The conference focused on methodological procedures in translator training which make innovative use of affordable technological tools. The use of electronic portfolios received special attention.
I was asked to give the inaugural plenary lecture which was entitled after my project. The presentation introduced a concept of going digital in the educational sphere by focusing on portfolio-related activities which - after the arrival of an e-portfolio - could help to coordinate the personal development agenda. The presentation described and compared institutional approaches with a students' perspective. Another focus of the presentation was The University of Edinburgh's plans to introduce an e-portfolio tool which would sit alongside, and be integrated with its extensive Virtual Learning Environment system.
The presentation by Shea Deva, Jennifer Gurrie and Kathy Courtney provided a preview of the WebCT portfolio tool. The key capabilities of this tool are listed below:
Notes from the meeting are available here.
The Focused Learner Questions project for the Effective Learning Framework organised a series of focus groups held in QAA Scotland Offices in Glasgow for the colleagues from Scotland. At the Focus Group our activities were:
The meeting was aimed at discussing a set of skills which would be included in the future University e-portfolio system. Items presented and discussed by me included:
With the contributions from Rachel Ellaway, Jeff Haywood, Hamish Macleod, Roger Scrutton, Stephen Smith, Fiona Sykes and me, the meeting helped to realise scale of difficulties we may encounter in the future with creating a generic set of skills for such diverse institution as ours.
This initial meeting was aimed at providing an overview of the future e-portfolio system at the University of Edinburgh. It was encouraging to see student reps strongly interested in the e-portfolio related issues. There were also thoughtful suggestions from them for activating student involvement in research. Items presented and discussed by me included:
The OSP UK Meeting was intended to give participants more information about the Open Source Portfolio.
The meeting brought together a number of educationalists interested in various
e-portfolio software implementations.
The meeting proceedings began with an introduction and welcome. Then, Prof. Jeff Haywood (pictured), the meeting's moderator and of the University of Edinburgh, kicked off with a keynote entitled 'Overview of OSP'. The keynote address was both to enlighten and inform. Jeff Haywood laid the groundwork and outlined challenges for the implementations of OSP. The topics included: SAKAI and OSP developments, directions of the OSP project, timeline for the OSP project and future versions of the software.
The 'UK presentations/cases of OSP' part got underway with Dr Angela Smallwood (pictured), Director of Centre for International ePortfolio Development, taking the e-portfolio agenda across sectors context. During her presentation titled "UK aspects of e-portfolios & PDP", she pointed out the importance of getting an eportfolio out of the box of institution, and the interoperability between different eportfolio projects.
The proceedings continued with presentations on cases of OSP use by Bill Steele
(ISLE Project),
Jen Ross (ERDEE Project),
and George Roberts (Oxford Brooks University)
who concentrated on ePortfolios for
adult community learning. The issues of integrating OSP with uPortal and WebCT were discussed
by Anne-Marie Scott from
MIS at the University of Edinburgh.
The highlight of the meeting was the teleconference from the US with Chris Coppola,
Director of OSP-Sakai-Kuali. In his speech Chris Coppola covered the issues of differences
and timelines for OSP versions V2.0/2.1/2.5. The presentation slides navigated by him were
showing very clearly the evolution of the OSP software. The solution for the migration from
v. 2.0 to 2.1, he stated, would be using the automated script with the exception for
Presentation and Matrix/Review forms where manual conversion would be required.
The meeting was a one-off with nothing similar coming in the near future. It would be good to have a follow up to this particular format and focus in order to establish the OSP UK community more firmly.
The
Cambridge-based conference featured in many interested sessions and presentations.
Full information on the conference is available on the EIfEL
website.
In Cambridge I met many international experts and talked to them about the results of their research and practice. One of those experts was the "celebrity" of the Thursday plenary session Dr Helen Barrett. She gave the presentation on "ePortfolios: digital stories of lifelong and lifewide learning" (photo). The most important questions she asked were: If we build it, will they use it? And HOW will they use it? What about the users? Why would learners want to use an ePortfolio?
Dr Helen Barrett is concerned that more effort is going into tool development and not into the important human dimensions of the process. That is why she emphasised the role of digital storytelling showing a reflective eportfolio enclosed in a movie file where the narrator (the author) was talking about career choice dilemmas. When we approach eportfolios from that point even a short audio file may become a very interesting eportfolio.
The Cambridge conference created a rare opportunity to talk directly with the
OSP developers from Indiana (US) about our
experiences of using OSP (photo).
Formed in January 2003, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is a collaborative, open-source, software development project. Their mission is to:
Open Source Portfolio is the eportfolio software which was chosen by the University of Edinburgh. We hope we will run some pilot projects in the near future using OSP version 2.0.
The
big name of the Friday sessions was Dr Linda Delene (Provost of Western Michigan
University) speaking about borderless learning and technology (photo).
Her presentation drew heavily on current situation in today's higher education. The main point she made was that an eportfolio would definitely change the culture of learning.
The conference gathered more than 250 individuals from different public and private educational organisations from different countries, proof positive that the eportfolio and reflective learning attract huge interest.
The E-break
session called "Eportfolios" assembled people who pay attention to the eportfolio
initiatives at the University of Edinburgh. Speakers were: Jen Ross (E-portfolio Co-ordinator, Moray House School of
Education) and me.
Jen gave a very interesting presentation on eportfolios in general and her research project: E-Portfolio Research and Development in Education in Edinburgh.
I presented the demo account of OSP ver 2.0. This version offers a feature called Learning Matrix which may be a good way of implementing digitized personal development files. It is important to prepare a special set of skills that will be included in this future table. Therefore, I presented the draft set of skills which might be useful across the whole university (photo).
The full report and the materials from that interesting event are available from the eLearning website.