We're in the middle of rethinking our use of ICT in education (or e-learning strategy, or how you would like to call it). Not unlike other eduational institutions we've been slowly riding the e-learning waves and in time have started using tools like a course management system, in our case Blackboard. Most of the choices have been made because of user demand and because "others" were also doing it—you can't permit to fall behind, can you?

The investments are quite high, both in software and infrastructure and in people in terms of training and content development. For a lot of staff Blackboard has been their first real experience with e-learning tools, which is quite allright. The trouble is, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that for some Blackboard is synonymous with e-learning. They are not to blame, because to be honest, that's how we originally started: we bought the package and now we see ourselves building a vision and strategy around its functionality. This is not far off from the comment Godfrey Parkin made on defining an e-learning strategy.

Portfolio's is the the topic of the day and again I see people looking at products first, which introduces some new problems because there's plenty of offerings. Which one to choose? It's interesting to see, though, that when viewed from our perspectives on learning and curriculum development elgg does seem to fit in quite well, but on the other hand there is also a strong demand for the development and understanding of employability skills and stuff like checklists for registering achieved competencies (I believe we are not alone in this). The registration of facts and figures, in other words, but where's the learning?

This is a complex situation: people basing their ideas of what a portfolio or e-learning is on product reviews and the discrepancy between what should be the outcomes of a learning strategy and the daily requirements of teaching staff to just be able to get things done.

This does not mean however that elgg should re-brand itself from a learning landscape to a complete e-learning and portfolio solution :)

Funny, I just noticed I have been added by Pete Hubbard to his friends list. Here you go, Pete, now you are on mine too.

What I have been wondering about is what the mores are for adding friends to a friends list. Is it the nice user icon, or a way to express shared interests, or is it after you have sent that polite little message with the single line: will you be my friend, or only after you have met someone in real-life? What's your style?

I have been reading through some of the LIfIA posts and after-party comments mentioned by Victor Leginsky and Pete Hubbard last week. There were two posts by Helen Barrett that caught my attention, The first, Poisoning the well had a very strong final message:

"I made the public statement this week, that high stakes assessment and accountability are killing portfolios as a reflective tool to support deep learning. Those mandated portfolios have lost their heart and soul: not creating meaning, but jumping through hoops!"

The other post, On the Other Hand, is about ownership. I tend to agree with her that control and ownership seem to be two central themes in the discussion about portfolios. My experience is that because of accountability issues (e.g. the reason behind a question like "how would Elgg help us satisfy our assessment criteria?") portfolio ownership often implicitly gets transferred to the institution, which inevitably leads to the loss of control by the learner. So, more than often the student is being asked to answer accountability issues via the predefined portfolio formats. No wonder that most students don't have very positive experiences with portfolio's: it's not their thing.

To be honest, how much attention can educational institutions pay to deep learning and "identity formation" and "expression of self" which reinforce the learner-centered nature of portfolios, as Helen Bartlett puts it? Criteria need to be met, and very often this is directly related to funding (at least in the Netherlands).

Yesterday I gave a talk about the semantic web at our neighboring university. I always enjoy doing these invited talks, this time it was for a group of about thirty engineering/computer science students. The talk went ok and I had the impression most of them were interested. I still find it difficult to talk about such an abstract concept without being able to show a semantic web killer app. There are a lot of interesting things happening at the moment, e.g. semantic blogging at Hewlett Packard and not to forget the amazing work being done at MIT like the Simile and Haystack projects, just to name a few, but I'm still waiting for the application that will be able to show the general public what it's all about (or would it be RSS?).

I was even a bit surprised that none of the students had ever heard of the semantic web or Resource Description Framework. It may be I'm a little bit biased by the things that interest me and am working with, but these are engineering students - shouldn't they be on top of things? I've noticed before with the interns I had the pleasure working with that most of them were quite mainstream in their technical interests: MS Windows desktop (tweaked, of course), Borland Delphi, Microsoft Visual Studio, et cetera, but no exciting and cutting edge open source tools or OS's like Linux or one of the BSD's or developments like the semantic web. Maybe my bias again but my impression is that's where all the exciting new developments are taking place. I've seen X Window do things I have never ever seen Apple or MS Windows do, and the desktop definitely is ready for prime time with apps like Beagle, F-Spot and Totem: cool stuff all the way. But then again, I am biased.

{{cut}}
I promised them to put up a list of interesting links I mentioned in my talk so here it is for everyone's pleasure. I encourage students to comment on this post, even if it's a simple "Yup, you're definitely biased".

• 
  gentle semantic web intoduction
  


• 
  JIME Special Issue: The Educational Semantic Web
  


• 
  semantic web pages W3C
  


• 
  RDF primer
  


• 
  OWL overview
  


• 
  MIT Simile, especially Piggy Bank
  


• 
  MIT Haystack
  


• 
  Mindswap
  


• 
  Touchgraph (related)
  


• 
  Jena – A Semantic Web Framework for Java
  


• 
  HP Labs Semantic Web Research
  


• 
  HP Labs Semantic Web Research: Student Projects
  

Scott Wilson has posted some slides on ePortfolios. They are excellent and provide a good overview of current developments and issues, including the positioning of Elgg in the ePortfolio-space. A must read (or view, whatever you are supposed to do with slides).