on e-portfolios

 

Over the years I have used eportfolios for many different purposes. Prior to the ALT Winter conference 2020 where I will be a panel member talking about e-portfolios I think it would be useful to draw all my explorations and activities into one place. This will be a post with lots of links but I hope also to summarize the rationale for looking to eportfolios in my work. The image above is taken from the Mahara #MUM (Mahara users Midlands) group which now resides in mahara.org. 

Firstly, it is important to distinguish between a portfolio and an eportfolio. There are many professions which expect to see a portfolio in order to recruit. A typical portfolio in this context (photography, modelling etc) would include examples of the work you are most proud of. A curation which shows your talents and expertise. An e-portfolio can also be used in this way of course. An electronic version of the same. This is how I used mahara for my CMALT assessment and subsequent review for example. The beauty of a digital curation is of course that it displays multimedia evidence wrapped with contextual narration. It reflects the fact that much of my activity is online and open. Display of my open badges also tells the story of my activity. So for me an e-portfolio is the logical choice. 

My rationale for supporting e-portfolio is more that just encouraging folk to "show off" however. An eportfolio is a very useful personal collection tool. By default, using Mahara the pages and collections you create are visible only to the user. This makes it a "domain of one's own" a space online (as I presented in ALT winter conference 2016) which can be used to collect your work, a space to reflect upon your experiences of online or blended learning which may for example have happened in a more formal VLE space. This is the approach we adopted in Languages@Warwick mahoodle and in the EVOLVE training co-laboratory. This store of personal reflection and evidence can easily be curated, selecting good examples which can then be shared more widely. There is an economy of time and effort gained in this approach and the results I've seen in our Assessed e-portfolio for language learning summarised in this e-book for example bear witness to the power of this approach. The eportfolio owner can acquire vital digital literacies (management of IP/copyright, permissions and online visibility) which improve the quality of their online presence. I have written extensively and openly about the process of forming a construct for assessment, leaving the documents available openly on scribd. A more recent final year module I created, Developing Language Teaching was 100% eportfolio assessed. A fact which was fully appreciated when lockdown arrived this year. Using their eportfolio as a private space throughout the course encouraged students to evidence the evolution of their development over time. Some extracts are included in this recent presentation for the MaharaHui2020 conference. 

Finally, I have also used an eportfolio shared space (Mahara group) to support shared research such as in the case of the WIHEA #knowhow project. Shared pages allowed us to collaborate and view each other's research and then decide together where we should investigate further. In a project such as this where staff and students in different roles had limited time to get together the shared group space mediated our interactions, saving time and allowing us to collaborate remotely. The digital artefacts we stored there were then easily accessible for us to create a digital poster for dissemination at the end of the project.  

My conviction that eportfolios can be a really useful tool for staff and students alike has several key contributing factors:

• Deep thought and reflection require private space and time as well as mediated discussion. We provide for both in the physical world, I believe we need to provide digital spaces with the same affordances. Especially in a pandemic.  
• Ownership is a crucial conversation in the digital domain. Legally there is too little protection for the rights of the individual who creates online, the industry would prefer us to all be consumers. There is much to do to increase understanding of Creative Commons licences.
• The assumption that all academic work should reside on institutional platforms to which you lose access at the end of your course or contract should be challenged. The possibility to export and retain your work should be supported. 
• Designing assessment which use e-portfolios is a really useful collaborative activity. For a practitioner it requires questioning what we value and empirically investigating how best to achieve that learning. There are of course disciplinary differences but sharing your construct openly can inspire others. 
• Learning is not a tidy, linear process. It is full of twists and turns. Making that explicit through reflection can help us come to terms with the challenges we face and find better strategies. 

Here's the recording from the ALT Winter conference 2020:

Free for all

Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.



I have just completed the first iteration of a new module LN306 Developing Language Teaching. The course has attracted a good cohort of students including a number of Erasmus students from Germany Italy and France and I have constantly been impressed with their instincts for what makes good teaching. The central objective of the course is to look at how as teachers we can create interventions to address a specific learner need and includes critical analysis of learning design and pedagogies. In passing during the course I have shared some of Open Educational Resources (OER) and tools for creation. In our final session this week I asked my students to critically evaluate the winning video from the Why Open Education matters campaign above and again the level of understanding proved a useful bridge to a constructive dialogue.

The video paints a rosy picture of how OER can improve the world, but said one of the students:

• how do you know what "good OER" look like? After all, text books have a kudos and an authority as they are endorsed by your tutor. Who can you trust?

This has frequently been a criticism levelled at the OER movement: too idealistic, all fluffy clouds and rainbows. I explained my position. 

I am very much in favour of what has been called by Martin Weller "Little OER", resources created by individuals to fit their context and subsequently shared under Creative Commons licences so that others can remix, re-use and re-purpose. The main benefit of this sort of creative activity I posit is as a means for contributing to your professional community. I admitted that I have created and shared slides which have carried the odd typo (as indeed do many text books I have used) but the benefits of this "open educational practice" (OEP) outweigh the disadvantages of the escalating costs for students of course materials. 

Surely the ability to critically evaluate all materials should not be sacrificed in favour of a blind acceptance that material on the reading list is automatically more trustworthy? Surely a student would be happy to know that his/her tutor is actively engaged in their professional community and able to adapt and create resources which best meet their local context? The students agreed (or seemed to at least) and I look forward to seeing their learning designs as part of their e-portfolio assessment in April. I am happy they have plenty to think about. 

The truth of course is that this learning design challenge matters more than ever to their generation and those who follow. The expertise of teachers is constantly undermined by politicians and the very existence of teaching jobs under threat thanks to "austerity". I am far from alone in seeing the potential of the open internet to inspire and support my profession.

The creative opportunities for learning design offered in the digital domain are endless:

Making your open textbook

A set of resources to get you started in curating your open textbook

It takes courage and commitment to engage in open educational practice there are few rainbows unicorns or fluffy clouds. This post describes the situation beautifully. Going open is a sign of strength worthy of Camus' approval as in L'Homme Révolté:

« La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent. »

Do you grow out of playful learning?

A selection of my language games

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (The Bible,  1 Corinthians 13.1,2).

This post was inspired by a #creativeHE post by Will Haywood published on his blog yesterday. Will raised the point that perhaps once we move to teaching in a different context (e.g. from school to HE) games and play in learning get a little left behind. I have been teaching French in HE for 15 years, with students who are often highly motivated, some on accelerated courses where they have to make lots of progress in a very short time. I need them to listen and imitate sounds accurately, using their voices with a new rhythm and tuning their ear to a new musicality, they have to make new connections quickly in order to acquire lots of new vocabulary in order to react appropriately in a language and culture that is not their own. Not unlike the process we all went through as little children. I try to make it fun. I describe an early lesson activity here where we play with the sounds we make, a playful ethos is crucial to the success of this activity. 

The toybox shot above shows a range of the games I use in class. Word cards and dice allow us to practice tenses and rhyming sounds, board games and role play help us to exercise our memory and strengthen the links between individual lexical items and meaning. The inflatable globe has lots of uses and often flies around the room to reduce focus on how silly you may feel making strange utterances in front of your classmates. There are lots of commercially made games too but I have found that the best ones are the ones that meet a specific learning outcome. More important than the game itself though is the establishing of a playful, non threatening ethos to play together. I remember a particularly exciting CD-ROM game I used in schools which was called Granville. It was an early form of SIM (simulation) where students had to navigate a small town in France (virtually of course) with a small set of coins, type the correct language into the computer in order to get what they needed (buying food, tickets etc) and then get back to base before time ran out. This was back in the 1980s though so it was not terribly sophisticated by today's game standards. You could even pay to hire a bike but you had to return it (using the correct words) or face penalties. The sort of thing you could do in a virtual world these days as long as you don't mind learning to move "in world" first. You can easily spend 20 minutes below the sea or stuck in a tree somewhere!

There's always a tension when you are designing learning using playful techniques - or serious games - between the time invested and the learning achieved. As a practitioner you get to judge this with experience and feedback from your students. So, do we need games less as we get older? I don't think so, indeed I would argue that we need permission to connect with our inner child even more if we are to free up the headspace we need to learn effectively. The biblical quote above may be misleading. Paul wrote to the Corinthians (if my rusty memories of bible study are correct) because he wanted to remind them of their responsibilities towards each other. As teachers we have a responsibility to support effective learning, that may well include the wise choice of a suitable playful activity or two. Laughter has a place in a classroom as it does in life. When we are older we can also reflect and analyse how the experience can help us break out of our learning ruts. Asking learners to create a game can be a really useful way of challenging assumptions about learning too. Play can support teaching excellence even in Higher Education.

Make it snappy!

Top Tips for Course Creation in Languages@Warwick

View more lists from Teresa MacKinnon

e-portfolio research

Now starting to find my way through the blogs, twitter feeds, studies and research to establish a suitable framework for evaluating our e-portfolios. Our implementation is due to start in October with a small pilot group. Lots of useful information from JISC and Becta. We will be emphasising the employability skills enhancement that we can deliver by encouraging the mastery of the available technologies and engagement with the language learning process. It is very important to me that we facilitate deep learning through a reflective, story telling approach. I found this presentation very significant:
http://www.vimeo.com/23513397