Screenshot from @topgold's Android phone
I ATTENDED THE THIRD DAY of the ePortfolio Conference in the Dublin Institute of Technology and finished with a renewed imperative to enhance my own ePortfolio and to advocate an option for portfolio reviews of applicants to our third level creative degrees.
Reflecting on #EPortfoliohub16
I prepared an intense two-hour workshop for conference attendees and was delighted to have both Helen Beetham and Catherine Cronin attend and offer feedback. The workshop is similar to one I run with first year students in the Limerick Institute of Technology. It assumes students have rudimentary portfolio objects on Facebook that can be substantiated through cursory sociometric analysis with some of the results repackaged for LinkedIn. In my student labs, we screenshot part of Facebook, iterate a word cloud, interrogate Socioviz for meaningful correlations and publish a short status update on LinkedIn. I modified the workshop outcomes slightly because I thought some of those attending would not have shareable content on Facebook or a presence on LinkedIn.
The entire workshop is online as part of a Slideshare deck at http://www.slideshare.net/topgold/identity-as-a-workshop:
I came to the ePortfolio Conference to show how students and teachers could show and share high quality portfolio objects. As I listened to presentations and watched teachers, lecturers and trainers in my workshop finish tasks I outlined on a Jump List inside a public OneNote collection, I realised many people do not have a personal workflow where they gather and repurpose content on their own connected devices. We assume our first year students have most of those essential skills before they begin their first lab session because if they don't they must avail of learning support to correct a deficiency. It's not unusual to see mid-career teachers unable to capture and edit on-screen while their students accelerate the process with apps or cloud services. Seeing this first hand, I realise I must revise my slide deck and give an overview of simple processes such as screen captures, cropping, annotating, uploading to shared spaces and co-authoring using Office 365.
Part of my workshop offered glimpses into social spaces offering business intelligence.
- Facets of business intelligence appear on screen when using Socioviz to interrogate hashtags, user names or place.
- Anything using the Facebook or Twitter firehoses drops into the space of business intelligence too.
During the workshop, we co-authored shareable items
- Used Office Sway to summarise word clouds.
- Used Powerpoint co-authoring to show simple sociometrics.
- Co-authored in Word to share info on LinkedIn profile views.
During my wrap-up session, I offered a few thoughts about managing a live lab session when confronted with laddish behaviour such as lightweight cyberbullying or desecration of online assets. I run full-on wide-open editing sessions which means students who wish to delete everything uploaded by everybody can do just that. My work practise is not for the faint-hearted and to keep my sanity, I have remote back-ups that will restore a lost day's work. I offered superficial explanations for my pocket-sized and cloud backup routines but did not elaborate for those attending the workshop and that probably means several people will not attempt to offer my eportfolio workshop in teacher training sessions.
I hope to unveil those viable hands-on tactics in future workshops, including the e-learning summer school in DIT in late June 2016.
As I left the final session of #eportfoliohub16, I noticed the online slide decks and personal websites of several attendees. I view those online assets as parts of the eportfolio of #eportfoliohub16 and hope to continue learning while reading high quality reflections on teaching and learning by those who listened, presented and shared during this three-day conference. If you want to be added to my recommended reading list, please let me know by commenting below or by tweeting me your idea.
Recommending:
Helen Barrett -- "ePortfolios for Learning"
Catherine Cronin -- "Learning. Reflecting. Sharing."
Helen Beetham -- "HelenB's e-learning blog"
Harry McCann -- "Simplifying Things"
Essential Reading List
Gail Matthews-DeNatale -- "Are we who we think we are?", 2013.
Paris, S. and Ayres, L. (1994). Becoming Reflective Students and Teachers. American Psychological Association.
Paulsen, F.L., Paulsen, P.R. and Meyer, C.A. (2003). What Makes a Portfolio a Portfolio, EBSCO.
Zull, J. (2011). From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education, Stylus.
JISC (2008). Effective Practise with e-Portfolios.
+++ Bernie Goldbach is a creative multimedia and business lecturer at the Limerick Institute of Technology.
