ePortfolios are both individual and community activities. As individuals document their practice, they perform several internal processes to make sense of what they’ve done. But, these processes can be amplified if a community of peers (and/or mentors or “experts”) is a key part of their ePortfolio process. By sharing reflection, and drawing on reflections and suggestions from a person’s community of practice, it would be possible to more effectively understand what is being documented, and to better adapt as a result.
Because ePortfolios are used to document and record an individual’s practice, they have an archival nature. They form a “permanent record” of a person’s activities and progress.
ePortfolios can also have a developmental nature, when the individual (and their peers) review an ePortfolio to create personal development plans, and to adapt future strategies as a result of the documented case studies presented within an ePortfolio.
ePortfolios have two primary components. The “presentational” component is the visible, shiny product of the ePortfolio process. It is a website, or a presentation, or a set of media produced to document and communicate a concept or event.
But, just as importantly, an ePortfolio has a cognitive component. The individual crafting their ePortfolio should be reflecting on their practice of teaching and learning, critiquing what they’ve done - what worked? what didn’t work? what would they do differently? This cognitive or reflective component is crucial, as it allows the individual (and their peers) to learn from both success and failure.
Some traditional ePortfolio projects approach the ePort as a solution to an HR problem - to document capabilities of employees and students in order to streamline institutional business processes. That may be an important and valid goal, but it is not the sole (or even the primary) purpose of an ePortfolio.
If viewed separately from any institutional context, an ePortfolio is a live document that represents an individual (or, perhaps a group of individuals). A successful ePortfolio project may enable these individuals to document their practice of teaching and learning, and to record snapshots of personal and professional development. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks templated document, as each ePortfolio must be as unique as the individual it represents.
The Teaching & Learning Centre has been involved with some ePortfolio-related projects, most notably a pilot project conducted by the Faculty of Education’s Master of Teaching Program. This pilot was designed to evaluate the technical and pedagogical implications of an online ePortfolio, as well as a community website, as part of the MT curriculum.
We have also been fortunate to play a lead role in the development of the Pachyderm interactive presentation authoring software, which was used to create the published ePortfolios in the MT pilot project.
I have been tweaking some of the Drupal -powered sites used at the Teaching & Learning Centre, and in the process have updated the copy of TinyMCE that provides the WYSIWYG editor. While downloading the fresh library, I noticed a spellchecker plugin , so I grabbed a copy of that while I was there.
It seems to work great! It provides a new button in the editor, and clicking that triggers a call to the Google spelling service . Any mistakes are highlighted automatically and alternate spellings for these are provided by clicking on the highlighted word(s).
The FlickrStickr module for Drupal adds the handy Flock-like Flickr Photo Browser, making it easy peasy to add photos from Flickr to content in Drupal. But, the module uses the PHP fopen() command, which is disabled on Dreamhost’s servers for security reasons.
So, with some really quick hackery (more like copy-and-pastery, following this example) I ported the module to use curl instead, and it works great. It doesn’t seem to be able to insert images into the TinyMCE editor, so you have to toggle back to text mode to insert an image (oh, the irony!)
Another quick test of drag and drop. This time, from a regular old page in Flickr , in a separate window, dragging an image directly into the TinyMCE editor in Drupal. It didn’t automatically add the hyperlink, but that’s still pretty easy…
Just kicking the tires of the latest milestone build of Flock. How ‘bout some Flickr integration?
Yup Flickricious. Not quite as simple as the Flickr plugin for WordPress - have to keep 2 windows handy and drag-and-drop between them, but pretty cool.
The final penultimate test of any blog publishing app appears to be whether or not keywords/categories are applied. I’ll try adding this to “flock” and “testing”. If it’s posted under “General” or without categories, you know the score… [OK. failed miserably at that. no idea why. could be a Flock thing, could be a Drupal thing…]
This page lists all of the images that are being used in the banner area of this weblog. I’m using a script to automatically and randomly select one of the images each time a page is loaded (but that may behave differently, depending on browser or caching). They are listed in chronological order, in the order they were added to the rotation pool - not the order they were taken. I’ll be updating this page as I have time, to provide more information about each image - when/where/why was it taken? Why did I add it to the rotation pool?
The colophon is a list of Drupal modules used to run this site. It’s generated by calling the module_list() method, and iterating over the output, so it’s a live reflection of what’s running right now.
Photograph by D’Arcy Norman
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button in the editor, and clicking that triggers a call to the 
