Electronic Portfolios

One of AECT's affiliate organizations is The Society of International Chinese in Educational Technology. I spent Wednesday afternoon at SICET roundtables, specifically the ones dealing with electronic portfolios.

The first, focusing on student involvement, was led by Dr. Shuyan Wang of the University of Southern Mississippi. My notes:
Four types of e-portfolios: summative, formative, job application and teaching. My thought, our portfolios at MSU are a little of each.

Her Ed Tech masters students create their portfolios in a Word document which she has preformatted. They are built on jump drives, backed up on a file server, and eventually end up on CDs, like ours. Portfolios are submitted, receive comment, are resubmitted, receive comment again, are submitted a third time. The final version includes all three stages of the student projects.

For faculty to actually make use of e-portfolios, they must be a course objective included in the syllabus, not just an add on. A participant said his school is looking at having faculty submit their own performance review materials in e-portfolio format, in part to make evaluation easier, but in part to force faculty to become familiar with e-portfolios so that they will be better able to work with students on them.

The second session, focusing on assessment, was led by Rui Hu of the University of Georgia. My notes:
The reflective component of their e-portfolios counts as 30% of their projects. Reflection addresses four questions: how I did this, what I learned, what problems I encountered, how I can use this in the future. E-portfolios are peer reviewed. Set of questions helps students keep on track with step by step reflection. Peer review helps keep students aware of rubric. Students are given guidance on constructive criticism, to avoid getting just "this is very nice" reviews.

Rui's students are creating e-portfolios in Google pages (thus fulfilling a dream which formed in my head yesterday). She does a session with them in which they create a set of links, then build the eight pages those links go to, and put the links on all pages. There was some later discussion of uploading to Google pages. This is something we must look into. Could make our own e-portfolio process simpler, and solve the "where to house them" problem at the same time.

K-12 e-portfolios were mentioned. Helen Barrett was cited as a good source on this.