The Infinite Bridge

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Electronic PORTFOLIOS

Course Description: Transcripts and resumes in the 21st century have to be more than a piece of paper.  This is not only because digital technology is ubiquitous, but also because digital technology allows us to represent ourselves in more multi-dimensional ways than we can in print alone.  This in turn allows those who assess or evaluate us to have a richer and more accurate picture of who we are and our capabilities, experiences, and accomplishments.

In this class students will learn how to assemble “learning portfolios” (created for personal reflective purposes) and “presentational portfolios” (created for external audiences such as prospective employers, instructors, peers, or others).

This is an experimental one-credit course on building electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) using the … platform. Students will get training on how to use the … as well as some training on basic tools for image layout and video/audio editing.  However, the primary focus of the course is on collecting and organizing digital artifacts, selecting items for specific purposes, and writing reflective self-assessments, biographical self-introductions, and cover letters.

Students will be reading articles and texts on electronic portfolios as well as viewing and critiquing each other’s work. Based on the readings and discussions the class will formulate the rubric we will use to evaluate the portfolios produced by each student at the end of the semester.

Project
Design two electronic portfolios:

one to present as your “educational self-portrait”, meaning the learning experiences you have had in the past that significantly shaped the way you think, act, or feel, and

one to present to a prospective employer showcasing your skills, knowledge, and achievements.

Both portfolios must be supported with a variety of “evidence” from such areas as academics, sports, arts, fieldwork, community service, or any other activities that effectively represent you.

The material evidence for your portfolios will be digital:

•    Documents (things you have written, things others have written about you, or writings by others that have meant something significant to you),
•    Images (photos and graphics that you created, or ones created by others that have a special meaning for you), and
•    Audio/Video clips (clips that you created, or ones created by others that have a special meaning for you).

Both portfolios also need to contain your reflections on the significance of, and relationship between, the artifacts you have collected, and how they contribute to the representation you are creating.

Process

Collect: The first step in the process is to collect as many potential artifacts as you can. You can create these items in the ePortfolio tool you are using, or upload into your ePortfolio tool things created elsewhere. It is a good idea to keep your material varied (images, texts, audio/video,
etc.). As you collect your material, it is also good to think about how each artifact could fit into the “portrait” you want to create. It is important to start out with more material than you will eventually need. That way you will have flexibility when you get to the next step. Having fifteen to twenty items (or more) to choose from is a good idea.

Select: Go through the material you have collected and pick out the artifacts that work well together to create the theme of your ePortfolio. The selection process should allow you to create a coherent narrative or story for the reader about your learning experiences.  This is not to suggest that you create a linear story (first this happened, then that, then that, etc.).
Instead, make your artifacts relate in interesting ways. For example, a photograph may have a connection to a paper you wrote. Or a description of an event may have an audio track associated with it. Or a line in a poem may be connected to a map of a place you have visited. The selection process is where you begin to weave together the “educational self-portrait” out of the various artifact in your ePortfolio.

Reflect: The three steps here are not mutually exclusive. You will probably begin reflecting even as you start collecting your artifacts or weaving them together in the selection process. But the final reflection you write (or record, if you prefer audio) will be what holds the ePortfolio together. Here are some questions to consider in your reflection:

•    Why did you pick the artifacts you picked?
•    What is their relationship to each other?
•    How do they coalesce to constitute your “educational self-portrait”?
•    How do you evaluate your own ePortfolio?
•    How do you evaluate the experience of putting it together?\

The reflection document may be a sort of introduction-and-conclusion rolled into one. Or you may prefer to have two separate documents (or recordings) – the traditional introduction at the beginning and conclusion at the end. In either case, this is your chance to explain what you have created and give your own perspective on the work you have done.

•    Collect a lot of artifacts before you start building your ePortfolio (starting out with more than you need is much easier than struggling to “bulk out” an anemic collection).
•    Be creative. Pick things that are meaningful to you, and things about which you have something to say.
•    Look for “aha!” moments and learn from the process as you are putting this project together.
•    Imagine creating an ePortfolio at the end of each year you are at UVa, and this being your first one.
•    Create something that shows where you are coming from as you begin your time at UVa.
•    8-10 Artifacts,
•    1 “About me” page
•    1 “Contact info” page
•    1 “Reflection” (Introduction / Conclusion, or combined into one)

ePortfolios are highly individual and creative products based on specific assignments, in specific contexts, at specific institutions. Using Google to search “sample ePortfolios” and “sample PebblePad ePortfolios” produces an interesting sense of what other institutions are doing. We encourage you to look around on the Web to get ideas of what might be possible, while  keeping in mind the specific assignment and specific tool we are testing for this course.

I am finally getting the hang of this portfolio development process.  Judy, Gail, and I had a substantive conversation about how we will proceed.  The first step is for Judy to ask the Deans what kind of data they want us to look at.

Their answer will give us a “context” for the “research question” we want to ask: a) What are the characteristics of each of the e-portfolio platforms we look at? and b) Which platform is most suitable for what we want to do @ UVa? There is a third question implied in the methodology we want to use: QWS (H&B).  Is it a good tool for making such decisions?

Possible Contexts:  focus on student needs, focus on instructional needs, focus on institutional needs (or some combination…)

Our Preference: focus on individual students and on the instructional space
Individual Student: career, advising, and tutorial type of services
Instructional management = non-credit/credit
Non-Credit: technical experts, trained support staff, “folio thinking”, micro-credentials
Credit: “folio thinking” general culture/awareness, re-designed courses, new courses, transcripts

(See AAEEBL proposal for rationale behind using QWS — iterative process ideal for developing portfolio thinking.)

What are the platforms we will be looking at?

Digication

Chalk & Wire

Pebble+

WordPress

*reference model:

The opening of 2015 has come and gone.  It’s the third month of the year.  It’s spring break for the students.  And I am only now engaging again with the 500 words per day commitment I made a while back.  Time flies, of course, and I am merely an earthly creature.  No drama.  Just getting up, dusting myself, and moving forward again.  There will be more reminders ahead, no doubt.

For me, right now, there is a wall between writing and meditation.  My movements from one side to the other are not smooth and seamless.  Words are like stones protruding above a shallow stream I am trying to cross.  I hop from one to the other in a futile attempt to make it to the bank.  There is  no bank, only the shallow water stretching as far as the eyes can see.  Is the water even  moving in a certain direction?  It’s hard to tell.  The smooth and rounded surface of each stone I step on kisses the balls of my feet firmly.  I tremble trying to remember the sequence of my steps.  The water settles around as I fall.

Perhaps it’s a lack of honesty that keeps me wandering over this pock marked terrain of stone and water.  What I call silence and meditation is not at all like that.  It’s roiling with voices and clamoring for attention.  If I were truly honest about it, my words would not be so abstract, my vision featureless.  Yes, today my back is aching and blood is pooling in my hands and feet.  Reels of memory too fragile to withstand recall, dissolve in anonymity.  I know what’s in them, but can’t call them out.  Death looks slightly more familiar.

In time I’ll learn to trust.

Taped above my desk in my office is a list of inspirational advice for writers by Daniel Pink.  The first advice is to “show up [and] write at least 500 words.”  I like the presence of that piece of paper right in front of me, and it’s effectiveness is proven (somewhat) by the amount of 500 word essays I have been writing for the past few months.  I have not done it every day, but certainly more consistently than my usual sporadic (once every six months) burst of scribbling.

One difference between the haphazard way I used to write and what I am doing now is that I am now using a WordPress blog to do my daily entries.  In the past, I wrote in notebooks and journals.  I would buy a new one each time the urge waxed and then abandon it as it waned.  As I look now at the bottom shelf of my bookcase I can see the stack of journals with only bits and pieces of writing in each one.  I tell myself I will someday copy everything and make one whole piece out of them somehow.  It hasn’t happened yet; but the consistency with which I have stuck to it in this blog gives me hope.  Maybe once I have built up enough momentum (“building momentum is much harder than maintaining it,” says Pink) I will begin that grand copying process and see if there is any connection between the separate chunks I have produced over the years.

Another matter related to this has to do with what I have been discovering about ePortfolios which I only understood theoretically before:  When you assemble disparate pieces of your work and look at them together you see more than the sum of the drafts.  You begin to make connections and to see a larger picture almost like pulling back from a map to see a more comprehensive view.  This is related to the writing process in which you do the mad-cap writing in the first draft, then come back later and being architecting the pile of words.  Only this time, the mad-cap work is done over a longer broken period of time and the architecting is more generative than reductive.

Lastly, I have become aware that even as the blog has helped me consolidate the location of my writing (no more wasting of unused journal pages), it has also surfaced another issue: privacy.  By nature, of course, there is no such thing as private writing in the universe, least of all when done electronically and online).  Even so, the paper journal represented a kind of privacy I assumed was there (all sitting there on my bookshelf).  The blog, to be fair, allows for settings to determine who can and cannot read my work which I have set to “private.”  But the temptation to leave it open and see what happens (like deliberately leaving your journal open in a public place) is attractively there.

My conclusion is that the marriage of the “private” blog and the ePortfolio represents a coming together of two powerful impulses of writing:  the blog keeps me writing, and the ePortfolio allows me to generate new insight about what I write so as to begin the sharing process (“writing is collaboration,” says Pink).  So, I am hopeful.  I do not think this will make me a great writer.  I do not see myself that way.  But I have always known the therapeutic and self-developmental effects of writing which, good as they are, are also difficult to self-administer.  The formula I have here might just do the trick.  We’ll see.

Today I want to write about Ethiopian (at least Amhara and Tigre) funerary rituals.  My close cousin’s son died about a week ago — a tragic affair in which the young man was found drowned in a public pool.  The circumstances were suspicious which complicated the funeral arrangements.  This was on top of the typically difficult process involved in such rituals in Ethiopia which is what I want to talk about.  I have three complaints: the public pressure, the cost, and the bitter grieving expected.

Funerals are definitely a public event for Ethiopians.  The ones happening among those of us in the Diaspora are even more so than the ones back in the home country.  There the magnitude of the problem was so bad that public employees were required to limit funeral leaves to one day only, the day of the actual burial (they used to last for weeks, especially where close relatives are involved). The problem is, of course, quite complicated by the traditional and religious obligations of the agrieved family who has to “sit” and recieve mourning guests for as long as they keep arriving.  And being an agrarian society with undeveloped transportation infrastructure, this could take weeks if not months. The Church also requires ritual activities at three days, six months, one year, and every ten years after the funeral wich further extends the period of mourning.  Much of this process has continued with the Ethiopian Diaspora community, at least in the US.

All this, of course, adds up to incredible costs that must be borne by the surviving family.  Granted, the more people participate the more donations and help also comes in, but it rarely does such help add up to the actual cost.  In a socieity where western style death/life insurance is not part of the culture, many families are bankrupted by deaths, especially when it’s the breadwinner.  On the other hand, communities in Ethiopia have come up with thier own types of associations where money is collected for members monthly and used to pay for, at least part of, such costs and to take care of the feeding of large crowds that gather on the day of the funeral.  One would expect that those of us in the West would have insurance coverage for such costs.  But that is not the case for most natives, let alone transpanted communities like ours.  One can only imagine the astronomical costs of trying to maintain the traditionaly ways within a western economy and without insurance!

The worst part of all this is the bitter grieving expected (by the self-invited public) from the family.  There is lip-service made to the value of “letting it all out” — so to speak.  But is that what a mourning mother or father needs, for the gossipy gawking public that mills around for days eating and drinking for free to comment on how well they are grieving?  The ritual may have made more sense once when people walked for miles to come and pay their respects, walked to Church with the mourners and met with throngs who were at the Church for other reasons, when people did not expect expensive alcohol and gourmet food as if the berieved were part of the royal family.  Today, and especially among the Diaspora, there is a tendency to live these fantasies at the expense of an emotionally devestated family.

What a shame!  Our community needs to look at itself and find ways, like our relatives back home did, to streamline the process and be helpful, not burdensome, to those who deserve our respect and love.

I asked my son this morning what topic I should pick for my daily post.  He first suggested China.  But when I told him I had nothing to say about that country, and that I should write only about what I know, he switched to Russia (where my father had been an Ethiopian diplomat in the 70’s), and then added Ethiopia.  That made more sense.  Still, what about Ethiopa (or Russia) would I write about?  As I explore the nature of the/my writing process, questions about the relationship between formulated and unformulated thoughts, questions about the nature of thinking itself, and questions about writing as thinking and/or acting come up.  I will stick closely to the principle of writing only about what I know (these questions are very familiar to me).  But other than that, how far should my mind be ahead of my fingertips in spinning the yarn that forms the fabric on the page?  It’s anybody’s guess, I suppose, but I may be veering too much towards the abstract (as my wife would readily agree) at the expense of the concrete (Ethiopia).

So, I will train my inner eye to memories I still retain about childhood in that country.  More times than not, my mind zeroes in on the small compound that surrounded our second house in Addis Abeba.  The house was a solid brick structure my father built using some money my mother got after the sale of some land she had inherited from her father.  I don’t remember how the decision was made, but the second house was build on land that was part of the first house whose sprawling rooms were built with mud wattle.  The new house was smaller and more efficient.  There were two bedrooms in the main house for my parents and for me and my younger sisters.  There was also a separate structure in the back with several rooms one of which was for my two older sisters.  We were more cramped than we had been in the first house, liked it because it was new and made of brick and mortar.  The other house was rented out and the money supplemented my father’s meager salary.

In the small compound of the second house, I had much less space for play.  There was no room for bike that I road around in what was previously a spacious yard.  But I had outgrown it anyway.  Instead, I created new games for myself such as training my dog to jump over obstacles, or devising traps to catch birds, or shooting at targets with my slingshot.  The confinement forced me to be creative.  And sometimes the creativity got out of hand.

The daily diet of 500 words continues.  It’s not the end of the year yet.  So, I’m getting a head start on writing resolutions.  One of the main conversations of the day was the current rape allegations against UVa which Tom, Ephraim and I (and then Georgia Sharon, and Kady) delved deeply into during our post holiday walk. What a sad situation!  I continually thought how sad it was that I had chosen to stay at UVa!  I hate it here.  Why am I  here?  But then I keep thinking that this is not about me.  My choice has always been to focus on ePortfolios and help make a reality the vaunted aspirations of Liberal Arts Education at a traditional American institution of higher education.  Now, with a clear mandate, a new Director, a new College Dean, and the tools and resources to get it done, I am on the cusp of making that dream come true.  In my own way, I will contribute to the definition of an LAE through the implementation of the humble yet revolutionary ePortfolio methodology to bring about not only revolutionary teaching, learning, and assessment processes, but also the technology necessary to scaffold a solution to the dilemma faced by the US higher-education industry in general.