The ePortfolio Phenomenon personal eportfolios for teaching and lifelong learning

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The ePortfolio Phenomenon personal e-portfolios
for teaching and lifelong learning

• JISC RSC South East ILT Fair
• Berkshire College of Agriculture
• 18 November 2005

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Key Questions

• Are eportfolios the personal learning
  environments (PLEs) of the future or just another
  initiative from the centre?
• What is an ePortfolio?
• Demonstration of Open Source ePortfolio
• Can ePortfolios help people to define their own
  success through reflection on past events with
  evidence from artefacts they have collected or
  constructed?

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Projects Summary
COMPLETE

• Personal e-Portfolios for Teaching and Learning
  (PETAL)
• 112k
• Software development and 1 pilot (CMALT)
• 5 partners
• Wider Opportunities for Reflection, Learning and
  Development (myWORLD)
• 207k
• Wide scale regional trial
• 8 partners
• ends 31/03/06
• Kent Personal Learning Portal Project (PLPP)
• 8k
• Alliance with Kent Wide-scale regional pilot
• Petal 2
• 51k
• Software enhancements
• ends 31/03/06

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Slice across education after school

• Colleges
• Plumpton, Abingdon, Sussex Downs
• Universities
• Brighton, Brookes, Kent, Canterbury Ch Ch
• Community Learning Centres
• CUPP, BLITZ
• Professional Institutes Branches
• CIPD, CMI, CILIP, ALT

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Travel required
Brookes Social Care
Brookes Certificate Teaching in HE
CMALT
Access to HE in FE
Professional CVs for Recruitment
Professional Pathways
HND Multimedia
Access to Art
Refugees in HE
PGCE Primary
Arts Foundation
Wine Studies
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e-Portfolio Policy

• one of many means by which governments seek to
  maintain economic competitiveness by building
  so-called knowledge economies
• one strand of national identity management
  strategy
• this can greatly confuse the discussion
• individual, federated or centralised
• inscription, relationships, communities of
  practice
• gender, race, ethnicity, family, friendship,
  vocation, recreation, embodiment, pleasure,
  nationality, neighbourhoods
• where are the shared third spaces, beyond the gaze

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A Few Signals

• DfES
• Provide integrated e-portfolios for Schools by
  2007
• A personalised learning space, with the potential
  to support e-portfolios available within every
  college by 2007-08.
• HEFCE
• Encourage e-based systems of describing learning
  achievement and personal development planning
  (PDP)
• BECTA
• ePortfolios will form the basis not only of their
  learner records, but also of their CVs,
  applications for both further learning and work,
  and their career decisions
• all education and training organisations have the
  responsibility to contribute to a learners
  e-portfolio for lifelong learning
• CareersWales
• E portfolio was launched on November 3rd offering
  an e portfolio for every Welsh citizen (Welsh
  postcode)

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ePortfolios? Whats an ePortfolio

• Portfolios are collections of objects (files,
  documents, thoughts, music, pictures - stuff)
  that show what you can do
• We can start saying that an eportfolio is simply
  an electronic version of a physical portfolio
• They are, the new generation of the old 3-ring
  binder (http//www.pt3.org/stories/eportfolio.htm
  l) or,
• a self-selected multimedia presentation of
  student work (http//www.eportfolio.lagcc.cuny.ed
  u/).

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Like what?

• Journals, logbooks, diaries, tasting notes?
• Personal Research archives
• pre-prints/re-prints, ePrints, dSpace
• Blogs (e.g. Blogger)
• Wikis (wikiPedia)
• Flickr
• monster.com or monster.co.uk
• Personal websites
• Profiles
• Yahoo, MSN, Skype, icq
• Loyalty cards?
• other things?
• FOAF
• LiveJournal
• RSS

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• According to Richardson and Ward (2005)
• The term portfolio as used in the UK generally
  describes a collection (or archive) of reflective
  writing and associated evidence, which documents
  learning and which a learner may draw upon to
  present her/his learning and achievements

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• ePortfolio Items
• transcript, reflection, affiliation, assertion,
  goal, etc
• ePortfolio Systems
• manage ePortfolio items
• enter, update, import/export, format
• manage user permissions
• ePortfolio Presentations
• sub-sets of the archive assembled and formatted
  for a particular rhetorical purpose
• transitions school/college/university/work
• assessments

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ePortfolio Items

• Learner Information Profile (LIP)
• UKLeaP
• BS8788
• IMSe-portfolio

qualifications, certificates, licences
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Basic functions
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Roles and Processes

• Roles
• Learner adult returner, student, professional,
  delegate, etc
• Teacher course leader, facilitator, mentor,
  tutor, etc
• Learning Technologist instructional designer,
  training consultant, etc
• Role names change as contexts change
• Roles may be shared or duplicated
• Role boundaries are porous
• Processes
• Orientation assessment, job application,
  thinking about my future
• Selection enter data/artefacts into repository
• Reflection annotate data/artefacts
• Presentation Private, Semi-public, Public

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Reasons for developinge-Portfolio systems

• increasing learner autonomy
• stimulating reflection and deep learning
• assessing learning
• apl/apel, entry with credit, cpd
• competency
• facilitating lifelong learning and progression
• within and between institutions
• between episodes of employment and/or education
• between national education and professional
  systems
• often in novel partnership arrangements
• reducing contact time while also increasing the
  quality of contact time

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ePortfolios and Success

• personal success linked to national success
• governments are seeking to maintain economic
  competitiveness by building so-called knowledge
  economies
• what constitutes personal success?
• employment?
• satisfaction?
• friendship?
• love?
• where is success important?
• domestic life
• public life education, community, employment
• third spaces

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Lifelong Learning Records
After 10 years and 3 attempts, Susie gets
out gets clean finds community learning
Where I live they tolerate crime, drugs and
antisocial behaviour and expect low personal
achievement. They dont think like the mainstream
and there is strong pressure to conform.
Susies Journey http//www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?na
mepub_inform6
Susies goes down for bringing drugs to prison
Susies boyfriend is banged up
Susie gets her chaotic life together,
formalises basic skills, gets ECDL, discovers she
likes computers and helping people learn becomes
a learning technologist
Susie leaves school
MLEs for Lifelong Learning http//www.jisc.ac.uk/m
le
Susie gets Pregnant
Must get job. Dont want employer to know my past
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• how can success be measured?
• how does success differ from person to person and
  in different contexts?
• can ePortfolios help people to define their own
  success
• through reflection on past events with evidence
  from artefacts collected or constructed
• enhanced with peer or mentor commentary and
  feedback

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Who will provide e-portfolio services?

• DfES has a highly centralised model
• There are many problems with such a model
• trust, personalisation, ownership of data,
  public-private partnerships, international
  student mobility and so on.
• The absurd extrapolation is that one day UNESCO
  will provide the world with e-portfolio services

Learner
Provider A
Provider B
Provider C
Centralised Record
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The reality of the world as it is

• Multiple distributed data stores Learner
  Integrated
• Many student record systems hold information
  about learners.
• Learners put information in blogs and personal
  websites.
• People have documents on their computer or in
  boxes under their bed
• Many employers require staff to use their systems
• Professional Institutes have online CPD systems

Provider A
Provider B
Provider C
Record
Record
Record
Learners Record
Learner
Service Provider
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a quasi-market for ePortfolio services

• ePortfolio systems providers will include
• educational institutions
• schools, colleges, universities, alumni
  associations
• local and national authorities
• LEAs, economic development departments
• professional institutes
• trades unions
• private sector providers (ISPs, Yahoo, etc)
• open source and proprietary
• free, sponsored and paid-for
• PPPs
• e.g. Fugitsu DTI,
• community and voluntary organisations
• others...

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Lifelong learning

• universities are beginning to permit graduates to
  maintain and update their ePortfolios
  indefinitely to strengthen alumni relations
• University of Warwick plan to use eportfolios
  "... to lock in alumni to the continuing sale of
  the university's services"
• the university preserves the connection with the
  graduate
• helps to maintain a network of alumni.
• good from a Careers Service point of view
• gives a view onto the successes of the alumni in
  association with the university

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With thanks to

• Ellen Lessner
• Irmgard Huppe
• Rhona Sharpe
• Jim Hyndman
• Nick Jeans
• Dave Pickersgill
• Seb Schmoller
• Julia Duggleby
• Alan Dibble
• Anne Jones
• Ruth Hilbourne
• Alice Fox
• Cherie Woolmer
• John Lidgey
• Glenis Lambert
• Adja Cici

• Richard Francis
• Fawei Geng
• Neil Smith
• Zack Wragg
• Ian Ibbotson
• Rob Tice
• Stan Stanier
• Joe Rosa
• Sasha East
• Shirley Borrett
• Chris Foss
• John Webber
• Bonnie Ferguson
• Edwina Bell
• Artie Vossell-Newman

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• Thank you!

George Roberts Development Director, Off-campus
E-learning Oxford Brookes University groberts_at_bro
okes.ac.uk 44 (0) 1865 484871 44 (0) 7711
698465 http//www.brookes.ac.uk/virtual/ http//ww
w.alt.ac.uk/altc2004/