ePortfolios as a means for assessment, learning, and transition to the professional environment

This week, we are exploring the use of ePortfolios as an educational technology. The biggest appeal for ePortfolios as a technology is their use for assessment as well as instruction. This concept of 'folio thinking' stresses that portfolios can be used to showcase student work as a means for assessing learning, but also as a tool for improved learning. Ideally, portfolios can be used so that the student themself must reflect on their learning and choose what entries to include based on what accomplishments they want to accentuate. Not only do these tools allow educators to better integrate assessment and learning, but they also provide a great avenue for collaboration between students and ultimately a valuable asset to provide potential employers to supplement a resume or other documents for application.

For this week's playtest, I experimented further with Wix.com, using a website as a type of portfolio, I also tested Nuclino, an online wiki building website, and google sites. Of the three, wix and google seem to be the most user friendly, but Nuclino seems like it would be a useful tool. I particularly liked seeing the graph of the connected webpages in the wiki made using Nuclino. Overall, however, I would most recommend wix or google sites. Wix seems like it would be ideal for an individual preparing an eportfolio and the results can look very professional. Google Sites seems to offer much more versatility (even with relatively little prior knowledge) allowing users to easily combine google apps such as graphs, spreadsheets, calendars, and maps very easily. Google Sites is also inviting because of the recognizable brand and the comfort that comes with using a prolific product. For classroom uses, I would be most likely to recommend Google Sites, not only for the ease of use, but also for some of the ethical quandaries which will be discusses later. It should be mentioned that I am mostly discussing ePortfolios in this entry, but physical portfolios bring many of the same affordances as ePortfolios, with the exceptions of connectivity and interoperability. Physical portfolios still utilize much of the same critical thinking as electronic ones, but the added benefits from the web make ePortfolios the main focus of my exploration. The most important aspect of these technologies, is of course the affordances that they offer. When it comes to ePortfolios, or portfolios in general, their affordances are not just to the learner, but also to evaluators and other professionals. A portfolio affords the learner the ability to reflect on their own work and showcase their achievements, thus is itself a great opportunity for learning, but it also affords someone looking at the portfolio the ability to evaluate the person. This can be greatly useful for the academic setting, as it provides a form of assessment that can provide as much insight into mastery as any exam but with a much more inviting format and potential for students to learn from the analysis of their old work and plan for future learning based on these analyses. It is also much more meaningful for the learner to create something (or even compile previously made items) to demonstrate their growth and learning rather than to simply answer questions prepared by an evaluator. I know that as a graduate student seeking a Masters degree, I would prefer to create a portfolio that I could then show off to friends, family, and future employers rather than take a test and show off my grade. Students could also potentially use projects and entries made for one class as evidence for mastery in different classes or use these previous entries as starting points for future work. Portfolios afford the student the ability to add on from year to year creating a living document that constantly showcases the student's learning while also giving them a tool to assess their own progress. Portfolios also offer learners the ability to collaborate between each other, using peer's creativity to further their own. For me, one of the most interesting uses of portfolios in education would be the prospect of students in one grade sharing their portfolios with students in grades below to show them things they have to look forward to or as a tool to better understand what paths a student may be interested in pursuing by comparing various paths based on their peer's portfolio. And perhaps most useful is the affordance for these portfolios to show prospective employers the abilities and qualifications of the student. Ideally, students could submit their portfolios in addition to other application documents to demonstrate their competencies to the employer. This of course opens up the door to some hard questions about the ethics of ePortfolios, in particular ownership and storage. While reading through the materials on ePortfolios one of the issues that I found particularly intriguing was the issue of ownership. ePortfolios in particular can offer some amazing affordances to students, as discussed above, however if the server storing the data for the ePortfolio is destroyed or needs to be cleared to make room for other data, then the student may be left with nothing to show. The ethics of who owns the ePortfolio of a student and who is responsible for any fees or costs associated with housing that portfolio is still a hotly debated topic. If a student wishes to use their ePortfolio for a job application, will the student need to pay for it to be sent to the employer? If a student wishes to modify their ePortfolio, will the changes be certified as official in some way? These questions and more must be addressed before ePortfolios can live up to all of their potential benefits. Until these have been answered, however, I will continue to muse about the ways ePortfolios may be utilized in the physics classroom by students. In particular, I would like to utilize a portfolio to have students collect and select a few labs that they have completed throughout the year. This particular activity is intended to augment the existing lessons where the students perform the labs, by adding an additional activity where the student sorts through their existing lab writeups and decide which of their labs best displays their own skills, understanding, and growth. The students can reflect on their labs and decide to chose labs based on common themes or skills required to complete the labs and will also supply a short written document describing why they chose the labs they chose and discussing their interest in the common themes or skills. The metacognitive task of selecting which labs to include and justifying that selection should help students not only to better understand their own learning process, but also to help connect and refresh previously covered topics. Labs that have not been looked at in months can be revisited with new insight and a better appreciation for how they fit into the larger class. The technology of ePortfolios easily lends itself to this task, as the acts of collecting and selecting are implicit in the use of them. I would also like to incorporate an assignment that will have students create a portfolio of physicists. This portfolio would not be a collection of their own work, but rather of the contributions of famous physicists through the centuries. This portfolio can be worked on at any time throughout the year, as it is more of a historical than conceptual. Students would compose a portfolio of the most influential people in physics and justify their choice with evidence and reflection. This project would, pedagogically, allow for students to better connect with the material as they are approaching it from a historical and personal perspective as well as academic. This activity modifies the typical lessons exploring the history of the physics and physicists by having students collect various examples from different physicists and reflect to decide which ones to include to best showcase the contributions to physics. These assignments, one adding to the students' personal portfolios while the other creating a more amorphous portfolio showcasing contributions to physics, allow students to utilize portfolios as a form of learning but also as a form of assessment and would both create a product that students could be shown to others as a demonstration of their learning instead of a simple test or quiz to assess them.