I just ran across Helen's page on research questions (http://electronicportfolios.org/research.html), and thought that a comment she made was particularly apt.  She said something about viewing portfolios on three levels: a digital archive of student work, a learner-centered view with a learner's authentic voice, and an institutional-centered assessment with rubrics and standards.

I really think that this 3-part system integrates the ways that several different groups view portfolios.  Teaching & Learning people interested in institutional growth and assessment have standards, students have a personal voice, and students' parents get some bang for their educational buck.  It sounds like these three also fit what students really need / want: personal & reliable file storage and a personal voice (blog), and what profs want: a way to easily standardize and measure educational effectiveness.

I think that we can view each of these goals as requiring a different kind of technology.  People interested in assessment have html-like pages, grids, etc... (OSPI, iwebfolio, ...).  Blogs support personal reflection.  Filing cabinets supports saving work online.   

I do think that this 3-part framework is still missing something -- community.  I've been reading thru John Zubizarreta's e-portfolio book, and one thing he highlights is the importance of community in a portfolio.  

While it is important that a portfolio be an intensely personal place, I think that many of the benefits of the net center on connecting people.  A portfolio is a presentation of yourself to the world, but it's nice to know what the world thinks...

Having a system that integrates each of these things would be a better portfolio system than the awkward kludges I've been dealing with at work.  What if a student could post a paper, reflect on it in a blog entry, and submit it to meet an institutional requirement, all in the same system?  Why not be able to turn a blog entry into a paper & tag it to show up in  your classes' journaling assignment slot? 

Anyway, my 2 cents;

Nathan 

I'm part of the Social Learning Lab at CGU, and am part of the group looking into supporting a number of courses next semester.  These are 'transdisciplinary' courses, a newer initiative on campus intended to increase links between different disciplines.  Transdisciplinary is a similar concept to multidisciplinary or interdisciplinarity, but goes more into achieving a higher level of synthesized knowledge.

In any case, CGU currently requires all of its new PhD students to take this course.  Our lab has been working on various social software platforms (podcasting, blogs, wikis...), but are going to focus on using Elgg to support these t-courses.

So, we now come the academic crux -- how to get a publication out of this...  A couple of ideas:

• Measure the impact of using Elgg on continuing social interaction.  Survey past t-course participants 3 & 6 months after the end of the course.  Ask them how much they talk with, collaborative with, or plan to continue talking with fellow members.
• View the t-courses as an alpha evaluation of Elgg & my wiki add-in (which will be in workable shape by then).  Gather qualitative feedback, and hope that it's good enough for a conference paper.  I know that there are some funky UI things in Elgg, we can use this alpha trial to find out where they are & devise tweaks to fix them.
• Try to evaluate the impact of blogging on forming community in the course, both during this course & after the class ends.

As of this point, as is typical in all of these kinds of experiments, I'm not sure about our baseline.  We can always contact  students who took the course in past semesters, but that could be problematic.  We also need to talk with the actual professors, as they *might* have some input on what they want to do with their own class. 

In any case, and in large part, I see the larger purpose of this as a way to introduce a core group of social networkers onto campus.  With any luck, this will be the first step towards encouraging more CGU students to communicate with each other.

- Nathan     

As most people know, I'm in the middle of a PhD program, and am looking at using Elgg as a platform for my dissertation.  I started off looking at Elgg purely as a way for people to collaborate on projects, and started the wiki add-in with that purpose in mind.  However, as I work more, I'm coming to realize that the e-portfolio aspects of Elgg may actually be more researchable.

At the moment, Elgg really concentrates on the social aspects of a portfolio more than the presentation parts.  While the personal profile page is really easy to get going (very low barrier to entry), it does not allow a ton of customization.  Elgg also has feeds, tags, blogs, etc..., but not much facility to present static information.

What I'm thinking now is to slightly tweak my original wiki notion to also include ways for people to customize their personal profile.  At a first step, I would put a checkbox by each wiki folio called 'Add to my Profile' that would add a new entry on the Profile page.  Perhaps it'd be something like 'My Folios', and then on the right side would have a link & description of each one.  This means that I would probably also have to add a button on the profile editing page called 'Add a set of wiki/folio pages to your profile' that would take them to the creation of a new wiki.

Allowing people to  build more static representations of their projects and knowledge could be rather nice.  In addition, if they do projects in Elgg, then these would be really easy to add to their profile.

I'm really trying to keep the 'click-count' down.  If people are to make collections of pages, they probably shouldn't have to click more than 2x, and certainly shouldn't have to input summary information beforehand.  This add-in would have to engage users thru their 'play drive' -- the whimsical 'what's this, oh -- nice...' concept.

This also applies to a posting several days ago about how Elgg meets the various aspects of a portfolio as put forward by Helen Bartlett.  To review, she said (my paraphrase) that a portfolio should have a digital archive, an authentic voice, and institutional assessment aspects.  Adding in a more static wiki pages could help to fulfill the latter by allowing a way to present project information and artifacts tailored to particular requirements.  Mind you, I'm no huge fan of burdening an e-portfolio system with overwhelming institutional rubrics, but we're kidding ourselves if we ignore the importance of that for institutional acceptance.

Pulling back to a larger context, this fits nicely in an overarching research theme of looking at the difference the 'e-' part of e-portfolio makes.  E-mail is very different from mail, how are e-portfolios different from portfolios?  Different people have said things like lowering the barriers to copying, greater publication opportunities, more capacity, etc...  But, I think that they're probably missing out on the social aspects & opportunities of putting documents online.  A portfolio should not be a one-way communication tool, but a way for mentoring, connecting, and sharing. 

at least, that's what I'm thinking...

I'm putting this post out to document a conversation I had with Brian yesterday about our intent to use Elgg for a CGU T-Course. 

We did some brainstorming, and came up with 2 primary experimental designs:

Both designs essentially are trying to evaluate the impact Elgg makes on students' classroom community.  We believe that compared to a non-enhanced class, students using Elgg will make better connections during the course, as well as do a better job of maintaining those relationships after the course ends.

The first looks at classes taught by Wendy Martin (t-course director).  Because she has taught 1 tcourse each semester since the program began (Fall 05, Spring 06, and will teach Fall 06), the design of the courses are comparable.   We would contact each student who has taken her course and survey them as to the closeness achieved during the course, as well as how close they feel / how often they contact other students now.  After the Fall 06 course ends, we would wait a couple of months & survey them as well.  This isn't the best design, but it probably one of the better baselines we have available.

The second design is more of a qualitative look at Elgg's impact.   This would probably do things like in-class focus groups, qualitative surveys (how did you feel about?  how did it impact? why did you use it / not use it?), and a post-course survey.  We would also use usage statistics from our Elgg installation to see how people used it. 

The goal is to increase the amount of LPUs (least publishable units) generated by the research program, and to have some sort of backup in case one or more of the experiments goes bust...

Anyway, this post will probably be refined as we talk with our advisors in coming days.

- Nathan