E-Portfolios for Learning

I am attending a workshop on "Using Worldware for Student Success in the Classroom and Beyond" conducted by Gary Brown from Washington State University, being held at the Campus Technology Conference in Boston. I had an opportunity to see a much larger picture of the WSU work that I have been observing from afar. I am impressed by their characterization of ePortfolios as "workspace" vs. "showcase" of student work. This is a glimpse of their concept of the ePortfolio as Personal Learning Environment.

Labels: portfolios, Web2.0

I am sitting in the Blogger's Cafe in the San Antonio convention center. Yesterday, I did my short presentation on the final results of the REFLECT Initiative. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the vendor exhibits. Today, I am enjoying the morning just doing networking, taking with people who are dropping by, and decompressing after four very full days. It is time to go home and get settled into my new condo!

I just had a wonderful conversation with a high school English teacher, who used my website for resources on working with her 11th grade students on electronic portfolios (she showed me some examples). She started her students with a blog, but many of them went far beyond the blog and created their own presentation portfolios using one of the Web 2.0 tools. She herself had to use one of the commercial e-portfolio/assessment management systems in her graduate program, and she said, "It took all the thinking out of it. They gave me the standards and told me which artifacts to put into each one! It wasn't as effective as what my students did!" I am hoping she will share her story with my new Google Group: web2eportfolios. I invite others to join the group (please give me your reason for wanting to join as you fill out the form).

I had another delightful conversation with a tech coordinator from a small Texas school district, who talked to me about his proposal for hosting ePortfolios for his 1400 student school district using WordPressMU. We talked about this strategy, and how they could implement the blogs and pages that the tool supports. Their district has already established a GoogleApps account for branded GMail in their district as well as all of the other Google tools. They are also setting up servers to host podcasts and video sharing. I am hoping he can also tell their story through my new Google Group.

Labels: NECC08, portfolios, Web2.0

I am at the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) and attended a session conducted by two Google employees. In the Q&A after the session, I had the opportunity to ask the following question: "When am I going to be able to use my GMail space to store plain old documents?" The two of them whispered something to each other and then said something about having a policy not to talk about when unannounced products would be available. But then they said something like "Soon!" Hmmm...

On Sunday, I did a day-long workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Classroom-Based Assessment and Interactive Student ePortfolios. We started with a blog and them moved to Google tools (GoogleDocs Documents for creating artifacts, GoogleDocs Spreadsheet for creating a table to keep track of artifacts, GoogleDocs Presentation to create a linear presentation portfolio, and Google Pages to create a hyperlinked portfolio (without the interactivity of the GoogleDocs tools). One of the participants, who had been playing with the Zoho tools, and especially the Zoho Notebook, tried the Google Sites tools (released in February) and found it to meet his needs better than the other tool. I will need to try the Sites tool when I get home.

Labels: NECC08, portfolios, Web2.0

The Educause Center for Applied Research just published a new Research Bulletin: Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management Systems.

This ECAR research bulletin details the arguments emerging in the blogosphere and elsewhere both for and against the learning management system. It examines whether the LMS is destined to continue as the primary means of organizing the online learning experience for university students. The bulletin is a companion to an earlier ECAR research bulletin that examines the factors leading to the selection of the open source learning management system at the Open University in the United Kingdom.

The article was written by Niall Sclater, Director of the Virtual Learning Environment Programme at the Open University in the U.K. A small part of the article discussed the role of two different ePortfolio systems being used in the OU: Mahara (developed in New Zealand) and MyStuff (developed in-house by the Open University).

Labels: research, Web2.0

On June 1, Campus Computing published another article on ePortfolios and Web 2.0, entitled "Unleashing the Power of Web 2.0," which highlighted some of the work of Washington State University and their use of SharePoint. It also discussed the continuum of ePortfolios as Personal Learning Environments (PLE--on the learner-centered end), and ePortfolios as Assessment Management Systems (AMS--on the institution-centered end). The article discussed the Evolution of Web 2.0 and the ePortfolio, and reported on discussions with three ePortfolio vendors (Digication, Angel Learning, and Desire2Learn) and the adaptations that they are making to their commercial systems in response to the Web 2.0 technologies. One of the ironies of this discussion is that free Web 2.0 technologies could be a threat to some of the commercial tools, since students could replicate ePortfolio/PLE functions of many of the commercial tools using these Web 2.0 tools. Accumulating institutional accountability data (AMS) is the real value added of many of the other commercial tools not mentioned in the article. The real value of Web 2.0 tools is for the students to create an ePortfolio that they can own and modify across the lifespan, gaining valuable lifelong learning skills that they can use once they leave higher education. That is the value of the WSU model using SharePoint, and other places using other types of social software for ePortfolios (blogs, wikis, Google tools, etc.)

The author of this Campus Technology article also published an earlier article, "ePortfolios Meet Social Software" which discusses some of the "stickiness" issues with ePortfolios, and the interest in the "own-it-for-life model" of implementation.

Labels: portfolios, Web2.0

Last week, I added a new page to my website: Learning about Electronic Portfolios. I converted the "open source" MOSEP course, created by the Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft under a European Commission grant, into HTML format (I found their wiki hard to navigate, and impossible to link to specific pages within the course). After I finished, I discovered the PDF version of their course materials online, but it is still impossible to link to specific lessons in the course! I also posted the course that I have been constructing about Web 2.0 Tools for Lifelong & Life Wide Learning. The course includes "Portfolio Pointers" on how to use the different Web 2.0 tools to construct an online portfolio "mashup".

Labels: assessment, portfolios, reflection, training, Web2.0

I am really excited. I am currently doing a workshop with English language teachers in Durango, and we are using a variety of Web 2.0 tools to facilitate the process over three full days; our agenda and the hands-on activities.

Yesterday, we began the workshop with Blogger and also Google Groups so that we could carry on a dialogue after the workshop is over (we will continue the dialogue online through December). I also showed them RSS feeds this morning (using GoogleReader), so that they can keep track of changes in blogs and other documents that have RSS feeds, like GoogleDocs, which we also covered this morning. Tonight we started to adapt the European Language Portfolio Word documents into GoogleDocs. We also looked at pulling together a presentation portfolio with the GoogleDocs Presentation tool, and then embedding the presentation into our blogs. Most of them were able to create a quick presentation, publish it, copy the code and embed it into their blogs (much as I did earlier in this blog).

Tomorrow morning, I will introduce them to online storage, where they will store audio clips and video clips of students' English speaking skills. We will learn how to store those files online in a free file storage website, and how to embed those links both into a blog and into a GoogleDoc or a Google Page document. I will be introducing them to Google Pages later, so that they can see a web page authoring tool.

This was a very ambitious schedule for these three days. The workshop day was different. We worked 9 AM to 1 PM, took the afternoon off, and came back for a 6-8 PM shift. It was nice to take off the hot part of the day, eating my heavy meal in the afternoon, but it still makes a long day! I am really impressed with the participants in this workshop. They are participating in a fast-paced workshop, learning a lot of new technology skills in their second language, staying past the end of the workshop to keep exploring new things. This is my second workshop in Mexico, and I am very impressed! I'm also able to practice my Spanish, reinforcing the class I have been taking this spring.

Labels: training, Web2.0

After the recent ePortfolio conference in Montreal, where I met Stephen Downes, his blog entry discussed the following entries about using blogs in the ePortfolio process:
This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 1
This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 2
This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 3

Alan Levine had discussed these issues in 2004, around the time I began this blog: Two Rivers Mix: RSS and e-Portfolios.

Penn State University switched over to the Movable Type blogging tool at the beginning of this year, and here are several weblinks that provide more information.
WHEN IS A BLOG NOT A BLOG?
ePortfolios at Penn State

I have already blogged about the research on blogs at the University of Calgary. It is important to emphasize that blogging tools facilitate personal publishing and reflection, which make this type of tool an essential part of any comprehensive ePortfolio system.

Labels: blogs, tools, Web2.0

I am at the ePortfolio conference in Montreal, and thought I would add an entry to my blog about an article that I am referencing entitled, "The Future of Web 2.0" which was published in Campus Technology on February 27, 2008. This was an interview with Gary Brown, Director of Washington State University's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. This quote is especially appropriate for using Web 2.0 tools within the context of assessment.

Right now at WSU, one of the things we're developing in collaboration with Microsoft is a "harvesting" gradebook. So as an instructor in an environment like this, my gradebook for you as a student has links to all the different things that are required of you in order for me to credit you for completing the work in my class. But you may have worked up one of the assignments in Flickr, another in Google Groups, another in Picasa, and another in a wiki. Maybe you've also made some significant contributions to Wikipedia. So, I need a gradebook where I have the link you've provided me, rather than a copy of the work, and the gradebook should be capable of pulling in all of these various sources.

Labels: assessment, Web2.0

GoogleDocs, the quintessential Web 2.0 tool, is always being upgraded. The advantage of this type of software is that I didn't have to do anything (such as download software updates) to take advantage of the latest version. I discovered some new features today while organizing all of my logins and passwords in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet (which I am not publishing for obvious reasons). I discovered that when I put a URL into a cell in the spreadsheet, it automatically became a hyperlink. I went back and re-visited the spreadsheet that I had uploaded as part of my portfolio over a year ago (My Artifacts-at-a-Glance) and found that the links, which were not active when I first converted the document from Excel, are now all "clickable." They have also provided the capability to embed GoogleDocs presentations into web pages, so I have inserted below the GoogleDocs Presentation version of my portfolio, which was converted from PowerPoint and edited to add comments/reflections and hyperlinks to the artifacts listed in the spreadsheet mentioned above.

Labels: tools, Web2.0

There is a wealth of insights about the future of Web 2.0 that can be found in some of the videos on the Web 2.0 conference site on Blip.tv. Here are some of my favorites, in addition to the presentation by Tim O'Reilly that I embedded in my previous blog entry. This was a conference for the developers of Web 2.0 tools, so the presentations were targeted at a Web 2.0 developer audience, but I think there are a lot of ideas that are appropriate for a user audience, especially as they provide a view of the underlying philosophy of the technologies to come. Below are links to some of my favorite presentations, although many of the others are also interesting:

• Scott Berkun, Berkun Consulting on Innovation and Creativity, Problems and Solutions
  
• Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody on "cognitive surplus" and the participatory web
• Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation on Opening the Mobile Web
• An interview with Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape and now with Ning, a social network building site

The other videos provide a glimpse of some of the Web 2.0 technologies under development from companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, WordPress, and AOL. The interesting difference between Blip.tv and YouTube is the ability to download the Flash videos from Blip.tv in addition to being able to leave comments.

Labels: Web2.0

I've spent the last few hours watching videos from the Web 2.0 conference that was held last week in San Francisco. I am most impressed with the presentation of Tim O'Reilly (who coined the Web 2.0 term). He discusses the core of Web 2.0 and some deep trends:

The first one is that the Internet really is becoming the platform, a global platform for everything, everything connected, and the nature of that platform is this amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence. It's not just about participation. It's about literally we are building a platform to make the world smarter, to make businesses smarter, to make ourselves smarter. This is an amazing revolution in human augmentation. We're at a turning point akin to literacy, or the formation of cities. This is a huge change in the way the world works.

These ideas bring me to the potential that these tools have for learning, both on a global basis which O'Reilly is focusing on, but also on an individual level, and the impact of Web 2.0 as a learning platform, beyond the specific tools. This video provides a profound look at how this technology could literally change the world, helping us to tackle some of the most difficult problems that we face as a nation and as a planet.

Labels: learning, Web2.0

While watching the day-long John Adams marathon on HBO (an incredible series!), I used the time to explore more of the online storage services that I started exploring last month (and that attracted many comments). Here are the services that I explored today:

• ElephantDrive - 1 GB free space, Email: YES - URI: NO
  
• DropBoks - 1 GB free space, Email: NO - URI: NO
• 4shared.com - 5 GB free space, Email: YES - URI: YES (very nice interface, but free account expires with 30 days of non-use)
  
• bluestring.com from AOL (more of a digital storytelling service, saving specific file types -- audio, video, images -- but not PDFs)
  
• openomy - 1 GB free space, Email: NO - URI: YES
  
• allmydata.com - 1 GB free space, Email: YES - URI: YES (one of my favorites, so far)
  
• hp upline - unable to set up account
  
• mozy home free - 2 GB free space, Email: NO - URI: NO (not a file sharing service, only a back-up/file syncronization service; requires client software download)
• getdropbox - 2 GB free space, Email: YES - URI: YES (still in beta, not giving out passwords or downloading software, yet) - The video demo on their website looks impressive.
• scribd - unlimited free space, Email: YES - URI: YES (this site calls itself the YouTube for Office/PDF files, but only stores these specific types of documents, not audio or video files)
• idrive - 2 GB free space, Email: ? - URI: ? (Windows only client software download required)
• divshare.com - 5 GB free space, Email: YES - URI: YES (another of my favorites)
  

I think I have found a couple of sites that meet my requirements: I've used Microsoft's SkyDrive in the last couple of weeks to transfer files between platforms, but I am most impressed with the capabilities of allmydata.com and divshare.com. The mediamax service is in the middle of migrating to a new name, thelinkup.com, and I received an email that told me they were not migrating files uploaded to its free accounts.

Labels: archive, digital preservation, Web2.0

I will be conducting two workshops over the next two months on using free Web 2.0 tools for ePortfolios:

• ePortfolio 2.0: using Web 2.0 for Authentic Assessment at the Eifel ePortfolio & Digital Identity conference in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; May 5, 2008; 9:30am–3:30pm (a "bring your own laptop" workshop)
  
• Web 2.0 Tools for Classroom-Based Assessment and Interactive Student ePortfolios at the National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio, Texas; June 29, 2008; 8:30am–3:30pm (a "bring your own laptop" hands-on workshop)

The resources for these workshops will be my examples of Web 2.0 portfolios, Google Tools, and my new Options for Online Storage.

Labels: conferences, ePMontreal08, NECC08, training, Web2.0

In my last two blog entries, I have focused on different online storage systems that could be used to store the artifacts for an electronic portfolio. As I researched further into this category of online services, I found the concept of "cloud" computing: a globe-spanning network of servers (the leader in cloud computing is Google, with Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon close behind). Another way to understand "computing in the cloud": dividing up work and distributing it out across the Internet. That is the model that I discussed more than a year ago as an ePortfolio Mash-up: different elements of my portfolio saved in different places in the Internet cloud.

In my reading, I found a new and interesting provider of personal digital document storage: Wells Fargo Bank! Their vSafe service will provide their customers online space to store and organize copies of important documents. "By protecting information in an electronically secure and centralized location, customers can easily access and recover copies of critical documents in the event of a natural disaster, theft or hard drive crash, or while traveling." I had not anticipated that online document storage would be provided by a financial institution, but security and privacy is a basic requirement of that industry. In the digital age, they could provide a digital safe deposit box for our important personal information. [I wonder if they would also allow hyperlinks to selected files? I have often compared financial portfolios (documenting the accumulation of fiscal capital) with portfolios in education (documenting the development of human capital).] But at $4.95 a month for 1 gigabyte, $9.95 a month for 3 gigabytes and $14.95 for 6 gigabytes of storage, it is fairly pricey for the increased security.

According to another article in Backup Review, another company in the Education market, School Web Lockers, is offering online storage of student and teacher work, accessible from home as well as school. "All School Web Lockers are backed up daily and preserved from year-to-year to allow students to easily create a portfolio of work." Again, I wonder if they allow hyperlinks to selected files from one of the many e-portfolio authoring tools.

Labels: archive, digital preservation, Web2.0

Some of these companies offering online storage have posted videos online (source: Online Backup and Storage blog):

• Drop Box - (YouTube video) (in private beta)
  
• Desktop on Demand - (YouTube video)
  
• AOL's XDrive - (BlipTV video) (1 GB free)
  
• Carbonite - (YouTube video) (not a free site - $50/year for "unlimited" backup storage)
• Roxio's BackonTrack - (YouTube video) (a product that you buy)
• Windows Live Sky Drive - (MSN video) (5 GB free)

Rather than fill my blog with more reviews of online storage sites, I have set up a web page on my website to organize my ongoing study of these online storage systems, and will post the most promising discoveries in my blog.

Labels: archive, digital preservation, Web2.0

I'm beginning a review of online file storage, building on my prior blog entry. I'm looking for online space to store artifacts for an electronic portfolio, not a standard file backup service. I found the following resources that either listed or reviewed the different services:

• Six Free Online Storage Services
• The Best Free Online File Storage
• Yahoo Group: Online Storage and Sharing
• Free Online File Storage
• 2008 Online Storage Services Report (the most current comparison)
  

Based on this work and a chart that I downloaded, from an article called The Online Storage Gang, I am exploring the following services. I pulled together a couple of PDF files and one MP3 file to upload as a test of the system. Here are my requirements: free storage of at least 1 GB of any type of data (including audio files) and able to share files in two ways (email with link to a file and permanent URI that can be added as a link to a web page).

• Box.net (I've had an account for more than a year, but haven't really used the service.) 1 GB free storage, maximum file size 10 MB (would not accept the MP3 file of my 12 minute 11.4 MB presentation) without an account upgrade. I had to edit the file down to less than 10 MB. Even then, it hung up in the middle of uploading the 9.9 MB MP3 file, and I was never able to add it to my account. Requires an upgraded account to create a permanent URI.
  Email: YES - URI: NO
  
• Omnidrive (When I tried to sign up for an account, I received the following message: We have currently reached server capacity and there are no more accounts available during the beta period. We expect to launch Omnidrive 1.0 during April, 2008.) That's too bad. Based on the features and description, it looks the most promising. 1 GB free storage
  Email: ? - URI: ? (website says YES to both)
  
• MediaMax (I read bad reviews, so I signed up with some reservations.) 25 GB free storage. I was able to upload files, either individually or as a batch. I uploaded an MP3 file, but it was too large to be downloaded without an account upgrade. It accepted the smaller file. After I transferred the files into a Hosted Folder, it showed the URL to link to each file. Files can also be shared by email. This was the most trouble-free and intuitive of the sites that I tried.
  Email: YES - URI: YES
  
• esnips.com - A very easy site to set up. I was able to upload my PDF files, but it rejected the MP3 file that I created, with the statement "Publish failed Suspected copyright infringement - upload denied." That won't work if students want to upload audio samples that they create. 5 GB free storage
  Email: YES - URI: NO
  
• Adrive - Very easy to set up and upload both PDF and MP3 files. No file size limit. A single click shares the file, and the list of shared files includes the URI. However, clicking on the link goes to a web page that downloads the file. 50 GB free storage
  Email: YES - URI: NO
  

Labels: archive, digital preservation, Web2.0

I received a notice that the Online Education Database has published a new article: e-Learning Reloaded: Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students. Here is also an excellent list of 15 Websites to Learn Web 2.0 written by educator Vicki Davis and published by 21st Century Connections. Vicki is well known for her use of Wikispaces with her students (her #1 link). Her #2 link is Google and its many services.

I have also been doing some research on the different tools that can be used for online storage, as I found Google's March 2006 vision of "a place for users to store 100% of their data online.”

• "Google Plans Service to Store Users' Data" (Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2007) - includes a good comparison of different virtual storage services available:
• "Google GDrive coming soon?" (from downloadsquad blog, November 27, 2007, including a history of the GDrive developments) - Apparently the project has been called Platypus or simply "My Stuff" although that name is the name of the new open source ePortfolio system created by the Open University in the U.K.
  

The big question is, WHEN??? I am experimenting with a third party addition to my Firefox browser, called GSpace, which lets me use 2 GB of my GMail/Picasa web space, being able to transfer files into folders within a browser window. I have already paid $20 (annual fee) to upgrade my online Picasa Storage so that I could upload more than the 1 GB limit for images. As of today, GMail storage has increased to more than 6 GB per account (and keeps growing).

To effectively use any of these virtual storage solutions as the digital archive for any e-portfolio system (or "lifetime personal web space"), they need to have the capability of OmniDrive and Box.net to "share files by creating a Web address that others can access." If I were to make a wish, I'd like an interface like YouTube or Picasa, that provides the HTML or URL to easily embed or copy/paste a hyperlink. I'm also hoping that the new interface allows more seamless integration between the different Google Apps (dare I hope "drag and drop" within a single window?). Now I have to switch between multiple windows to copy URLs for links to different documents. I hope the Google virtual storage service becomes available soon, and I hope it also works seamlessly with a Mac (not just Windows).

Labels: digital preservation, portfolios, Web2.0