eportfolios :: Blog

It has been a while since I was involved in the ePortfolio scene, and with my PhD on hold as I pursue running a business, I have not been able to keep up-to-date.

It feels like the whole ePortfolio / PLE movement has died out, is this the case or are developments flourishing? 

Hi,

To everybody who is interested about electronic portfolios here you have the information about a book written by the Digifolio members.

Digifolio is a Comenius project. The main objective of the digiFolio Project is to use the educational possibilities of portfolios supported by ICT in teacher's professional development leading to the building up of new competences and new approaches in the learning methodologies.

The digiFolio publication can be downloaded here (PDF format 987K)

I hope the publication will be useful.

Sincerely

Fernando

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Fernando Albuquerque Costa
Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação
UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA
Aprender Com Tecnologias: www.aprendercom.net 
Blogue pessoal: www.aprendercom.info/miragem

 

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Hello,

I've been lurking for a while, however this is my first post here, so hello :D.

When I first started looking at elgg it was because I was watching developments with moodle and hoping to integrate these for students at the school where I work. However, I then decided to train as a teacher and to that end am now using elgg for my own graduate trainee programme portfolio. FYI this (vocational) portfolio consists of:

• lesson plans
• evidence sheets (signed off by other people)
• witness statements (written by other people)
• logs of mentor meetings
• refective logs of professional development opportunities
• weekly reflective logs
• lesson observations

as you can imagine, this adds up to hundreds of pieces of information over the year.

However, there is some resistence from the DRB who are responsible for training and recommending me for QTS, towards me using this environment. They are concerned that it is not "transparent" enough, in particular:

1. that people I work with who might need to "sign off" on a piece of evidence, won't want to go through the process of creating usernames etc
2. the assessor will want to work with paper, not from a screen (plus issue 1).
1. and if they don't mind working from a screen, won't want to have to log into anything.
   

Part of this perception is probably my fault; I have chosen to do most of the record keeping behind virtual "closed doors". There is so much reflection required that I think it is more liberating for me to be able to do this in front of a small invited group rather than the whole world :(.

Following a discussion yesterday, I committed to printing out everything at the end of the year for assessment, if the assessor and external tutor require it.

If they don't, I thought that it would be fairly trivial to add the public, via my access controls, to the group I have setup via network controls so that at the very end of this process, and in time for assessment, I could just open up all the work (which is currently restricted to that group) to the public and the assessor could browse to their hearts content.

Unfortunately, it appears not to be so simple, and I wonder if anyone has any idea what I could do? Or if, to make a wider point, this is something that should perhaps be considered as a necessary requirement of an eportfolio system?

Looking at the way that access controls are presented, it would appear to me as though it would not be out of the realms of possibility to make access "circular" i.e. where now we can choose to open a document to public, make it private or add a group, we could also do the same to a group. So for example, I have a started a public group call GTP Community, if I could make that group truly public (anyone can read) and then add that group to my access controls for my group. Or more simply, that we could have the choice to open a closed network group to the public and with the option to close it down again.

The problem would be, I guess,if elgg access has been designed heirarchically, however, if it is more "flat" (apologies if these are the wrong terms), then surely this kind of opening and closing of access would be possible.

Hope that makes sense, I'm thinking it needs a diagram. I hope you'll be able to advise me.

Cheers

Mandy 

As part of our university departmental orientation programme for new 2006/07 students we are planning to use Elgg as a platform for communication, collaboration and e-portfolio purposes. The idea is to help new students gain an identity, form new communities with other students and start to build their portfolio from day 1.

One of the concerns I have is how sustainable will Elgg be. If the e-portfolio becomes an indispensible, lifelong exercise, how do we ensure that it is still available after their 3 or 4 years at university? It is not feasible to host it on the university server (for 50 years??), so will it still be available from Elgg.net, or is there a permanent solution?  

Does anyone 'here' have any experience/knowledge of using Sakai and  the Open Source Portfolio. The 5th Sakai conference is happening this weekend in Vancouver, BC and appears to enjoy a loyal and dedicated user base. The ePortfolio appears to be more in keeping with Becta's aspirations, but is it wedded to Sakai ?

Thanks in advance. 

Has anyone else seen the features of the new application Pack WebCT are producing for June 2006?

Does anyone think this will close the gap in the market for comercial VLE's? It seems to cut across many features of Elgg. We are hoping to do side by side comparisons of Elgg, WebCT and our MIS system to see where we can get the best info into and out from our systems.

How many different needs we have here. Does any one else have ideas of a matrix to map the flow of demands from different groups?

We have Government, HE sector, Professional Acrediting bodies, PDP, IPE and a raft of smaller groups. All with seemingly different agendas Much like George Roberts wrote back in December. I would welcome some feedback and to share ideas on the UK, European, and World wide views. Any pointers are greatfully received.

My New Year's resolution was to create my e-portfolio. So I have been working on my profile and now I am a little stuck because I want to make some hyperlinks. I tried just writing the address but it doesn't become a hyperlink. I would also like to be able to link to some files which I will have uploaded and I foresee the same problem arising there.

Since most of my recent activities can be summarised by reference to the projects I have been associated with, it is really important to me to be able to link. I'm a little stuck and would appreciate some advice.

We built an eportfolio in 2000 for use by teacher education students in our college. We used what we felt, at the time, was the easiest technology for our students to learn and use so they didn't have to concentrate so much on the technology that they didn't have time to concentrate on their course work. We now have over 2000 students with online eportfolios.

Needless to say, online technology has advanced greatly since 2000 and we are looking at evolving to a more advanced system to take advantage of web2.0 technologies. Our current system is a "static" website system. If you are interested in learning more about our current system, do a google search on my last name combined with eportfolio and frontpage and you will find a paper published in Essays in Education with a complete description of our current system.

I have been working on customizing Moodle to serve as a replacement for our current system and have made good progress on this. We want to move to a system that does provide a place for students to create a standards-based eportfolio (one that they will enjoy creating and value) and at the same time provide a means for administrative assessment of the eportfolio.

I have just now found Elgg and it has caught my attention due to the eportfolio potential and community building potential. It seems to have some key features that will appeal to students...seems very similiar to the hughly popular "facebook" that all our students are crazy about.

I'm looking forward to diving into this software and exploring the potential.

There is a problem but it is hard to pin down. It has to do with the tension between institutional and individual agendas. For the moment the eportfolio movement is driven by institutional agendas. The institutions may be concrete ones: particular universities, particular departments of government, particular companies and so on. The institutions may also be abstractions of these: education, employment, government, society.

Other institutions show little interest in eportfolios as such. (read more here)