practicing what we preach: building an e- portfolio community of practice louise frith daniel clark
TRANSCRIPT
Practicing what we preach:
building an e-portfolio Community of PracticeLouise FrithDaniel Clark
Kent’s e-portfolio
Enabling the use of technology in teaching “When asked what they would find most
helpful to enable them to use technologies more in their teaching, most teachers say 'give me examples, in my subject area' and 'point me to relevant people I can discuss these issues with”. Conole (2010)
From sharing to participating (passive to active) O’Reilly 2005
What are the barriers to E-portfolios being taken up more widely in L&T?
ISSUES Responses
Too many tools Replaced Pebblepad with MyFolio
Time to learn the new technology before using it with students
Established a digital retreat
Need local examples of use Established a Community of Practice for Kent staff
Lack of sharing among disciplines & between academics & services
Emphasised that it’s for all disciplines and support staff
Methodology: Principles of our approachUsed Clegg and Bradley’s (2006) 3 approaches to PDP to arrange the case studies: Professional Academic Employability We aimed for our community of practice to be:User centredExperientialSharedEvolving
MyFolio Community of PracticeWhat we did:Set-up a group in MyFolio for any member of staff using MyFolioEmphasised that the group is for all staff (academics and services) this reflects how we expect students to use it i.e. to record their academic and other activityCurrently has 33 members and 14 pages which share practice
Example page
Three elements of a CoP (Wenger,1998)
Showcase day
Employability strategy
Own pages within the group
Evaluation of the CoPInterim evaluation has been done via telephone and face to face interviews with staff. From this this information the following recommendations have been written:
continue to record new practice with MyFolio through pages within the MyFolio CoP.
collect and share practice on assessment of e-portfolio work
continue to encourage students to share ‘finished’ pages
hold annual Embedding Employability through E-portfolios events which showcase work and facilitate networking.
Questions What new technology has led you to do
things differently in your teaching/interactions with students?
How have you been able to communicate your use of new technology to colleagues?
References Clegg & Bradley (2006) Conole (2010) O’Reilly (2005) Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of
Practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.