The Wales-Wide Web

Meant to Post this last week - behind with everything at the moment - but better late than never I suppose.

As you all must know by now I presented a paper at the European e-Portfolio conference last week. A couple of people have been kind enough to email me asking if I could put a copy of my presentation on the blog.

The paper can be found here and the presentation is at the bottom of this post. Did not actually intend saying anything else but now I'm started will go on a bit.

The conference was very well attended - I guess over 200 people from many different countries. sadly I could only stay for the first day - time is in short supply at the moment.

The "welcome address" was delivered by Greg Watson, the (new or so I'm told) chief executive of OCR - one of the largest of the UK examinations and accreditation boards. I wasn't expecting much so was quite delighted when he talked about the danger of assessment dominating portfolios. Good stuff.

Helen Barrett was the keynote speaker. Sort of falls in that strange American category of 'inspirational". Enjoyable it was and she had great examples of multi media story telling. But my fear is that the software and skills required to produce such electronic stories remain way beyond average teacher and trainer skills at present - let alone that of most learners. As such, examples like this can tend to make people more wary of trying - "I can't do anything that good, they think".

Went to two workshop sessions - including my own. The first was Learning and learners - Social Inclusion and Accessibility. Great opening address by Bonnie Dudly Edwards who was moderating. Then two very good presentations. Anna Home form the University of Bristol presented The use of e‑portfolios for social inclusion: what counts as valid evidence?. Nice research design raising issues of what we shoudl be looking for as evidence of achievement. Providing a visual tool for dyslexics to build an ePortfolio by John Phelps of Goldsmiths University of London (UK) presented the JISC funded VMAP portfolio software. Had a preview of this at the JISC conference last year and I liked it then. John claimed that the reason they had stated out down a 'visual path is because Goldsmiths runs arts course and an incredibly high (can't remember how high) percentage of arts students are dyslexic and therefore worked better with a visual rather than text based tool. Interesting. But as far as I can see the approach - very much like mind mapping - offers many ideas for how we can make portfolios more attractive and easier to use. It seems the software is now available on Source Forge. Good to see the JISC e-leanring programme rolling out the products!

The final presentation in this slot was from Martyn Cooper of the Open University and Andy Heath of Sheffield Hallam on ePortfolio: The Accessibility Landscape. Tut, tut, boys - you haven't got your presentation up on the web yet. Not so accessible! But a seriously good and entertaining presentation. This is another of the JISC projects.

I was on in the afternoon session on ePortfolio learning and learners. Darren Cambridge from George Mason University gave a great presentation on the implementation of portfolios in, I think, Minnesota. Shame it is not yet available on the e-Portfolio confernce web site. Certainly took the wind out of my sails by showing there are implementations in the US which are not so assessment oriented. Then me - you can judge my presentation yourselves. And finally Ali Jafari from Indiana University who confirmed all my worst prejudices about the misuse of portfolios when presenting Lessons Learned: Concepts and Architecture for Developing Epsilen Portfolio Project.

And that was it. I could not stay for the next day. But thoroughly enjoyable and revived my faith in the possibilities around e-Portfolios.

PS2B_attwell_barrett.ppt

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