Cole W. Camplese

Supplemental Activity

So after my post the other day where I was lamenting the lack of opportunities I see for engagement in the school system I got a handful of comments telling me the same thing -- "take matters into your own hands." Good advice and it really got me thinking about some things. My wife and I have always spent time reading with our daughter ... as a matter of fact, the little lady has always really been into reading, talking, singing, and all sorts of other really creative and engaging activities. She pushes us more than we push her and that is really cool. But, I've never really taken the time to bring my own interests, research, and perspectives home to her.

Night before last, she and I sat down at the kids' eMac and opened up iWeb for the first time. I decided that I was going to find a way to work with her to create a digital portfolio, journal, blog, or whatever where she and I could spend time reflecting on the work she was doing in school, the things she was thinking about, or anything in between. The goal for me is to get her used to the idea of actively reflecting on her activity in an ongoing way. As a sidebar, I personally think it is an incredible opportunity to develop a life-long story about her intellectual development ... that is, if it sticks.

So we created a website with iWeb and published it into a password protected space within my .Me account. Very easy and relatively flexible. The real win here is that with only a little instruction she is getting the hang of it. Last night, for example, she wanted to publish a story reflecting on her kitty, Misty. We sat at the desk searching for a picture at Flickr tagged Misty and she dragged it into iWeb. She then proceeded to dictate the words and I was surprised how she spent time really reflecting on what Misty had meant to her ... Misty passed away almost two years ago. The time we spent reflecting was good for both of us. She talked while I typed, but then ran and got her Mother so she could read her reflection to her. She was really proud and I was happy to have spent the extra time with her.

The other thing we're trying to do is capture some of her analog work and put it into her space. Two nights ago she was showing me a picture and the story she wrote to accompany it on a piece of paper. I grabbed the camera and snapped a picture of it. She helped me import it and drag it into iWeb. She then told me the story of how she drew it, what it meant to her, and when I asked her where the story came from, she looked at me at said, "from my mind." I probably should have known that. Either way it is reflection and that is something I now can trust she is engaging in.

Scholar Blogging

As I type, members of the ETS staff are working with a group of students from the Penn State Schreyer's Honors College to get them going on a very cool new project we are a part of. About a year ago, I was having lunch with Dean Chris Brady from SHC and we started talking about how important it is for students to think critically about the things they are learning both in and out of the classroom. The thing Dean Brady talks about is the importance of the things that go on outside of the classrooms in an honors education. We talked about how powerful blogs could be as ePortfolios and really looked at how categories could be easily used to link program goals and outcomes to student posts. We promised each other we'd find a way to make it happen.

A year later and I am thrilled to see we are launching a pilot with first year Honor Scholars who self selected in based on a great post by Dean Brady that will see them posting their learning and life experiences over the course of the semester, year, and perhaps their entire college career. One of the key ingredients here is the linkage between the SHC mission and the students' reflections. Scholars will use the three main themes of the mission as categories ... these themes are:

• Achieving academic excellence
• Building a global perspective
• Creating opportunities for leadership and civic engagement

So as the Scholars move through their academic careers they will reflect on events in an ongoing fashion and critically select the categories that match the experience. The other piece that makes this very interesting is how Dean Brady envisions these Scholars' advisors using the portfolios to assist in academic advising. The way it typically works is that as a student comes to visit an advisor for a meeting, the advisor pulls the transcripts and talks to the student about their curricular progress. With the added notion of the category driven portfolio, these same advisors can quickly use the categories to filter content and get a more complete look at how the student is progressing through their college career. I am very eager to see this take shape.

My colleague, Erin Long, is the lead instructional designer working on the project with the Scholars. She wrote a post that outlines some of the things we'll be asking the Scholars to think about as they participate. I like situations where we end up with "wins" on multiple levels -- students thinking critically about their intellectual development, faculty more actively participating in the advising expereicne, and us getting honest feedback in a real world use of the technology. We'll be reporting back throughout the year ... are there other things we should be considering along the way?

Back to the Portfolio

In light of the Blogs at Penn State project I have been thinking and talking quite a bit about how that platform can be used as a digital publishing platform ... much less a blog, but a way to enable personal content management. I've written about this before, but have some additional thoughts to share ... these are new ideas I am working on so bear with me.

I've mentioned before how the Blogs at PSU work -- a central service that allows individuals to publish into their personal webspace. We all get at least 500 MB here at PSU and getting more isn't difficult. We have recently been working on rolling out Protected Personal space as well. What Protected Personal does is allow anyone at PSU to publish into a protected directory within their personal webspace. It has a really nice permissions toolset so I can easily restrict or expose content inside Protected to only the people I decide to. This is an important step for us on a whole bunch of levels, but I want to focus on how it might be used as part of a personal ePortfolio environment.

You can obviously put anything you want into Protected space -- including the automatic publishing of a PSU Blog. The way I'd like to frame this revolves around the notion that I would set up a master blog in protected that would act as my personal repository -- essentially a place for me to collect everything I do while a student at PSU. I would use categories and keywords to organize everything including day to day class notes, the creation of papers, the place I stuff pictures, and really anything else I create while at the University.

Now the process of creating a solid ePortfolio relies on a few important concepts -- an ePortfolio needs to be reflective and it needs to be made up of artifacts related to my personal and academic goals. So imagine as a student you are given a checklist of objectives or goals you should work towards in a given field of study. You would then be asked to work through the creation of a balanced scorecard that would have your personal goals on it as well. It would give you a roadmap to follow as you collect evidence of your growth. As you move through the semesters the idea would be to put everything in the repository while categorizing things as they happen with an eye on your goals -- maybe even use your goals as categories.

At any given interval it would then be easy to go into the protected repository and critically select the strongest pieces of evidence and post them to a public ePortfolio site -- also published and managed via the Blogs at PSU. The idea being that as you move them into public view you spend time reflecting on the work and soliciting feedback from others via the comments. Faculty and administrators could utilize your evidence by direct linking in departmental assessment activities as well if necessary.

I think the keys here revolve around making a few changes not to the technology, but to the ways we work with students as they move through their academic careers. Sitting down with them as they enter a program and helping them establish their personal goals so that they balance them with the goals of their program -- that is critical. Showing them how to collect as much evidence as they can, knowing full well that only a subset of the repository entries will ever see the light of day in their portfolios is also a fundamental shift in thinking. Imagine a protected respiratory that would hold an entire academic careers' worth of intellectual development and learning evidence. All of it would be tagged, categorized, and ready for searching, selecting, and reflecting on. I see it as a potential opportunity to shift the way we ask students to think about their academic careers ... what do you think?

Predictions in an Online Publishing World

I got asked a very interesting question today during a committee meeting today. The question was about the use of the Blogs at Penn State toolset as it relates to student portfolio activity. I have been saying for about 36 months or so that a robust blogging environment could serve as an "ePortfolio Light" toolset to enable students to focus on the reflection of their learning without needing to learn commodity web skills. As an aside, for a long time I have been trying to talk about a blogging platform in terms of personal content management and as a publishing platform. What I like about the PSU portfolio efforts is that it has been about the right stuff -- students taking time to reflect upon their personal story. The thing I haven't liked about it is that we have forced them into a very old school web publishing model to do it. We've asked them to use Dreamweaver to do this expression and while it is a decent tool, the whole notion that a complex piece of software gets in between thought and execution as it relates to reflection is a shame.

I have had one of my colleagues, Glenn Johnson, come into my class in the past to discuss ePortfolio and the students really do get it -- they get the importance of building a place online that represents them. What they struggle with (generalization time) is the whole web publishing process. Think about it, expression online using a WYSIWYG tool is a convoluted path -- open a WYSIWYG tool, learn it, understand the naming conventions of the online world, figure out how to move your static files, make sure everything is in the right directories, upload it, look at it in the browser, rinse, and repeat. Contrast that with modern publishing tools -- authenticate, type, and click publish. Sort of a no-brainer.

So, back to the question. Today I was asked to project if the Blogs at PSU, when used in a electronic publishing context, would increase the amount of students engaged in portfolio creation. Right now, from what I understand, less than 50% of students activate the free personal webspace we give them. Activate is different than using it. About half of that group reports using it for academic purposes. Will giving the students of our University a simple tool for publishing, reflecting, sharing, and collaborating online change those numbers? I said I think it will -- and I also mentioned that if we built a FaceBook Application to facilitate blogging from their profiles we'd see an even bigger jump. I am wondering if those of you who have done University blogging environments to support simple web publishing have seen increases in student utilization of online publishing for academic (or even personal) use. Any help out there for me?