Superuser

I’ve decided to blog a series of articles on re-inventing a ‘digital portfolios‘ in the context of the NETs for technology and 21st Century High Schools. This follows a session I attended at NECC on Digital Portfolios.

I felt that the way in which students and teachers need to represent themselves during several years cannot be adequately achieved using this methodology alone. Though before read/write web - this was not possible at all.

A quick Google Search for ‘digital portfolios’ demonstrates that not much has changed in a decade. Again, it brings me back to the ideas that teachers have about ‘what is an ICT’. Going by Google alone, you’d be convinced that what you will find about ‘digital portfolios’ is indeed ’state of the art’. With more effort, you can find writings that look deeper into assessment.

So how do these two established discourses relate to the read/write web in Classroom2.0?

Students today are active in the read/write web, and posting images and text about themselves using the interwebs and mobile phones without giving a second thought to the long term representations that they are making. This activity is largely disconnected from their academic endeavors in digital publishing - for assessment.

In this first post, I want to explore the existing characteristics of what many educators call a ‘digital portfolio’.

Excluding Web2.0 - Digital or electronic portfolios were considered to be selective and purposeful collections of student work.

Portfolios were selective records of learning, growth and change on the part of the student. They provided meaningful documentation of students’ abilities (in a formal learning context). Portfolios provided information to students, parents, teachers, and members of the community about what students have learned or are able to do - as a result of largely classroom activities.

They represented a learning history of sorts. Portfolios bring together curriculum, instruction and assessment. Through the use of portfolios teachers and students could develop a shared understanding of what constitutes quality work. The ethos behind digital portfolios seems entirely valid when applied to the read/write classroom. So lets move onto the characteristics.

The main characteristics of a portfolio included:

*  Student-centered
* Active learning
* Student responsibility
* Available to the community (school, parents, etc.)
* Showcase of work
* Reflective

Typically, these portfolios selected work based on the context of who was going to look at them. For example, if the audience was a college admissions board, then then it may well contain elements that would not be used for a job application.

What they don’t do, is accurately reflect the students growth as a learner, as the assessments taken over time are not included in the end product - or are dis-jointed so do not give an accurate reflection of their academic and social development.

For example : A student is given a task to create a 10 page power point reflecting their work in Digital Photography over their 120 hour course in 9th and 10th grade. How does this reflect their learning?

To me it mearly demonstrates the ‘end’ or ‘peak’ of the student’s mastery of the subject - and has a prescribed - pathway that suits the teacher, standards and assessment tools.

Compare this to Joseph Saad - a student with an interest in 3D Digital production, though not studying it in his ’standards’. Joseph decided to blog about his progress. In this ‘portfolio’ reflective writing, self-assessment, end product, and mutli-literacies are abundent. How do we assess this work? Do we need to? and who is assessing it? - I suggest ‘everyone’ who Joseph ever connects with. Even after 3/4 years at University, he will be able to show that this was his ‘hello world’ moment. A moment he choose - not some requirement in order to graduate.

These portfolios, were largely a collection of MS Office type ‘products’, perhaps some work in Macromedia (Adobe) and perhaps some scans or digital photos.
The method of transmission was a CD-Rom, small (html) website or Adobe Acrobat document.

The portfolio was a very selective and targeted form of communication between the author and a very limited audience.

Assessment of a digital portfolio was a process by which teachers created a rubric that contained ‘outcomes’ or ’standards’. This was largely an off-line activity and like most teacher generated material - consisted of a mark and a comment. The on-going growth of the student was not viewable, like many assessments, it was all about the ‘end’ product. What did the student select as appropriate to meet the purpose and outcome/standard.

In some instances, online tools were created to allow teachers to cross reference student portfolios to standards - using rubrics. The intention is to allow teachers to ‘grade’ students using some rudimentary hyperlinked pages to things such as digital photos, scans and perhaps quicktime movies. The student however was not an integral part of this assessment and record keeping.

The work that went into the portfolio - samples of student work, information to put the work in context, a reflection on the work using a process - collect, select, reflect.

It was therefore a ’skill’ for the student to select an appropriate ’sub-set’ of work to any given future context. This portfolio is made from the following elements

* Expectations (Proficiencies) - What should a student be able to do, what purpose does the portfolio serve.
* Entries - what are the most appropriate elements to add to the portfolio
* Review Process - Who is the audience, how do we review individual entries, how do we review the portfolio as a whole
* School structures - how do we make this happen, when can we use technology (a subset of the question)

When adding 21st Century Learning skills, we try to apply a new set of ’skills’ to the evidence being created in the portfolio. To my mind, this application is prone to being subjective. How can element “A” display ‘collaboration’ for example. The student reflection was also subjective - and occurs at the end of the process.

Indeed, even ‘contructavist’ approaches to learning, still required the student to produce a selective set of artifacts that fit inside a rubric of not only ’standards or outcomes’ but meshed with the ’21st Century Skills’.

The portfolio was a result of ‘mastery’ skills - a student needed to master a set of publishing skills to represent themselves which in itself presents a problem, as it favours ‘visual thinkers’ - which is only one of the multiple intelligences.

Enter the read/write ubiquitous printing press where it is easy to publish and share information anytime, all the time.

This smashes the selective and targeted nature of ‘digital portfolios’ - as the personally generated stuff (MySpace, Bebo et al,) may well conflict or even be more substantial that the school generated stuff.

Surely, the school and the person should be one thing. As Will Richardson says, if no one is teaching our kids how to present themselves on MySpace, then we cannot be shocked by what they do”

So this leads me to think that the current notion of a ‘digital portfolio’ is fundamentally floored, as it assumes that students only create digital work in the walled garden of their school. There are some great examples that we can model to our students - even on, dare I say it, MySpace.

Already I have more questions that the ‘google’ searches answer;

• What happens when the audience is everyone and the work in the portfolio is everything?
• What happens when the students have MySpace, Facebook, Bebo accounts and students no longer distinguish between school and out of school digital representation of themselves - via Google?
• What happens when colleges and employers can Google the student and the student can no longer be as ’selective’ about their content or their audience?
• What happens when teachers comment on student’s work online, and everyone can read it?
• What happens when students comment on each others work online?
• What if the students chooses to represent themselves using an avatar in a virtual world?
• How does a student who is a level 60 WoW player best illustrate their tenacity for co-operation, problem solving and communication online?
• What if a student creates a blog about their passion which is not going to meet a ’standard’ - How do we support them, if indeed we support them at all?

The idea of a ‘digital portfolio’ being a static, selective and limited communication piece is a very limited idea to me - where the communication was predicated by an understanding of who sees what and when.

I used to be and Art Director, so endlessly carried around a portfolio of my latest ad campaigns and typographic renderings. This was a very targeted communication. I knew who would be looking at it, and what the goal was in doing so. I could be very selective in both the audience and the content.

Much of the information I’ve found online about ‘digital portfolios’ is mid 90’s to now, and still presents the development of a portfolio as I’ve outlined.

What I am going to try and explore in a series of posts is how we can best represent student development, when to share, when to assess, how to assess and what communication tools best illustrate that a student is a progressive learner over a sustained period of time.

A short post from Alexander Hayes really made me sit up and look. The slideshare presentation on the future of participatory media raised some really interesting concepts that explains some of the ‘issues’ we are looking at as Web 2.0 educators. The presentation itself is not directed at educators - but by golly are there things for us to learn. It’s a year old, but still oh so relevant.

Conversations that are cross device and multichannel - that’s what we need for sure. Any device that is web enabled should be part of our educator’s tool kit. The kids get it! but when will we! Lets get into disruptive innovation. Lets discover the difference between social networking and what Jyri Engeström
describes as “social objects” - or in our case perhaps its learning objects and social objectives. Now I understand better why Flickr and Delicious has worked in classrooms, but other things have not. A worthwhile set of slides to view.

Head of Technology, Director of IT, IT Manager … many names for the same thing. When the beige computers began to appear in schools someone generally took control of them. Mostly this was a teacher, and more likely it was a computing teacher. Initially these boxes appeared in the library, after all they had CD-Roms, so held information - so logically this was where we held information. Eventually the beige boxes grew in number and found thier way into a computer ‘lab’.

A ‘lab’ infers some sort of science, and indeed, computer science was the lable we placed on ‘learning about computers’. They were technical things, and students needed to know how they worked. Given the history of ‘micro computing’ then teachers saw the beige boxes enter ‘labs’ or ‘libraries’ - but they were always a tool that required some ‘expert’ use. During the 90’s these boxes were hooked up to the ‘information super highway’ - usually a room full sharing some basic modem (squeek). For teachers, using the internet was a fairly painful experience. The 90’s saw teacher develop only a basic understanding of using technology in the classroom.

• Publisher - yes! lets make a leaflet about some inquiry based lesson
• Word - wow! now you can type up your essay or at least cut and paste
• Power Point - a presentation, usually linear, paste in photos and text
• CD-Roms - exploring information (multimedia) using a set of ’schoolie’ CD-Roms
• The internet - Netscape, Yahoo and Alta Vista - search and locate information

So for a decade, we added an ‘ICT” component to our syllabus’ and using one or more of the above activities meant we hade met the outcomes. But ICT means information ‘communication’ technology - and we missed that part - the communication element was never really explored in any depth. We took ‘communication’ to mean how computers communicate - baud rate, modems, full duplex, half duplex etc., - we focused entirely on how we turned analog information into digital ‘bits’. Even today, the Australian syllabus still talks about modems and how we transmit and receive ‘data’ purely from the technical point of view.

At some point, we decided that allow students to store work on a ’server’, rather than the Floppy Disc. This meant that students became ‘connected’ to the system. We assumed this was a dangerous thing, largely due to the media hype talking about ‘hacking’ and of course the various movies in which kids gained access to nuclear weapon consoles.

So we decided it was best to have someone to police this risk, and at the same time look after all their beige boxes - enter the IT Manager. Historically, the IT Manager evolved in the commercial sector as the poor guy that every other department threw work at, largely to be able to claim that the reason that (x) has not been achieved is that IT hadn’t done (y). Every smart department manager knew how important it was to make massive demands of the IT department - it was like insurance against under performance. No one up the food chain really knew what IT did, so didn’t question why the department managers didn’t achieve some goal. IT Managers learned to protect their interest. They learned to narrow the angle and IT was largely conducted in a trench-war culture.

In schools the IT Manager locked as many software features down as possible. Standard operating procedure. Access to databases and servers was also restricted. This made the IT environment simpler to ‘manage’ - as long as kids had access to MS Office and some hard drive ’share’, then teachers we’re happy. At least with a server - you didn’t have to issue and collect floppy discs. That practice is still not dead! Today the collection of work is on a Flash Drive. We haven’t moved on at all.

A lot of voice at NECC was given to blaming ‘access’. The IT Manager has been hearing this for decades. But giving you access, means you will later complain that you didn’t get enough access, or access that is fast enough for the purpose you intended. So there is not real ‘win’ for the IT Manager to break down decades of standard practice, learned out of the trenches.

As Dean Shareski said in a recent NECC reflection

We have no idea how small we are. My guess is about 300 of the 17,000 attendees have any sense of what powerful online communities are all about. That would represent about 2% of an edtech community. These would be the teachers that you’d like have the best shot at building a network. Reading some of the teacher reflections in the last NECC daily made me shudder somewhat. The focus on buying stuff, teaching tools is missing the boat big time. It’s easy to understand why an average teacher would have no idea of how and why. While it’s been written about lots, when you see it in this context it’s quite amazing.

So how many of the Edubloggercon people were IT Managers or IT Directors? - from that 300? I’ll put my hand up. I get the shift and have seen what can happen if the barriers are removed. But, and it is a big BUT. Unless the teachers - on the WHOLE network - understand what this access means, then it poses a threat to the world of the IT Manager - who is predomenenty focused on ‘up time’ and ’security’ - and not learning outcomes. Many IT manager are not teachers in the first instance.

IT Managers are people. Just as a Web2.0 teacher gets frustrated by the ‘lack of access and opportunity’, at the same time, the teacher raised on MS Office and beige boxes is happy to know that the IT Manager is looking after everything for them, and has been doing so for at least a decade. Teachers all to often dismiss what IT Managers are doing - if you’re not on class, then it aint really working. IT these days is not about the beige boxes. Its about telephony, multiple databases, firewall security, AUPs, wireless control, course management software, IWBs, digital media and staff development.

Opening the firewall to read/write web is not hard. However getting teachers to appreciate that ‘the blocker’ is therefore removing site-security, and so places the ‘ownership’ of the risk with the teacher is difficult. I want it, but don’t ask us ‘all’ to take responsibility for it.

NECC illustrated how many teachers were doing amazing things in their classroom, and negotiating this with their district. I also talked to people who could not identify any ‘innovative IT managers’ in their district. The IT guy is not the problem folks. If you want more access, more funding etc., then you need to cite how ‘others’ are doing things - show them who is doing innovative things, get them to talk to these people and connect with thier IT manager to discuss the issues involved.

The IT Manager is resilient to people complaining. There is no benefit to allowing a more open network, if some teacher comes in and complains that a kids saw a bikini on YouTube today.

If you want a read/write classroom, then you have to INCLUDE the IT people as a valuble link in the learning process.

This to my mind creates IT people who are open to working towards change, as they can see through the conversations with the teacher - how the changes they can make - help the kids. Kids are the enemy remember - they break stuff!.

Show them what you are doing … you probably won’t get what you want on day one, but then if you’re the only teacher who is pushing for change … then it’s not that they don’t agree with you, it is that they need ammo to make the ‘push’ work. Enlist them in your advocacy as much as the teacher in the next room.

I think IT Managers need to spend more time in classrooms, more time at conferences such as NECC, more time getting connected via the web. They need to understand the ’shift’. They have the technical skills, but probably lack the context to know why it is important.

What is not acceptable is for the IT Manager to dismiss Web2.0 classrooms as being ‘un-safe’. This can also be because they have stopped being ‘progressive’ and trying new things. Locking down everything is safe. These are harder to convince to get out the trenches.

What? you want to put a MacBook on the ‘wireless’?. Give kids a router? what for?. Add another ADSL line just to watch videos? Second Life? that requires ports opened … etc.

Just my thoughts, I see both sides of the ‘line’. But if you’ve got a IT Manager, stuck in the trenches, then you need to find some common ground. If you enlist an army of teachers to complain that you want more access, then to an IT Manager - it’s nothing new and unlikely to draw them out into the open - that is if they don’t mow you down with in hail of network policy enhancements just to teach you a lesson - cause they know it’s safer in the trench than running the cross fire of administrators, supers and parents.

Go on, take your IT Manager out to lunch, or better still, take them to NECC or some other Edubloggercon. We know you only want to talk to us when you a) want something b) want something fixed - so perhaps by making them an important part of your overall teaching and learning strategies - we might even return the call.

Oh my, what a treat! On Wednesday morning at NECC a bunch of good teacher librarians gathered to present a panel session Feed, Tag, Research: Remixing for Library 2.5. I was the odd one out, having travelled a lot of air miles to attend the session with my colleagues. Between us we covered some key ideas, promotional strategies and a most definite 21st century learning focus.

I want to thank my friends Joyce Valenza, Carolyn Foote, Diane Cordell and Anita Beaman, for the opportunity to join them and provide an Australian view, voice, and focus on some initiatives.

Naturally this keen set of NECC Librarians wiki is there for you to browse!

I did a search for “NECC08″

in Tag Galaxy. Look what I found

Here is a video explaining LibX - a great tool that I promoted at NECC in San Antonio.

The LibX Murdoch University Toolbar is a Firefox Browser extension that lets you search the library holdings straight from a toolbar in your browser.

It also embeds little symbols next to the titles of books and journal articles in pages you view on the web. Clicking on these symbols lets you check whether the library has it.

This is awesome and a cool Web 2.0 enhancement for libraries. Enjoy!

Amazing book, here’s the author talking about how the internet changes societies, and therefore changes the way in which out students (can) learn as they live out at least part of their lives - digitally.

Reading the book also challenges those who ‘allow’ or ‘provide’ information technology into our schools, to consider the impact of ‘firewalling’, ‘blocking’ or limiting access of teachers and students to the read/write technologies as powerful vectors to learning.

Konrad Glogowski’s great presentation at NECC talked about the idea of students having a ‘third place’.

The third place is a term used in the concept of community building to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. In his influential book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg (1989, 1991) argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

Oldenburg calls one’s “first place” the home and those that one lives with. The “second place” is the workplace — where people may actually spend most of their time. Third places, then, are “anchors” of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. All societies already have informal meeting places; what is new in modern times is the intentionality of seeking them out as vital to current societal needs. Oldenburg suggests these hallmarks of a true “third place”: free or inexpensive; food and drink, while not essential, are important; highly accessible: proximate for many (walking distance); involve regulars – those who habitually congregate there; welcoming and comfortable; both new friends and old should be found there.

One of the key ‘take aways’ from my NECC experience are photo’s such as this one from the Edublogger cafe. For many advocates of fundamental changes to the way schools are organised (or need de-organising), the way we engage learners, methods, tools we choose - the internet is the ‘third space’.

A series of communication tools - skype, gmail, twitter, second life etc., connect people globally in a third ‘virtual’ spaces, as it is impossible to do in a ‘real space’. When they get together in situaltions such as Edubloggercon (in a sub-culture of NECC itself), then the idea becomes more ‘explainable’.

All these people live hundreds if not thousands of miles from each other - but share common conversations through a variety of communication tools. These conversations sustain and promote their ideas, that may otherwise fade in a localised vacuum.

It is no wonder that students create ‘third spaces’ at school - using technology (mobile phones, IM). If we don’t create them for them, they will create their own - just as everyone does.

I will definitely be looking to create more of these spaces at school. I can now better see why the students at my school have been so successful with their ‘Gaming LAN’ room. Perhaps unconsciously, the third space has been created.

In Classroom 2.2 (the second build for 2009), I’ll be looking at how I can create ‘third places’ in the PBL environment. These were not included in the current build, but after seeing how well they worked at NECC, then I think that they will add value to the 2 new classrooms to accommodate 160 new students for 2009. Photo : Konrad Glogowski

That course we ran last year is coming up again. I’ve tweaked it quite a bit - free at last from the learning management system it was locked up inside, running in a wiki schedule, backed up by blogs and an email forum.

This course has been developed by staff in the Educational Development Centre of Otago Polytechnic and is designed to help both formal and informal learners access and interpret models, research and professional dialog in the facilitation of online communities. After completing this course people should be confident in facilitating online and/or be able to critique and offer advice to other people in the facilitation of online communities.

The next facilitated course starts 28 July 2008.

Participation in this course is open. You will need to have regular access the Internet and be comfortable with independently completing tasks. To join simply introduce yourself to the discussion page and include an email address that can be use to add you to an email forum for the course.

In formal learning terms this is a level 7 course registered on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Formal learning participants engage in this course for a period of 10 weeks with an indicative time commitment of at least 6 hours per week. Formal learners will receive concentrated learning support throughout this period, and assessment services and formal recognition at the completion of the course. Some people may prefer to engage in this course informally and to set their own pace through the work using the schedule as a guide. Informal engagement is welcome and arrangements can be made for formal assessment and recognition at any time with the course facilitator.

World of Warcraft (commonly known as WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game with over 9 million people playing. Luckily I ended up in this session run by Leslie Fisher, and was thrilled to be introduced to the game and how it is played.

What’s World of Warcraft about? Believe it or not, it can be about
“working with enemies” to create positive learning! This immersive environment seems most impressive. The interactive nature of WOW capitalizes on the positive and negative features of each of the characters. Each character adds to the group blend, and ways of working together to manage the competitive environment. As each character has particular features which allows them to only undertake certain activities the whole notion of blend, collaboration, and effective participation comes into ‘play’. You do what you can do with your character - the aim being to do it well.

I think the ‘in game’ environment of WoW is beautiful - recreating the actual way that natural environments work within the mulitmedia environment. It is clear that the game is immersed in action, and the action is all goal-based. The point of it all is the capacity for students to learn key skills through gaming:- planning; conversation and coordination. To participate in a Quest well is to involve yourself in forming partnerships. Frankly, this is the most exciting form of collaboration I have seen! This is cool! This is perfect for all students, but particularly for the boys in my school. Keep playing (and learning) till you reach your objective! This is certainly the dream goal of all education!

Students are doing a lot of research, and engaging in collaboration and analysis in depth to achieve success. Those who research well will be ‘friended’ by keen learners. Also languages skills are supported, and team building is supported at all levels. Good typing and good sentence structure is vital to improve the competitive ability of each character. Good research, good typing, good language and good social interaction are what is needed to do well in this game. Players need to be able to communicate effectively and socially to accomplish tasks.

Gaming in WOW can help with can help with
• Mapping, direction, etc.
• acting, role-playing
• ESL
• handicapped students
• global interaction.

Just like the real world, characters specialize in a profession, and can then make items that will benefit others. Those with unique items and accomplishments usually garner more attention.

A question from a teacher in a Quaker school about ‘killing’ raised the issue of where students can go for a similar experience without the violence. Though I haven’t played it, I think Quest Atlantis would fill the bill.

Clearly this game is addictive, but it is fun, challenging and great for learning skills. Kids just don’t realise they are learning because they are having fun!!

Getting into WOW? Look for Lesley at Server: Alleria Guild: Emerald dream Characers: lesliegolf, Fairway and Bogey.

So what do I think of all this? WOW. But the reality is that lots of schools aren’t going to get into this because of the monthly cost per person, and because of the kill kill kill that would not work at all in some schools.