the opportunity to add new tools to the model, and some of the changes have been made by my selves after getting e-mails or other kind of feedback. Thank You all for contributing to this construction. I look forward to see where we will end up...

This is how far I've com with my research questions

2007-09-26T09:11:00.000+02:00

My research area is assessment and digital portfolios, and I am working on a design which can be classified as a qualitative study based on cultural-historical activity theory.

The research foci: the introduction of reflection based digital portfolios, including the use of web 2.0 technology, as a tool for developing assessment competencies among teachers.

At this premature stage my research questions are as follows:
In what way may reflection based digital portfolios have an effect on the teachers’ assessment competence?
Or more specifically

1. Will, and in that case how, can various tools, built on web 2.0 technology and social software, affect the teachers assessment competence?

2. To what extent and how do teachers develop criteria for their own multimodal reflection and documentation?

3. To what extent will improved teacher competence in assessment lead to a change in teachers’ teaching practice?

Plagiarism

2007-08-07T10:19:00.000+02:00

How can a digital tool prevent cheating with out turning the student into guilty until proven otherwise? I don’t think we will ever find such a tool. On the other hand I think we can do something with the attitude amongst our students. Jude Carol has written a useful introduction on the subject and you can find it on Bergen University Collage’s website right here.

I love libraries!

2007-07-09T10:19:00.000+02:00

I’m attending a PhD seminar in august and signed on for it a week ago. The seminar title is "Sociocultural approaches to education and psychology" , and I think it’s going to be quite interesting. One thing didn’t recon though, was the reading list.

When I got the list on e-mail (which was enormous) I ran down to the library. They where closing up for the summer and I needed to order all this articles and books before they closed. With good assistance from two of the librarians I managed to place my orders in a hurry, and I got hold of every thing I needed. Now I sit here with almost 500 pages to read. It looks out to be a tough summer. I’m glad it’s raining….

Mindmap on e-portfolio definition

2007-06-08T08:37:00.000+02:00

In Norwegian, but still understandable
The map is (and wil always be..) in progress.
On Mindomo

How come assessment is so hard to change?

2007-05-22T16:12:00.000+02:00

I’ve wondered about this especially for the last days. In higher education we want the students to learn. As teachers we want them to understand the subject. We want the students to search for and build their own knowledge. How do we do that? How can we facilitate this curiosity for learning? How can we as teachers point out directions for the students and guide them along the way, giving them support and benefits from our knowledge?

It is questions like that we should dare to ask, but are forced to drop because of traditional exams and assessment systems. If we could focus a bit less on assessment and more on learning I believe the students would actually follow the same focus. If teachers and students jointly put more effort in learning, the assessment part can benefit from that and focus on development of competences instead. After all, most of what we teach our students during college and universities today is already old fashioned when they graduates anyway…..

Yawn

2007-04-16T13:56:00.000+02:00

It’s quite hard to focus on writing your article on the computer while the sun is shining, people are barbequing and it seems like everyone except me has started their vacation… Well, that’s not true. There is people working in almost every office around me, but still there are many people outside, enjoying the sunny weather. I hope someone can invent a small and light computer, with a 19 inch laser screen, laser keyboard, and built-in webcam, headphones, and all other gadgets I use every day. Then I could just take it all with me outside…..and work from the terrace….in the sun…hmm.

Online, offline

2007-04-10T12:43:00.000+02:00

The term “Addicted to Internet” gets over a million hits on a single Google search. I found this site amongst them, and it brags about how you through a multiple choice test actually can measure how addicted you are. Nice……!!?

ICT and sosioculturat theory

2007-03-05T09:57:00.000+01:00

I've been working on a lecture about how ICT has had an influence on pedagogy. This has brought many ideas and reflections to my work. Among other things I've read Engelbarts Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework from 1962. This is, indeed, a piece of cultural-historical theory on Human-Computer Interaction. His article is to be found here .
It's worth reading.

Are You Lonely…..

2007-01-31T17:46:00.000+01:00

Well, according to Professor Michael Keren, at University of Calgary, you are. He claims that bloggers are lonely people living their lives and dreams in cyberspace rather than facing reality. It’s a harsh statement, but it made me think about my own blogging. I address my blogg to anyone that finds interests in what I write, and that also include my selves. I use the blogg to reflect about my work and to discuss what I mean about different issues considering learning, web 2.0, social software, teaching, knowledge building and so on. The blogg gives me a space to try out my thoughts, to develop them and to give others opportunity to contribute to what I have been thinking. This is in fact knowledge building in action, rather than the act of a lonely, detached person lost in cyberspace….

Google, the one and only?

2007-01-31T17:16:00.000+01:00

Google is the single most dominant search engine on the web today, with market shares between 40 and 80 %, depending on who you ask. What this means to public access to information is yet hard to predict, but some thoughts and perhaps also concerns has come up on this topic during the last year. I won’t get further into this now but here is a list of the 100 best search engines as an alternative.

Useful tool

2006-11-22T13:55:00.000+01:00

I’ve just read JaO`s Blogg (Norwegian Blogg) and found a very useful tool there. Page2rss . I’ve been looking for this for some time. It’s surprisingly many web sites that doesn’t support rss/atom yet.

The picture is taken from this site http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2872/support-common-feed-icon

E-portfolios in teacher education

2006-11-18T10:10:00.000+01:00

This is probably the most difficult part of a PhD-project; to find good, manageable research questions. And every time I elaborate on my questions they end up emphasising the subject slightly different. I think this process is a never ending one, and I’m sure it’s the last part I’m going to finish in my future PhD-thesis.
Anyway, this is what I’ve ended up with to day. I want to examine how e-portfolio, based on web2.0 tools, can bee an artefact for learning and assessment for teacher students in developing professional competence and subject skills. I will focus on
the three notions interactivity, participation and sheering witch is some of the most important features to web2.0 tools according to O’Reilly and his article What is web2.0. The three notions will be examined in relation to how they affect the students learning process.
To answer my main problem of issue I’ve deduced three research questions.

1 How can we define e-portfolio? This question has to draw upon existing theory developed in portfolio research and at the same time examines how the latest development on the web (web2.0) will have an effect on e-portfolios.

2 How do teacher students and their teachers work with e-portfolios in their learning activities? I’ve been given the opportunity to follow approximately 60 teacher students during their first two years at university. I will perform action research in this project and go into the activities as a participant. All the students are supposed to work with e-portfolios both as tools for learning and assessment.

3 What kind of knowledge is being generated with and through e-portfolios? I will analyse some of the e-portfolios developed during the two years I’m allowed to follow the teacher students. As framework for this analyses I will use Joanne Carney’s method described in the article Setting an Agenda for Electronic Portfolio Research: A Framework for Evaluating Portfolio Literature Besides analysing e-portfolios I will interview both teachers and students about what knowledge they mean they have developed through their e-portfolios.

Flickr

2006-11-16T00:36:00.001+01:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Back from vacation...

2006-11-09T22:27:00.000+01:00

I’ve been on vacation for the last week with my family. Diving is absolutely amazing on the coast outside Sharm El Sheik in Egypt. We saw shark, barracudas, giant morays, a lot of colourful, small fish and amazing corals. Besides diving I had time to read some articles, and also a Norwegian book on education for the information society. I have to get started on my writing again now that I’m back. I feel it’s a bit easier to start up now that I’ve gained a distance to the text. I’m supposed to deliver something by Monday. Hopefully I’m starting to get a grip on my research questions now.

What's next?

2006-10-26T22:10:00.000+02:00

Well, i passed the first test. Now i just have to write out my PhD-sketch to a PhD-plan. Then, maybe I get accepted. The new tentative title on the project is:
How can e-portfolios be a tool for learning and assessment of digital competence in teacher education?
I'm now brainstorming on research questions, and any comments or tips are welcome.

Before feedback…

2006-10-24T21:47:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow I’m going to present a sketch of my PhD-plan to a professor in Bergen, and I’m pretty nervous. Not that I don’t think I’m able to pull this PhD project off, but it’s always a bit tricky to reveal once ideas on a premature stage of the process. On the other hand it’s often in those situations you really need feedback, just to correct the course and make sure you’re on the right way.
I think I should read Tim O’Reilly’s article What Is Web 2.0 before I go to sleep.

I promise to blogg the outcome of tomorrow’s session as soon as possible.

A useful article on the subject "Assessment and Learning".

2006-10-22T14:14:00.000+02:00

I've just finished reading an article written by the Norwegian professor Olga Dysthe. The name of the article is "The challenges of assessment in a new learning culture" and was presented as a key note lecture at the NERA Conference at Iceland Pedagogical University, Reykjavik in March 2004.
I will give you a quotation from the article:
"Portfolios may be used for different purposes, and it is the purpose that determines what is collected, who collects it, how it is collected, who looks at it, how they look at it and what they do with it."

In relation to what I wrote yesterday, it might be an idea to analyze portfolios and the different tools used according to what Professor Dysthe says in this quote.

Finding a system in the complex

2006-10-21T21:41:00.000+02:00

I’ve started working on a mind map about e-portfolios. It’s hard to classify the different tools that are common to use when working on portfolios. The tools can be divided in different groups and levels, and this is only some of these categories.

Tools used within e-portfolios can be:
Individual or Collective
Synchronous or Asynchronous
Multimedial (several medias) or Monomedial (one media)

May be it is to simple to divide the tools into this categories, especially since many of them appers in several categories, but still… I think I’ll try.

So much to learn and so little time.

2006-10-20T14:41:00.000+02:00

Today I got the message. -You have two months to work on your project plan. You should definitely read Helen Barret, Joan Carney, Marja Kankaanranta, Kathleen Yancey, Carey Jewitt& Gunther Kress and so on… it was easy to find articles or books written by these recearcers but I have one problem. This people are serious writers and they write a lot. Where should I start? What is most important? I’m expected to finish my work on the PhD-plan within about 60 days, so I’m in a hurry.
I have picked out two articles to start with. Barret’s article “Researching Electronic Portfolios and Learner Engagement” and Carney’s “Setting an Agenda for Electronic Portfolio Research: A Framework for Evaluating Portfolio Literature.” I think these two will give me an introduction and also an overview.
If anyone has other suggestions, pleas don’t hesitate to give me a comment on it.

A day in the "Blogg-world"

2006-10-19T21:00:00.000+02:00

This morning I tried to define the two words multi-literacy and multi-modality. I need to find a good definition to elaborate on in my PhD- project plan. Any way, I ended up linking several other bloggs to my own. And that turned out to be quite useful. Although it took almost all day, this roundtrip from one blogg to another gave me a glance into the fascinating environment of blogged networking text elements. My question is how this can be placed into a socio-cultural understanding of e-portfolio. I did get some ideas today.

My PhD plan (In progress)

2006-10-18T11:25:00.000+02:00

Well it’s hard to put together a project plan for a PhD application. This is my second attempt but I think I’m better prepared, and therefore have a better chance this time. The main focus in my project is (at least for now) how to give students and other learners god conditions for documentation of knowledge and learning processes through electronic portfolios.
This is quite a large questions and I have to specify and cut down on themes to make the questions more consistent. Therefore I have divided my approach to answer the main question into three minor problems for discussion.

1. I want to analyse tree different stages within the Norwegian use of e-portfolios, represented by tree time periods. I will relate the first period to a concrete project involving teacher education, called the PLUTO-project. In this project the students worked with web-based and open e-portfolios were the learning process was easy to follow, from the early beginning of an assignment to the end. The next period is introduced with the Learning Management Systems. Now the e-portfolios are closed up and mostly without insight to the ongoing learning process. The last period is the one starting to trace out today. The e-portfolios is once again moving towards an openness and students and teachers uses the open web to publish their assignments, thoughts and reflections. I am planning to use Joanne Carney’s tools on analysing e-portfolios in this process (Carney 2004).
2. What is expected of ICT knowledge from the participants in the learning activity when they work on their e-portfolios? Helen Barret’s definition of e-portfolios is complex and demanding. It says: “In my definition, an electronic portfolio uses electronic technologies as the container, allowing students/teachers to collect and organize portfolio artifacts in many media types (audio, video, graphics, text); and using hypertext links to organize the material, connecting evidence to appropriate outcomes, goals or standards.” (Barret 2005). This brings me to think about the two notions multiliteracy and multimodality. How do these to concepts relate to how the students and the teachers are working with e-portfolios?
3. Finally I will also look into how the participants in the learning activity (with the e-portfolios) are creating the necessary infrastructure. Creation of e-portpolios of today demands an efficient infrastructure, and according to Star and Ruhler (1996) this:”…infrastructure is something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures.”
Well, I know this is too much and I’m now facing a painful cut back on foci. I have to emphasis a smaller area.
If someone out there has any comments I’m happy to hear from you. That’s one of the reasons I decided to start blogging today.