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Friday, October 10, 2003
Blogs as possible lightweight ePortfolio platform
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/blogshop/archives/000062.html
We are very fortunate to be following in the footsteps of some real trailblazers who have already experimented with introducing blogs in an online setting. One such person is Alan Levine from the Maricopa Community Colleges who developed one of the first so-called 'blogshops' aimed at educators.
One of the ideas explored there was that of using blogs as the basis for an easy (and cheap!) 'eportfolio' system for students. As an example, he points to a eportoflio developed by a student, Ryan Eby that used blog software for its basis.
Since then people in Alan's community college system at Chandler-Gilbert CC have gone on to implement a blogging based eportfolio system for both students and staff alike.
This last example is one where blogs are being used less because of their characteristic of creating chronological ordered 'posts' and more simply because they are very inexpensive, simple to use, personally-focused publishing systems. And the software used to implement this was FREE. The post by Alan is well worth reading in detail as he freely admits this idea is not without its problems and challenges.
What do you think? Has anything you've seen so far made you think this idea is viable? What problems could you forsee with trying to re-purpose blog software to publish eportfolios?
Posted by Scott Leslie at 01:10 PM in Uses of Weblogs in Education | Permalink
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There have been a few other recent e-portfolio initiatives that I'd love to learn more about: UBC's and weblogging at the institut st-joseph. Both documents convincingly describe the benefits of reflection as part of online portfolios -- it would be great to hear about the challenges and victories in their implementation.
This type of reflection, community-building, and personal development seems to run counter to the current educational focus on marks, testing, and standards. Portfolios are personal and internalized, recording the past and projecting into the future -- tests are competive and uniform, offering a one-dimensional view of a single moment in time. Perhaps more educators will embrace portfolios as a softer, more student-focused system that can be run in parallel.
Posted by: Jeremy at October 10, 2003 02:23 PM
Also, FYI, the college that held the workshop that the blogShop was written for has developed their own ePortfolio tool that has built in blogging tools: See:
http://eport2.cgc.maricopa.edu/
(I really do not expect a large numbers to be up to using a weblog as a full-blown eportfolio, it was more to introduce the communication tools-- comments, trackback, RSS-- that blogs have).
One of their faculty is running a process where he periodically asks his students to write in their blog portion of their portfolio, a reflection on what they learned in a particualr class or project. David also does his own blog as a teacher, and looks for differences in what he thinks he taught versus what the students write that they learned.
He also shared that it has dramatically changed their writing, because in the past, they were writing for an audience of one (the teacher) where a public blog/portfolio, they are writing for a larger potential audience.
Posted by: Alan Levine at October 17, 2003 01:44 PM