Posts Tagged ‘eportfolio’
By: Rebecca Frost Davis
Can we preserve and transform liberal education for a networked world? The opening forum of the 2011 AAC&U Annual Meeting raised this question, and I saw affirmative answers and strategies throughout the conference.
Mark Taylor, the opening forum speaker, called for us “to move from a world of walls and silos to one of webs and networks” (as Maggie Stevens (iccmaggie) tweeted). But what does that world look like, and how does liberal education work in that context? Webs and networks naturally make us think of technology, especially the Internet, but Taylor is calling for more than just using technology tools. I heard it put this way in the Q&A after the HEDs up sessions on Friday morning: “Higher Ed use of technology has so far been varnish on traditional methods rather than the paradigm shift that is needed.” Following the 2010 AAC&U Annual Meeting I wrote a blog post about that varnish called, “Technology and Learning Disconnect,” in which I wrote about typical attitudes toward technology that I saw at the conference:
By: David Hubert
The E-portfolio Forum at AAC&U’s Annual Meeting featured many excellent presentations. I was drawn to “Balancing Student-Centered E-Portfolios with Assessment using Open Source Tools,” by Frank Kline and Helen Barrett, both of Seattle Pacific University, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The presentation was well-balanced, with Kline providing a detailed introduction to an electronic portfolio initiative in Seattle Pacific’s Education program, and Barrett adding the “big picture.” Seattle Pacific previously had three years of experience with commercial e-portfolio products, but ultimately decided to go with a Web 2.0 solution that allowed for student-owned portfolios based on Wordpress. Students in the education program build their e-portfolio and structure it around established standards and criteria for prospective teachers in the state of Washington. The portfolios contain artifacts and reflection from program courses, but the assessment of the students’ portfolios centers on “meta-reflections” that task students with demonstrating how their work shows that they have met the standards and criteria required for licensure in Washington.
While the job market for new college graduates continues to improve, many companies are specifically seeking out candidates who possess excellent communication and teamwork skills as well as critical thinking and analytical abilities. (See both the recent New York Times article and AAC&U’s own recent survey of employers.)
In the current climate and given these employers’ expressed needs for talent, how can new graduates demonstrate to a prospective employer what they know and can do as a result of their college experiences? The traditional records of a student’s education are the academic transcript and his or her resumé, but both of these documents are limited in their ability to describe the effect of meaningful experiences such as project-based work, leadership in extracurricular activities, internships, and studies abroad. In a 2007 national survey, AAC&U discovered that more than two-thirds of employers found the college transcript either “not useful” (33 percent) or “just somewhat useful” (34 percent). In contrast, a majority of employers thought that e-portfolios would be “very” or “fairly useful” in evaluating college graduates’ potential for success.
By: Stephen Langendorfer
As we enter a new decade, education is still plagued by one of the more misdirected assessment initiatives of the past decade: No Child Left Behind. NCLB, unfortunately, arose from the faulty notion that simply by administering standardized tests, educational practices magically would be improved. Indeed, the most underperforming schools as measured by standardized test scores are punished and the children who need the resources the most are deprived of them.
Along the same mistaken line of accountability thinking, institutions of higher education were coerced into engaging in the misnamed Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA). The misguided idea behind VSA is that the primary focus of assessment in colleges and universities should be garnering some single standardized score by which an institution can compared to its peers. Although we know from the LEAP initiative that all institutions of higher education should share some common focus on liberal education as measured by the Essential Learning Outcomes, each institution must have its own unique mission and vision. No standardized test can come close to demonstrating the degree to which any institution is achieving its self-identified mission.
By: Ross Miller
For me, e-portfolio use is all about expectations and Greater Expectations. Teaching all of our students, and teaching all students to higher levels was a dual challenge that (as Randy Bass mentioned) basically established a logical (and one hopes inevitable) drive to spread the practice of using portfolios for learning. (If you are thinking that I neglected to include assessment, then you may still be thinking of assessment as separate from the process of learning.)
The Greater Expectations project advocated for all of us to find intentional approaches to liberal education – working to develop intentional learners, teachers, and institutions. If we really intend to be intentional while also working within the limits of time, then we must focus on those practices that produce the greatest effects. Portfolios and their electronic progeny have long pointed toward a handful of powerful practices of which we should be more conscious and use much more often. Read the rest of this entry »
