Cole Camplese has a great post about FaceBook:
FaceBook is a social networking service that about 85% of the college student population uses. A quick survey of my class this semester showed me that 44 out of 45 students were in the FB. It is amazing how much time and energy students give to their entries and it shows me that with the right mix there are things we can do to design killer experiences:
- One thing is to make it easy to connect to others. LMS tools do not do this. They are positioned as a teaching tool first and only — that is shame as I would love if it my students spent some real time inside our learning spaces.
- Make features they want — right now our CMS/LMS has dropboxes, messageboards, quizzes and all the things I want as a teacher but nothing for them. There isn’t a place to connect with others outside of email, you can’t leave quick messages for anyone, and the chat stuff is just so old school.
And yet, we can’t seem to get ePortfolios off the ground. Clearly, we’re starting from the wrong end of things. Let the students show us how they use online spaces to present themselves, and let us go to them and teach them how to harness what they are already doing for purposes like reflection and job hunting. Applications like FaceBook and MySpace are pretty easy to build these days; we shouldn’t have to invest big bucks into designing ePortfolio apps. They already exist. From the software perspective, what we mainly need is a tool that makes it harder for students to carelessly or accidentally throw out the stuff they did for class that may be important in ways they’re not thinking about yet. We need that Box-‘O-Stuff, where they save their first assignment drafts and where it becomes natural and automagic to keep all subsequent drafts. Then we need easy hooks so they can suck that content out of their boxes and post it on whatever MySpace-like application (whether integral to the LMS or a third-party service) suits their specific portfolio purposes. The main focus then becomes on teaching them what to put in the portfolio and why, rather than on how to build the widgets.
But are we humble enough to approach it this way?
I love the “Box-?O-Stuff” reference … it is so true. Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but at a conference my group recently hosted we had a student panel talking about their perspectives on teaching and learning with technology … when the FaceBook issue came up, they all perked up. All of them had FB accounts and all of them were into it. When asked if the University would provide a FB like system they said it would be cool, but they also said they probably would not use it. Why? Because they said things the U runs feel “controlled.”
I like some of the newer open source tools that can enable FB like functionality — elgg comes to mind. At any rate we are working hard to figure out what the spaces are that students want … and that is the hard part, letting them lead the way. Interesting times.
Sounds like Learning Object Repositories all over again. Distributed blogfolios have the potential to reverse that, emphasizing the control of the individual, over any institutionally mandated program…
Nope, it’s not at all like Learning Object Repositories, which have precisely the same problems as traditional ePortfolios. The mistake is in thinking that personal/academic content management systems should look like tradtional publishing content management systems. The empahsis is wrongly placed on workflows, taxonomies, and elaborate templating when it should be placed on easy content storage and easy, user-driven access control. Just because content management systems for academia have largely failed doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
At any rate, this approach is not mutually exclusive with a distributed one. Any properly designed system will put the highest emphasis on ease of getting content into and out of the box of stuff. And in a Service-Oriented world, the distinction between “centralized” and “distributed” makes less and less sense anyway.
I was meaning that conventional ePortfolios were like LORs…
Ah, got it. Then we agree completely.
Box-‘O-Stuff = wikis to me 😉
The box has to have all the stuff students do for class, which means you can’t define it as a wiki. I suppose you could wrap that stuff in a wiki, but I really do think the right app is more like a file management system.
Not just “humble enough” – also brave enough. There is a definite element of fear involved. Very few of the teachers I know make use of technology in teaching, much less online resources.
I was at school nearly a generation ago, and there was a limited amount of “technological kit” involved in my education. However, I can remember workshopping the solution to a particularly tricky chemical equation as a class, because the teacher wasn’t able to solve it. I can remember heated debates that ensued when we believed a teacher has misunderstood, misinterpreted or overlooked some fact or issue.
The teacher didn’t know everything – they knew it and we knew it, but they didn’t shy away from teaching it anyway, and taking it in their stride when the class pointed out an error or debated a point.
Why is it then, that, when it comes to the use of equipment, we feel the need to know everything before we give it a go?
That is a fantastic question, Karyn. I’m going to be giving a presentation on faculty blogging in a few weeks. I will be sure to give you full credit when I ask my audience the same thing.
Excellent point — I’m actually working on something similar to this over at the Elgg project. I’m trying to create a wiki-like add-in for portfolio presentation. It’s not all online yet, but I should have a pretty approximate version by the end of the summer.
Ah ha! Great idea. A wiki would be a very good portfolio tool to sit on top of a box o’ stuff. I like that idea a lot. It might not give fine enough control of presentations for job-hunting porfolios but it certainly would work well for reflective portfolios.
I reckon you’reon the right track with the ‘two application’ approach to the issue of portfolios. The first requirement is certainly the “box of stuff”, which, to me, implies a content management approach of some sort. It’s important that the owner of the ‘stuff’ has the ability to store, label, sort, retrieve etc the stuff they put in there. The second part is how that stuff is then rrepresented within a portfolio or portfolios. My perceptions is that a portfolio is largely about the way selections of the ‘stuff’ are organised and published for others to access – ie I may create, form my repository of ‘stuff’ a portfolio to show potential employers. This will be different from the portfolio I create for my potential clients, or the one I create for the sports team I wish to join etc.
Great post. We certainly need to listen to students’ stories and learn from them. That does not necessarily mean, however, that we serve students’ interests best by attempting to mirror their chosen social spaces in the campus online environment (I know that is not what Karen and others are suggesting!). I think we need to remember that connecting with students is just a first step. It’s not the main game – that’s learning – but it can be a bridge to learning with and from them. I’m a big fan of wikis: without a doubt, wiki is the most used and most liked tool in our campus CMS/VRE. Box O’Stuff plus wiki, or a wiki-like tool, makes a lot of sense to me.
Great thoughts from all. I’ve been thinking about social computing and informal/non-formal learning lately. I recently found MySpace music, where bands are setting themselves up, with fans, free downloads and concert calendars. I thought wow, what a great idea. And then I wondered,”Who thought that up?” The creators of MySpace or the bands? I suppose I’m thinking aloud about that kind of learning, that kind of creative problem solving and how to capture it and spread it around.
I think we all may be missing out on why college students use MySpace and FB. If you were to really ask themm and observe their behavior when on these sites, you would realize they are only using them as a dating service/social outlet. Trying to inject an educational element into this environment will fail because it has nothing to do with the real reason why they are there in the first place…anything but learning.
I confess that I don’t really know why students use MySpace and FB. I’ve heard all kinds of explanations, including the theory that it’s really just an elaborate “Sims”-type game in which students are creating fake identities and trying to score the highest number of “friends” and poach off of their competitors. (My colleague has pointed out to me that there is a large number of “Dirk Digglers” registered on MySpace, for example.)
My position isn’t literally that we should use one of these existing services. Rather, it’s that we should let the students guide the creation of the service that they will use.
I was actually one of Cole’s students. Not one of the ones specifically mentioned in that survey, but nonetheless. I think that the concept of facebook and the concept of an eportfolio are pretty different things. Facebook is a social networking tool. It’s just another way to communicate with your friends. It’s nice because it’s easy to find out who the people in your classes are, and it’s a good way to find out how to contact people after classes.
Facebook has pictures where you can “tag” the different people in them, and that’s another feature that’s pretty cool. Instead of everyone having a different photo album, it becomes a large photo album, because the “pictures of you” aren’t just pictures you put up yourself, it becomes a large collective photo album.
Facebook and myspace are for your friends, whereas an eportfolio should be more for an employer or professionals. Unfortunately students are going to use fb or ms so they can get phone numbers of cute girls/guys, or figure out what John Doe does in his free time. I think the way to get students to use eportfolios isn’t to appeal to their social sense, but rather to give more proof that eportfolios have a practical purpose, that they will increase their odds at a job interview, etc. Most students have a resume, to me an eportfolio should be an evolution of that.
The thing is, there’s very little evidence that employers are interested in looking at portfolios. I moderated a conference on ePortfolios recently in which we had a couple of employers–an HR person for a big corporation and the CEO of a small technology company. For different reasons, they both said they weren’t interested in portfolios. The HR person said she barely has 15 seconds to scan a resume as it is, and the CEO said he doesn’t believe they give him enough useful information.
On the other hand, there’s no reason not to use ePortfolios in a learning context for reflection and peer/mentor review. Mike (or anyone), what is your sense of the value and practicality of trying to tap into that “social sense” for reflective portfolio purposes?
IMO, portfolios aren’t for HR or hiring purposes at all. I see them as more important for personal/professional development than as filters for screening potential employees.
In the same way that HR/employers wouldn’t necessarily care about specific project work done in a course or program, they shouldn’t care about the exact type of personal development – except that a potential employee is capable of critical self reflection and growth…
Exactly. The only cases in which ePortfolios matter for jobs are those professions that already use portfolios, e.g., graphic design, architecture, etc. On the other hand, everyone can benefit from a little introspection.
Hm. Maybe part of the problem with getting students to use an e-portfolio is defining exactly what an e-portfolio is. Sure it’s a place where you put stuff about yourself; “artifacts”, but maybe we need to come up with a clearer definition of its purposes. The way e-portfolios were marketed to me by some of the professors at ist (I never actually talked with Cole about e-portfolios specifically, but some of the other professors) was as an evolution of the resume, something that would greatly benefit a job search.
Leaving aside the confusion that is sometimes caused – and mentioned above – by the word ‘portfolio’, portfolios are more boxes-o-bits than boxes-o-stuff. Why the distinction? Because ‘stuff’ conjures up an amorphous mass and ‘bits’ are not, they are separate. If we can mentor/teach people to look longterm at what may be of use, whether from their academic life or their social life, we can encourage them to reflect on that and write up a few notes or even just tag each ‘bit’. the bits can then be extracted with ease and assembled before being presented to a third party. The individual owns all the content. All we can do is be a party to what they choose to share with us. There are some excellent systems out there that help people gather ‘stuff’ but arrange it and collect it into ‘bits’. What is more, they are platform independent so can be uploaded into university systems or employers systems or Facebook or something else with ease. Top-heavy LMS ‘solutions’ are a headache for all.