cogdogblog

WebCT Opens Doors to OPSI e-portfolio

It was bound to happen, once the interest in electronic portfolios has bubbled widely, the big Course Management Monoliths would bring them in under their hoods.

I am not at EDCUASE (hardly seems to be any blogging from there? trying a feedster search now- hey who put all those banner ads in there?), and this is just a PR post, but coming soon, to a CMS near you... WebCT Demos New Open Source Portfolio PowerLink at EDUCAUSE 2003:

I am quite sure that Blackboard is on the same track via their "Building Block" approach.

It will be curious to see if the CMSes act as a conveyer of content to and from eportfolios, or if their game is to suck them under the password protected hood. It is an important feature of an enterprise e-portfolio tool to provide portfolio artifacts that are institutional, program, or course authenticated, going beyond what an individual self-selects to add (leaving the individual hopefully in control of the public presentation).

Next on the horizon- WebCT and Bb take a bite at blogs. Bet on it.

And why should they not now pick up on RSS? There could be feeds for course catalogs, feeds for student assignments, course announcements, etc- the database to generate the content exists now, and it should be trivial to have code spawn the feeds.

League Bloggin': Land of 10,000 E-Folios

Just a quick recap of this League Conference session, "Minnesota: Land of 10,000 E-Folios" by Paul Wasko of eFolio Minnesota the project providing electronic portfolios to all citizens of the state. This was a hands on session that allowed us as participants to create use the tools available in this software.

It actually is very easy to use, and offers quite a number of control and flexibility. It has a decent set of templates (using style sheets) and easy, consistent enditing tools. From the editing interface, you can always toggle to a preview mode to see the work.

I was impressed as far as it meets some of the flexibilty and ease of use issues our faculty have voiced for electronic portfolios. It offers level of access the owner can set for different users and group (restricting access to very specific sections of a portfolio). It doe snot seem to have the ability to have "official" pieces of work added by the institution, so the portfolio content is all user selected.

Interesting feature is the ability to create a custom survey/poll that the owner can collect information/feedback from their visitors.

I am not sure how long they will keep active the junk I made, but you can find it at:
http://www.sample9.league.myefolio.com/

Need to learn more about the Avenet software that runs this.

ePortfolios at Maricopa

Actually, we have some ventures going on Electronic Portfolios at Maricopa.

A new mcli site (for now) chronicles three project/efforts.

1. Maricopa joined the ePortConsortium, a group of several colleges/universities hoping to develop a system that has the desired features and the (grail-like?) goal of interoperability. (more...)
2. One of our colleges, Chandler-Gilbert Community College, is developing their own eportfolio tool. (more...)
3. And we had the (wild eyed?) notion that available weblog tools could be used as platforms for eportfolios (but offer more interesting features for student publishing). (more...)

Stay tuned for developments in the year to come...

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/eport/

ePortfolio 2003 International Conference

NOw, I wish our work with electornic portfolios was buzzing enough for someone in the organization to force me to attend ePorfolio 2003, the "first international conference on the digital portfolio, 9-10 Octobre 2003, Poitiers France"

Can you say "buzzword"? This year's "portal"??

ePortfolios might be the biggest thing in technology innovation on campus

Actually it sounds interesting, like the Eurpean community is doing more consortium building on this than the big old USA.

Let me go, sil vous plait!

Today we are just at the start of exploiting the full potential of the e-portfolio. This conference will provide the opportunity for benchmarking initiatives, technologies and policies (within and beyond Europe), exchanging with experts and practitioners on current and future development, networking with other professionals to establish action plans to enable you to get the full benefit from this promising learning technology.

MT as a Teaching Portfolio

Ryan Eby, a Michigan State University education major, has created an e-Portfolio in Movable Type, a nice example of using te reflective aspects of a blog for this purpose.

Major sections in Ryan's teacher portfolio include his "tutoring logs", teaching strategies and resources, teaching philoophy, and an "inquiry project"

Thanks for a great example, Ryan (and activate Trackback on your blog ;-)

About ePortfolios..

More to come here in the nest few weeks as some new efforts get under way in the area of Electronic Portfiolios. For now, see the 100+ resources collected for our October 18, 2003
ePortfolio Dialogue Day

The work here will be results of implementation of the ePortConsortium system as Maricopa has joined this consortium to further the effort.

On another front, I am gearing up to create a tutorial/ workshop on using MovableType as a possible ePortfolio tool as well.