[DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

[Keli Sato Amann]

Hi John and Michael
Thanks for responding. You both seem to be making the point that all student work is captured and that there should be as many ways of pulling that work into "portfolio" as there are definitions of portfolios. John, I'd posit your "personal profile" type portfolio roughly maps to Michael's "A periodic browse through the box of stuff" and even more to "Pulling out stuff to impress somebody"  while your  "matrix-style competency portfolios" roughly maps to Michael's "Pulling stuff out to prove you did the work."

In that second category, some organization describes an aptitude all students should have and the student must find artifacts (papers, tests) that show that they have this aptitude.

I don't think there is anything about the persona or scenarios we've written so far that impedes this. In the near future, I think we'll write scenarios where the student personas of Gita (the 3rd year pre-business engineering student) and Evan (the MA Education candidate doing distance learning) engage in one or all of those types of portfolio building.

The concern that prompted me to write was another situation: when program objectives have been mapped down to a course, when those objectives are actually attached to particular activities, and when an activity is graded according to those objectives. In this case, students don't have a choice of what maps to each aptitude--it's been specified for them. The work to be featured would be chosen by the instructor or department. An example might be a department that needs to prove that at least 90% of their students meet certain criteria by the end of the year—they use the results of certain assignments or tests in particular classes to demonstrate this.

Is this situation actually within the portfolio domain? Do those who build portfolios need objectives mapped so discretely and for this reason or is this a separate area of concern? Lynn said that stating objectives for activities is a desirable thing, but that might just be because it's always good for students to know why you are asking them to do something and because it's always good to state objectives for any project so you can measure their later success.

Even if it turns out that this situation is separate from what eportfolios are concerned about, I still think adding objectives to an activity would be a good thing. But I hope someone can answer my question.

Best
Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Feldstein" <michael.feldstein at oracle.com>
To: "John Norman" <john at caret.cam.ac.uk>, "pedagogy Learning" <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>, "sakai-ux" <sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 5:12:54 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

I wrote a blog post along these lines way back when: http://mfeldstein.com/eportablefolios/

- m


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-----Original Message-----
From: John Norman [mailto:john at caret.cam.ac.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 6:28 AM
To: pedagogy Learning; sakai-ux
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

There is another parallel to be drawn between portfolios and content. I believe NYU are exploring this angle.

If you split content into two broad categories, a resources library and consider course pages to be a set of presentations that put selected content from the library into 'presentations/views' for various audiences (arrange them on a page), then creating the course pages is very similar to the portfolio use case whether we are talking about matrix-style competency portfolios or personal profile type portfolios.

Any distinction is typically around the processes associated with creating the 'presentation/view' and feedback and grading considerations.

John

On 17 Mar 2010, at 19:00, kamann at stanford.edu wrote:

> Hello all,
> I came to a realization this morning after talking with Clay. For the Learning Activities project, I have been talking about breaking the functionality that had been siloed in T&Q, Assignments, and Gradebook and Schedule. However, despite this, I was still thinking of Portfolios as a separate thing from the learning activities work we were doing. It's probably not as separate as I had been thinking.
> 
> Early on we talked to Janice Smith to get an overview of portfolios and Sakai. We talked to Virginia Tech about their work with portfolios and they later contributed some interviews. However, VT was the only school that explicitly used portfolios and the interviews they had at the time were only with students and TAs. Because none of the instructors we interviewed formally talked about writing out objectives and tying this to learning activities , none of the 8 instructor persona talk about things like writing objectives or attaching these to their activities, or evaluating student work based on such objectives.
> 
> This morning I read a note I had from a talk with Amber, Teggin, and Sam at Virginia Tech. They said that in one sense Assignments and Portfolios are alike in that students upload files to both, but Assignments is all about the submission, while Portfolio is more about the process.
> 
> Clay has reminded us that the needs that have been captured in Portfolios could, in the future, be met from different contexts, since tool boundaries will not be the same in 3.0. While it may be that the goals of a person interested in capturing evidence that a student has met certain objectives is different than one who just wants to give them an 87%, it's likely that they share some common needs that only fork off at a certain point. This is why embodying clusters of needs as persona has been useful for our project: it's a tool for helping us to see when Jane and Lisa have the same basic common needs, only Lisa needs a little more, or when Mark needs a completely different interface from Tammi.
> 
> While there is a part of me that wants to narrow focus, I know that we'd likely miss a great opportunity if we did. If we design interface for describing a learning activity, there are likely hooks into learning objectives that we need to plan for. Would an interface for grading a student submission be the same as that used for one evaluating it as part of a student's portfolio, or would it be radically different? 
> 
> I think that there are three ways we can start to build this understanding.
> 
> 1) touch base with the folks who are thinking about OSP for 3.0 (Noah, 
> Beth)
> 2) review the learning capabilities work that the T&L community is 
> doing
> 3) find out about VT's latest interviews since January
> 
> After this, we may either need to add a persona, or it's possible that some of the existing persona might think more about objectives.
> 
> What do people think?
> Keli Amann
> User Experience Specialist
> Academic Computing Services,
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