If you just finished EDLD 5302 and are wondering what is the best way to approach EDLD 5303 then you will appreciate this post.
In our research into why students either continue to use or stop using an eportfolio after a program of study the number one factor for why students stopped using an eportfolio was the lack of time.
In addition to the survey results one of our focus group participants stated:
“All your time is spent just keeping your head above water there is no time to think about the benefits of an eportfolio or how to build and structure your eportfolio for use for anything more than document storage”
For many of the students in Masters of Digital Learning and Leading program at Lamar University coming out of the first course in the program EDLD 5302 Concepts of Educational Technology this sentiment is true. We have often seen students struggle with getting the weekly assignments completed and simply dropping an evidence of learning into their eportfolio container is what most students have been able to accomplish.
EDLD 5303 is structured to give students the time to focus completely on the eportfolio, to experiment with blogging tools and methods, and to work on their eportfolio without having to do additional course work?
The evidence of learning accumulated in EDLD 5302 can now be shaped and moulded into a well organized and cohesive format to genuinely convey a message beyond basic technology skills competence. In EDLD 5303 students are given the opportunity to move beyond dropping assignments into a digital container and are encouraged to start to consider and show how they plan to use technology to enhance their own learning and their learning environments.
This theory and background is all great but what is the best way to proceed through EDLD 5303?
We recommend that students:
Explore and incorporate the ideas from the following and related links:
Take the time to revise and better organize and preset your EDLD 5302 coursework. Chances are you received significant feedback that you would like to act on and also wished you had more time to do a better job on your assignments. You now have the time to do this.
Review your eportfolio platform and consider if it is robust enough to support you through the remaining 10 courses in the DLL program and for many years to come. For example, in EDLD 5305 you will be required to have students comment on your work. Getting comments working in Google Sites can be challenging so if you were to switch to a different platform this would be a wonderful time. Consider the recommendations in How to Create an Eportfolio. If you are not using WordPress or a similarly robust blogging platform you should consider the switch before you have so much content that the switch becomes much more difficult.
Review and improve your navigation and organizational structure. Even though we all rely heavily on search engines a well organized and comprehensive navigation structure can go a long way to making it easy for your user to access information on your site. Have other people use your site and share how easy or difficult it is to navigate. If you are using WordPress you should start to build a good “Categories” structure which will help you to organize your site was you continue to add more content.
As the bare minimum you should include the following sections on your site:
About/Bio
Main Interest (on my blog you will see Learning, Courses, CSLE, Eportfolio, Book list etc.)
Projects
Categories
Archives
Links
Social Media connections
Contact
Start using your eportfolio for more than just your course work and start posting about your learning experiences.
If you pay attention to any type of media that has a focus on education, teaching and learning you will have inevitably seen the argument that all children/students should learn to code. The argument runs along this line… computers are everywhere today which means coding is the new literacy or skill of the future; therefore everyone should learn how to code. While this argument makes some sense I have always been hesitant to fully endorse it because I see so many other fundamental skills that our children need. I am not alone in this hesitation.
Jeff Atwood a career programmer who founded two successful software startups is deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code. Atwood believes that basic exposure to computer science is fine but it should not come at the expense of other fundamental skills like reading, writing and math. He also wants:
children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically. Where did that Wikipedia page come from? Who wrote it? What is their background? What are their sources?
Atwood reminds us that many programmers would be much more successful if they could read and write better, think critically and communicate effectively–essentially be better learners.
The longer I spend in the education the more I am convinced it’s about the learning, it’s about making meaningful connections and sharing those connections with others.
If you recall the minimalist fundamentals of eportfolios the ePortfolio can and should be simple to understand and, more importantly, simple to create and maintain. There are really only 3 steps to creating and maintaining an eportfolio/blog:
It has never been easier to create an ePortfolio/blog and there have never been so many choices in ePortfolio/blogging tools or platforms. You don’t need to take a course or workshop to get your ePortfolio started. If you have a Google account you have access to Google Sites which is the simplest way to create an ePortfolio and if you are interested in only putting in a minimal amount of effort to share your work and ideas a Google Sites ePortfolio will do. By selecting the Portfolio template in Google Sites you can have a rudimentary ePortfolio up and running in a few clicks. Figuring out how to change your Google Sites template or how to move beyond the basic functions is just a YouTube search away. While doing the minimum to get by is an adequate starting point we encourage you to go beyond the minimum and explore more flexible and adaptable options.
Ironically these are the two factors when combined improperly can limit the persistence of ePortfolio use beyond a student’s course of studies. Let me save you the hassle of making the wrong choice.
If I were to start my ePortfolio/blog from scratch today I would use self-hosted WordPress on a hosting service like Bluehost. This is exactly what I have been using since 2006. The only regret I have was that from 2006-2009 I posted on a WordPress site for a college I worked at rather than my own domain and when I left that college I left three years of posts behind. Don’t make this same mistake–post your work on a site your own. You can always cross-post to another site.
WordPress is easy enough to use that you don’t need to know a line of HTML or other code but also powerful enough to run some of the largest sites on the Internet. According to W3Techs Web Technology Surveys & Build with CMS Trends
WordPress is used by 28% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 63%.
The cost for a self-hosted WordPress site on Bluehost is as low as $4 per month and there are special deals for college/university students and faculty.
If your school or organization offers an internal solution this may be a good place to start but unless they have a very specific path for moving your ePortfolio to your own self-hosted site I would encourage you to create your own site and forgo the hassle of having to move your ePortfolio at a later date. I am a sophisticated technology user and lost over three years of weekly posts by not using my own site.
You may be tempted to ask:
But isn’t WordPress.com free and since it is WordPress isn’t this a good way to get started on my ePortfolio/blog? Yes, WordPress.com is free but you will be very limited in the themes you can use, the plugins, and many other functions. More importantly, it isn’t your domain – you don’t own it… You are only renting. My colleagues and I at Lamar University are currently conducting an extended research project to see what factors contribute to the continued use or the lack of use of an ePortfolio beyond a program of study. One of our hypotheses is that people who don’t own their own domain/ePortfolio do not persist in maintaining the ePortfolio. You can view the peer-reviewed published results which confirm that ownership of the ePortfolio is one of the primary factors that contribute to persistence in ePortfolio use in the article Factors that contribute to ePortfolio persistence. We are currently replicating the study in several other institutions and have follow-up research that you can view on my Research page.
Since you want to continue using your ePortfolio/blog it is best to start it on a platform that is powerful enough and gives you enough control to grow your ePortfolio/blog the way you wish to grow it.
But can’t I move my WordPress.com ePortfolio/blog over to a self-hosted WordPress in the future? Yes, you can but it is never as easy moving a site as you hope it will be. I have moved many WordPress sites over the years and I still dread having to do so. Most hosting companies like Bluehost will help you move your WordPress.com site but it will cost. So the money you save on WordPress.com will be spent on moving it to your self-hosted WordPress site. Start with the self-hosted site at the beginning, limit your problems, and plan for the future.
But aren’t sites like Blogger, Square, Weebly or Wix much easier to use? Most of these sites do suggest that they are simpler to use than a self-hosted WordPress site but when you use a hosting company like Bluehost you get 24 by 7 phone and chat support, great video tutorials, and a system that is very reliable and just works. You do have many more options with a self-hosted Bluehost domain but you will want to use those options as your needs expand. For example, I have many different sites/domains that reside within my main Bluehost account. Furthermore, I have experimented with most other sites and keep on coming back to WordPress.
There are many other reasons why it is best to start with the self-hosted WordPress site so rather than just take my word for it have a look at:
Since it will be your ePortfolio/blog you can include anything you want. I have had a website or ePortfolio or blog up since the mid ’90s and I suggest you consider the following sections to your site:
About/Bio
Main Interest (on my blog you will see Learning, Courses, CSLE, Eportfolio, Booklist etc.)
Projects
Categories
Archives
Links
Social Media connections
Contact
If you recall my minimalist definition of an ePortfolio being a learner’s digital evidence of meaningful connections then you need to include what is meaningful to you. As your ePortfolio/blog grows you will have to expand and reorganize your site as necessary.
For example, I have been using my current ePortfolio/website since 2010 and have thousands of posts and hundreds of pages, and the bigger my site gets the more effort I have to put into keeping everything organized. Fortunately, my self-hosted WordPress site has enabled me to continually expand, reorganize, and improve my site over the past 10 years and I have plans to keep on developing and expanding my ePortfolio/website for many years to come.
Contribute to your ePortfolio/blog regularly
If you want to contribute to your ePortfolio/blog on a regular basis you need to accept the fact that it will never be finished! The reason I can say this is that I believe that I will never stop learning so I will always have something new to include in my ePortfolio. This idea is also important because once you accept the fact that your posts will never be perfect you can publish your work more quickly and over the years see how much you have grown.
While there are some people who are able to commit to a grandiose plan of posting 500 or 1000 words daily I have learned that I am not able to do this. I just don’t have the time or willpower to maintain this. Furthermore, the research into willpower, habits, and goal setting has revealed that we have limited willpower and if you rely on this willpower to meet huge goals you will more than likely fail (watch for more details on this in future posts).
It may be better to set a very small goal or mini-habit of writing 50-100 words a day on your ePortfolio/blog. You don’t have to publish 50-100 words a day, just commit to the simple task of writing 50-199 words on your blog. You can save your posts in draft mode until you have enough to make a full post. You will find that you will often write much more than 50-100 words and will be able to post more often. Just commit to 50-100 words to build the habit of writing on your ePortfolio/blog daily and within 18-66 days (the average range of time it takes to establish a habit) you will establish this habit.
Or, commit to posting once a week and slowly build up your ideas in draft mode, and then when you have accumulated enough make the post. I also like to post links to videos, articles, and other resources that are important to me and my audience.
When you combine this mini-habit with the fact that you will never be finished with your ePortfolio/blog and it will never be perfect, you will find that you will be posting quite regularly.
If we simply build upon the minimalist definition of an ePortfolios as a learner’s digital evidence of meaningful connections, then the answer to why one would want to create an ePortfolios is to show those meaningful connections. This notion of showing what one has created, developed, built, written or assembled is an extremely important aspect of an effective learning environment that is often overlooked beyond the show & tell sessions that we fondly remember from primary school. Consider the experience of a foreign student from Bangledesh who shared:
If somebody asked me “What did you do in the laboratory? What did you learn in your education?
What did you do?” When I go back to my country, somebody can ask me “What did you do in the US?” This is the only thing I can show them, “This is what I have done. These are my grades, these are my projects, assignments…” They can see everything. It’s me. This is the best thing that I saw through the ePortfolio…(Provezis, 2012)
When we take a closer look at an ePortfolio where the learner can show what they have created, developed, built, written or assembled we see that the benefits include:
Active & deeper learning – The act of creation means that students are engaged in reflection and deeper learning. By reflecting on and showing what they have learned through their ePortfolio the learner is fully engaged and as John Dewey affirmed:
students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning. (1938)
The following links provide examples and support for active and deeper learning:
Choice, Ownership, Voice, and Authenticity (COVA)** – We can give students choice, ownership, and voice over their digital domain through a learning environments and pedagogy that provides authentic assignments that gives the student the opportunity to solve real world problems in their own institutions or organizations and show those solutions through their ePortfolio.
The following links provide examples and support for choice, ownership, voice and authenticity:
Visible learning – an ePortolio helps teachers see learning through the eyes of students and through effective feedback helps learners become their own teachers.
The following links provide examples and support for visible learning:
21st Century Assessment – Grades simply do not reveal skills, knowledge and abilities. Students need to be able to show potential schools or employers what they can do and an eportfolio is one of the tools that many organizations will be looking for to see this evidence of learning and abilities.
The Coalition for Access, Quality, and Success which includes all 8 Ivy League schools plus an additional 72 top-level schools are creating an admission process and platform tools that will include an online virtual locker (an ePortfolios), a collaboration platform, and an application portal—seek to recast the process of applying to college as the culmination of students’ development over the course of their high school careers.
The following links provide additional examples and support for 21st Century Assessment:
References:
Dewey, John (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY
Provezis, S. (2012). Weaving assessment into the institutional fabric (NILOA Examples of Good Assessment Practice). LaGuardia Community College: Urbana, IL: University of Illinois and Indiana University. Retrieved from http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/documents/LaGuardiaCC.pdf
**COVA – The abbreviation COVA was first used by Dr. Tilisa Thibodeaux at Lamar University in 2015 in our discussions regarding ePortfolios persistence and our collaborative research into why students tend to stop using ePortfolios after their program of study. COVA originally referred to choice, ownership, voice, and agency but after subsequent discussion agency was replaced by authentic learning opportunities because of the primary role authentic assignments play in the continued use of ePortfolios.
An initial response to this question would be the learner/student. It is their work so they would own it – wouldn’t they? However, if you look at current ePortfolio practice and the research into learner engagement, agency, choice, and voice you will find that even though the students are doing the work, more often than not they do not own the ideas and are not making meaningful connections, they are simply completing assignments and giving the instructor what they want (Barrett, 2005; Hopper & Standford, 2007; Lindren & McDaniel, 2012; Atwell, 2013; Buchem, Tur & Holterhof, 2014).
The following student statement collected as part of UBC’s ePortfolio Pilot Project confirms this unwritten instructional arrangement (Tosh, Penny Light, Flemming & Haywood, 2005):
The things we are supposed to do for it [the e-portfolio] are kind of like assignments and no offense but everybody knows, for assignments, you give them what they want – you give them what they want and they give you your mark, that’s basically the way it works.
Unfortunately, jumping through the hoops prevents deeper learning and is killing the meaningful connections that come from reflections on learning in an ePortfolio (Barrett, 2005).
Gardner Campbell (2009) proposed that we move beyond the template-driven, plug-and-play, turnkey web applications where we point students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made. In contrast, we must enable students to create personal cyberinfrastructures where students become effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives. This personal cyberinfrastructure has been realized in the University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own and similar initiatives at other universities (Watters, 2015).
Even if we get the Domain of One’s Own piece right and give students the control over the selection of the ePortfolio tools and the environment we can still limit the effectiveness of the ePortfolio experience if we fail to listen to our students and address two additional key factors.
1. Ownership of ideas and learning
In the provocative student voice post Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It? Andrew Rikard points out:
Giving a student ownership over data means nothing if it doesn’t allow them to determine that data. At that point, the student once again loses agency in relation to the institution. Promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces (2015).
Rikard displays wisdom beyond his years by challenging us to acknowledge that:
‘Domains’ is radical not because it is a technological shift, but because it encourages a pedagogical shift… The question bigger than data ownership is how to make ownership over ideas happen (2015).
It is this ownership of ideas that leads to deeper learning. In order to make meaningful connections, one has to take ownership of those ideas and concepts in order to construct meaning. Eportfolio proponents all point to the power of reflection but unless the student is reflecting on ideas that they own rather than reflecting on artifacts and data the power of this reflection is lost. Making meaningful connections is what leads to learning.
Therefore, we have to not only give students a choice, ownership, voice, and authentic learning (COVA) over their digital domain we have to give them COVA (Thibodeaux, 2015) over their ideas. The best way to do this is through a learning environment and pedagogy that provides authentic assignments and gives the student the opportunity to solve real-world problems in their own institutions or organizations.
Educators also have to create and model this type of learning environment if they wish to help bring out a change in education.
2. Modeling – Walk the talk
Once again we need to look at what our students are saying about how well we model or walk the talk. The research into UBC’s ePortfolio Pilot Project Tosh et al (2005) revealed that students wanted to be shown good examples of ePortfolio, be given evidence of how the ePortfolio will benefit them in their studies and future work, and, most importantly, have the instructors show them one of their own portfolios. The following statement from a disillusioned student in the UBC ePortfolio Pilot Project (2005) captures the essence of not being able to walk the talk:
In terms of promotion the problem is the people trying to explain it [the eportfolio] have probably never used it so in a way they have no clue what they are talking about, basically. To put it frankly – after listening to them you would be like, Okay so you as an outsider who never even used it is telling us we should do this because it is the best thing since sliced bread but you have never used it – you can’t find someone who did use it – you don’t have enough information to tell us how to use it – and now you’re telling us use it and we’ll grade you on it – this kind of makes it hard for students to accept or appreciate it.
Educators need to realize that we if expect to maintain any level of credibility and respect with our students we can only ask our students to do things we are willing to do ourselves. John Hattie points to feedback within a trusted relationship between and teacher and a student as one of the important factors in student achievement. If we effectively model what we expect our students to do with their ePortfolio by showing them ours, then the feedback we can provide to our students will be much more valuable and more openly received.
Fortunately, there are instructors who are effectively modeling deeper learning in the Domain of One’s Own project at MWU (Groom & Lamb, 2014) and several other institutions who have adopted this model. Image Source: https://marcabraham.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/book-review-crossing-the-chasm/
Our challenge is to move this beyond the early adopters and encourage the early and later majority of instructors to utilize and model ePortfolio. Perhaps we are closer to this becoming a reality than ever before.
Buchem, I., Tur, G., & Holterhof, T. (2014). Learner Control in Personal Learning Environments: A Cross-Cultural Study. Journal of Literacy and Technology Special Edition, 15(2), 14–53.
Lindren, R., & McDaniel, R. (2012). Transforming Online Learning through Narrative and Student Agency. International Forum of Educational Technology & Society, 15(4), 344–355.
Thibodeaux, T. (2015) The idea for abbreviating choice, ownership, voice, and agency as COVA came out of a conversation with my Lamar University colleague.
Tosh, D., Light, T. P., Fleming, K., & Haywood, J. (2005). Engagement with electronic portfolios: Challenges from the student perspective. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology/La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, 31(3).
