Darren Cambridge is a well known voice in the ePortfolio world and has authored or co-authored several helpful books. The YouTube Recording, of his presentation on 23rd August, at one 1hr and 40 mins takes some dedication to follow - I just feel for the people in the audience! What he said was good if not new to many who regularly read this blog.Early on in his presentation Darren claimed that ePortfolios evolved from paper-based 'Writing Programs' and the need to teach writing skills in the 80's. This flies in the face of the work of Dr Helen Barrett and her identification of portfolio practice based on young children's 'shoeboxes' in the 70's or my own experience of presenting portfolios of work in the 60's for Design and Technology courses.
The presentation was frank and at times honestly brutal in terms of the 'extra' work that staff would need to undertake. What he did not mention, as far as I could detect, was the fact that the ePortfolio system actually helps staff to save time: having access when convenient, being able to provide feedback before a student might find himself 'up a blind alley', being able to quickly route to areas of particular interest, etc. On the other hand, Darren did point out the fact that the ePortfolio allows teachers to see the whole picture of the learner, their interests and background.
As a 'stand alone' presentation I just felt that he presented too many negatives. However, within the context of a larger workshop conference I hope that delegates found more things that excited them and where they could see how the ePortfolio can actually enhance Teaching and Learning.
The term ‘Disruptive Technology’ is only true where it is an indictment of outmoded pedagogies. For institutions that have emerged from the dark ages and have been using Web2.0 technologies and liberated Teaching & Learning styles the introduction of an ePortfolio facility could rather be seen as an ‘answer to a maiden’s prayer’. I’m trying to think of the best antonym to ‘disruptive’ – we need a word that combines supportive, energising, and challenging or provocative.
3 comments:
If you feel for the audience, please feel for the speaker as well! I'm not used to speaking for an hour and half at a time, and it's exhausting. But, that's what my hosts wanted, and they were paying for my time.
Ray makes two interesting points here. First, I should clarify my claim that the origins of the current e-portfolio movement is writing assessment in the early 1980s. I do not mean that portfolios as collections of illustrative work (as in the design disciplines) or as collections of work that could help celebrate and look back on a learning journey (as in education) don't have much longer histories. They certainly do. Rather, my claim is that what I see as the central features of portfolios as they are commonly used today, i.e. reflection on a selection of works for the purpose of demonstrating competency and explain its development, first became clear in those early writing assessment appropriations of the portfolio concept and that this conception soon spread to other disciplines, including some of those with older portfolio-like traditions. That being said, I haven't done a formal analysis of citations or archives of curricular materials to prove that this is the case, and it would be interesting to see if such an analysis would or would not prove me right.
Second, he suggests that e-portfolios are only disruptive where progressive pedagogy is not the norm. To an extent, this is, of course, correct. That fact is, however, the kind of pedagogy that easily incorporates e-portfolios is not the norm at almost all institutions of higher education--the survey of JISC projects that suggests the disruptive technology classification proves as much--and my audience here was the faculty of such an institution. Even for those who embrace active learning, reflection, and so forth, fully embracing e-portfolios is challenging. It requires coordination with less forward thinking colleagues across the university is a wide variety of roles, and it often requires radically expanding one's sense of the learning for which one is responsible, moving beyond just the narrowly prescribed outcomes of one's own classes to think about students' entire learning careers, both formal and informal. That's a stretch for the best of us.
I'm afraid I don't see the point of most of the rest of the critique. Ray is missing the rhetorical context for this talk. It was a presentation to a broad group of faculty members (staff in UK terms) new to and unsure about eportfolios. There's not much new here to the readers of his blog because they aren't the audience. This isn't a "yea, rah, eportfolios are wonderful" talk because such cheerleading doesn't work with this kind of audience, and, given the reality of the state of most institutions, is also dishonest. I know: I've done a lot of it in the past, much of which I regret. This is an attempt to engage head on the skepticism and fears of the people who will need to change their attitudes for this institutions' initiative to be successful. The feedback from folks at QU suggests it had the intended effect.
If you feel for the audience, please feel for the speaker as well! I'm not used to speaking for an hour and half at a time, and it's exhausting. But, that's what my hosts wanted, and they were paying for my time.
Ray makes two interesting points here. First, I should clarify my claim that the origins of the current e-portfolio movement is writing assessment in the early 1980s. I do not mean that portfolios as collections of illustrative work (as in the design disciplines) or as collections of work that could help celebrate and look back on a learning journey (as in education) don't have much longer histories. They certainly do. Rather, my claim is that what I see as the central features of portfolios as they are commonly used today, i.e. reflection on a selection of works for the purpose of demonstrating competency and explain its development, first became clear in those early writing assessment appropriations of the portfolio concept and that this conception soon spread to other disciplines, including some of those with older portfolio-like traditions. That being said, I haven't done a formal analysis of citations or archives of curricular materials to prove that this is the case, and it would be interesting to see if such an analysis would or would not prove me right.
Second, he suggests that e-portfolios are only disruptive where progressive pedagogy is not the norm. To an extent, this is, of course, correct. That fact is, however, the kind of pedagogy that easily incorporates e-portfolios is not the norm at almost all institutions of higher education--the survey of JISC projects that suggests the disruptive technology classification proves as much--and my audience here was the faculty of such an institution. Even for those who embrace active learning, reflection, and so forth, fully embracing e-portfolios is challenging. It requires coordination with less forward thinking colleagues across the university is a wide variety of roles, and it often requires radically expanding one's sense of the learning for which one is responsible, moving beyond just the narrowly prescribed outcomes of one's own classes to think about students' entire learning careers, both formal and informal. That's a stretch for the best of us.
I'm afraid I don't see the point of most of the rest of the critique. Ray is missing the rhetorical context for this talk. It was a presentation to a broad group of faculty members (staff in UK terms) new to and unsure about eportfolios. There's not much new here to the readers of his blog because they aren't the audience. This isn't a "yea, rah, eportfolios are wonderful" talk because such cheerleading doesn't work with this kind of audience, and, given the reality of the state of most institutions, is also dishonest. I know: I've done a lot of it in the past, much of which I regret. This is an attempt to engage head on the skepticism and fears of the people who will need to change their attitudes for this institutions' initiative to be successful. The feedback from folks at QU suggests it had the intended effect.
Darren,
I'm honoured that you should take the time to respond to my post and yes, I do very much appreciate the effort that you put into the presentation. Watching on line I at least had the opportunity to take a screen-break!
I recognise what you say about many HEIs needing to catch up with 'progressive pedagogy'. However, here in the UK I feel that we are on the edge of a cusp whereby both mainstream education and the teacher training institutions are begining to realise that modern pedagogies are facilitated by appropriate ePortfolio tools.
I apologise if the brevity of my post caused it to sound critical. I DID appreciate the context of your presentation, particularly with the Q&As afterwards. I hope that you can appreciate that I WAS impressed with the item and thought it important to post to my wider readership.
Kindest Regards,
Ray T.
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