The Medical ePortfolio Project

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?

Chris asks in his comment "Can the articles list be dynamic with an endote.enl??"

The answer is yes, but it would take me many many hours to recreate it that way. However, if you download the original Word document, which I've uploaded here, you can click on the icon for 'export travelling library' in the Endnote toolbar in Word. (You can see this icon circled in red below.)

This will give you the option to create a new library with the references in the doument in it, and when you open the new library you will find all the references are listed with their weblinks, with the exception of those that were originally downloaded as pdfs. If you want those I have got copies that I downloaded last week.

I'm afraid it isn't possible to upload an endnote database to the blog for sharing. We would need to have endnote installed specially on the server to be able to share it in this way. We'll have to share important articles by listing them in the sidebar.

This is the first post on the Med ePortfolio blog. It will be interesting to see how it works!

I have been reading the literature about ePortfolios with the idea of settting up a taxonomy to assess the use of eportfolios that we can trace. I'm putting a list of the articles that I have found useful in the sidebar, under the heading Resources, along with a brief summary of each article - clicking on the link will lead to a copy of the article. If you have any articles you want to add to the list, send me wither a copy of the article or a link to where it can be found and I will add it to the list.