The Medical ePortfolio Project

The article is about how eportfolios were introduced at the University of Westminster. Lots of detail about timetabling etc.

A US educational technology journal called Innovate holds web seminars and makes the archives available to subscribers. You can get a free account here. However, in order to get to the seminar archives you will also need to install a VPN on your computer - you can quickly do that from here if you don't already have one. If you are at home when you use the VPN, use the offcampus option. But if you are on campus you need to pick the oncampus option, then, when it asks you to log in, use you usual unikey login with !10 directly after your username - no spaces - followed by your usual password.

If not you're completely exhausted just by reading this far, take heart: this archived seminar is worth it. It is called 'The Power of "E": Using e-Portfolios to Build Online Presentation Skills' and is given by Cara Lane from UWashington in Seattle. It is an excellent overview of some of the benefits of using eportfolios with two groups of students: with junior students to improve their academic writing skills by taking them from the familiar (email and blog writing) to more formal ways to present themselves, and also with professional students to orient them to the presentation skills implicit in their future life.

It's also an excellent example of how a good web seminar can work, I have attended one that wasn't very involving, and I wasn't impressed with the idea then. This one was much better.

There is a seminar series from 5-9 June on eportfolios - details here - but I will be still away that week. There is one on June 6 about eportfolios with a number of speakers (I think it's 9am on June 7 here but don't take my work for that!). I will listen to it when I get back and review it for the team.

There has been a lot of work done in the UK, and some excellent products have been developed. Here's the current JISC report on their usage.

This document could provide an interesting background for any eportfolios from the UK. It seems that some work has been done by the QAA on formalising how eportfolios and other personal develoment documents of various kinds are used in the UK. I don't think that anything has been done here on this - there's nothing on the AUQA website. I suppose the present DEST research proposal relates to people wanting to set some standards.

I have just received the books i ordered from Amazon:
The Web portfolio Guide by Kimball
Electornic portfolios by Cambridge et al
Handbook of research on ePortfolios by Jafari and Kaufman
Will peruse and see what they have to offer.

Discussion with a colleague today reminded me about a rubric that people sometimes use for assessing journals and reflective writing: Bigg's SOLO taxonomy. (SOLO=Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) It is often brought up in discussions of deep and surface learning

It is described here and discussed in slightly more depth here and there are hints at applying it to essay-type work here.

If you think this is worth pursuing I will put these links in the sidebar and do some more research on SOLO and how it has been applied to reflective writing.

Using portfolio in the assessment of learning and competence: impact of four modelsEndacott et al in Nurse Education in Practice 2004; 4: 250-257

They describe portfolios as being one of the following:
Shopping trolley - merely a repository for documents
Toast rack - discrete elements that assess different aspects and each of which is added without intergration (ie kept apart from each other re the separate sections of the rack)
Spinal column - portfolio structured round competencies or outcomes with evidence of achievement slotted in; also has reflective accounts
Cake mix - more integration between the various parts with theory and practice meshed so whole portfolio (the cake) assessed rather than components

Also see this upload for some of my thoughts/questions on the process

Just been talking to Meloni Muir who went to this conference 2 weeks ago. I have the book of abstracts to peruse. Meloni impressed with the introduction of an ePortfolio at QUT. I will contact them to find out more and maybe get access. Wollongong has also introduced a portfolio this year which medicine are using and I will chase that up as well.

I have been looking at Helen Barrett's pages and there is some excellent and thought-provoking material there. She is based in teacher training, but she raises many philosphical issues that we need to consider. I would especially recommend reading this entry in her blog about choosing an eportfolio system - it incorporates her view of what an eportfolio is (and can be), and analyses the competing forces that come into play when eportfolios are being set up. Reading this should help us to clarify exactly what (and who!) we want this system set up for, and help us to focus on what the student experience might be.

And here is another article from 2004 that she wrote with David Gibson about these issues, and (relevant to us) detailed suggestions about how to assess portfolio software.

Here is a graphic which compares assessment management systems with electronic portfolios. This is one of the philosphical problems that Barrett identifies - the need to balance quantitative assessment reporting systems with qualitative experiential measures of learning.

I've found a link to this article online. It isn't held at our library, but only costs Aus$4.11. It may not have any new information in it - what do people think?