ePortfolio keynote

‘Curriculum is technology’: Affordances of ePortfolio

Paul MahargOsgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto

preview

1. Research design and reflective journalling: a case study from professional legal education

2. ePortfolios in active learning – student example

3. ePortfolios in active learning research

4. Rethinking the ePortfolio as genre: compare other genre affordances:

a. explorer narratives

b. Patchwork text(ing)

5. The materiality of disciplinary learning in ePortfolios: the alternative to the box under the bed

Slides available at: http://paulmaharg.com/slides

Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA 2

http://paulmaharg.com/slides

First, definitions… An ePortfolio …

• Is a personal digital collection of information, reflection on learning and future plans

• Records and demonstrates a person's learning, career, experience and achievements.

• Belongs to the learner, not the organisation – but must be hosted somewhere

• Is populated by learner• Is primarily concerned with supporting learning• Is lifelong and lifewide learning

1. Research design and reflective journalling:a case study from professional legal

education*

* My thanks to Karen Barton, Patricia McKellar & Fiona Westwood, whose outstanding work at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law is represented in the first three

sections of this presentation

Glasgow Graduate School of Law

• Diploma in Legal Practice• Professional legal learning• Students taught in a transactional learning

environment• students engage in year-long collaborative

learning in virtual firms on seven substantial simulated legal transactions

• they use f2f meeting (logs), activity logs, personal logs, intranet discussion forums as chat rooms, drafts folders, correspondence folders and style banks

ePortfolio project at GGSL

• Introduced e-portfolio for students• Invited local law firms to participate• Five agreed to take part in Pilot• Project running with former students later ran

in partner firms

feedback from GGSL project

• Portfolio specification needs to be clear and simple

• Collection of evidence is problematic• Give guidance and examples• Use and train mentors• Support conversation and peer support• Use forms and checklists to help avoid ‘empty box

syndrome’• Regular reviews and feedback are essential• Allow alternative models and range of assessment

tools

1. ePortfolios in active learning: student example*

* My thanks to Karen Barton, Patricia McKellar & Fiona Westwood, whose work at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law is represented in the first

three sections of this presentation

Glasgow Graduate School of Law staff formed a working party for Scottish professional legal education

Aims

1. investigate best practice in the design, functionality and implementation of e-portfolio assessment systems

2. recommend to the Law Society of Scotland on functionality, processes and procedures for implementation of a unified e-portfolio system for PEAT 1 & 2, traineeship and CPD

3. plan and implement a pilot with a variety of stakeholders

4. report on pilot with a view to phased implementation of ePortfolios in professional legal education across Scotland

ePortfolio work was extended

3. ePortfolios in active learning research*

* My thanks to Karen Barton, Patricia McKellar & Fiona Westwood, whose work at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law is represented in the first

three sections of this presentation

• “Firms? Computers? Collaboration? Three words guaranteed to strike torpor into the heart of the average mature student.”

• “A feeling of dread crept over me when I realised that much of the work for the Diploma was to be carried out in firms.”

• “I struggled with the fact that I didn’t have total control over where, when and how I worked.”

• “I don’t think that I’ve ever been quite so scared in my life. ……Imagine my shock at discovering that I’d be part of a firm and that I’d be potentially responsible not only for my own failure but that of three others. I almost left.”

• “Four strangers, four projects, one team?”

Reflective learning and group work in virtual firms

• Reflective Reports were prepared as an assessed piece of work for one of our Diploma subjects, Practice Management

• Each student was asked to focus on two of the simulation transactions, and bear in mind the following issues in their report:– The most difficult questions they had to answer in each of

the two projects, and how they answered them;– The pattern of work that they adopted within the firm,

and the strengths and weaknesses of their approach;– What they would do differently next time and why?– What they had learned from the transactions as regards

risk management, case and file workload and client care?

Reflective reports on the experience…

1. Reports analysed

2. Data coded, framed

3. Matrix developed:

• Type 1 - Learning Communities that displayed high trust and high learning

• Type 2 - Legal Eagles that displayed low trust and high learning

• Type 3 - Friendly Societies that displayed high trust and low learning

• Type 4 – Dysfunctional firms that displayed low trust and low learning.

research method

4. Rethinking the ePortfolio as genre - compare other genre affordances:

- explorer narratives as reflective accounts

- Patchwork Text(ing)

Explorer accounts as reflective narrative

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John Rae (1813-93)

Mungo Park (1771-1806)

• The project(ion) of the self: internal landscape of the self vs external landscape of the mind.

• The constant negotiation between new and conventional, eg relations with others who are not treated as exotic by Rae or Park – Inuit in the Arctic, Poulh on the Niger – but by the reader.

• Notes are apparently contemporaneous, extempore, made under immediate hardship, but… the accounts are also redrafted for publication and posterity.

‘Aesthetics matter:interface design shapes learning’

• Feedforward in assessment: see Petraglia, 1998.• The Patchwork Text:

– Students share pieces of writing in small groups– They keep a reflective diary on the process, privately.– Student review all writing half-way through a course,

looking for unifying themes.– The Patchwork Text is a selection of those writings,

presented in an interpretive reflective framework(Scoggins and Winter 1999)

33Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA

https://o nlinete achingmanifes to.w

ord press.com

/

Aesthetics + assessment re-designPatchwork Text is:

‘derived from aesthetic theory, drawing on the notion of artistic structuring as the ancient mode in which human beings represent their understanding of the complex and ambiguous significance of their experience. The central process here is imagination, the faculty which allows us to ‘go beyond’ our direct experience, to generalise and integrate the fragments of experience…’

(Scoggins and Winter 1999, 488)

ePortfolios can surely play a role in:1.Capturing feedforward2.Enabling the social learning of Patchwork Texts 3.Scraping and curating the more ephemeral evidence, eg in texts, chats, tweets, etc


4. The materiality of disciplinary learning in ePortfolios: the alternative to the box under the bed.

3617.8.17 Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA

‘Aesthetics matter: interface design shapes learning’

Maharg (2007), chapter 9.

webcast v.1


webcast v.2


webcast v.3

‘…we beat on,boats against the current…’


1. Coherence

2. Signalling

3. Redundancy

4. Spatial contiguity

5. Temporal contiguity

-- Richard E. Mayer’s multimedia principles

1. Coherence2. Signalling3. Redundancy4. Spatial contiguity5. Temporal contiguity -- Richard E. Mayer’s multimedia principles

ePortfolio as lifelong curationof professional resources

‘You know, after the summer holidays I kinda wonder how much of this I’m going to remember. It could be a year down the line before I’m ever doing any Civil Court work and a lot of that will be forgotten. And it will be good to have that to go back to and be reminded, just again, even from just a confidence point of view, of the sort of way the court cases are carried out, even if it is just that. Then again video lectures are excellent because you can go back to them – “What was the procedure for the Options Hearing?”’

‘When I go on and do my traineeship you’ve got those materials there and it is not a case of finding the box under the bed where your lecture notes were stored 6 months previously … I have got something I can take into work with me and use on the computer. So it has been more than just a set of lectures it is a whole resource I can use for other things.’



http://bit.ly/2w740qv

http://bit.ly/2w740qv

more information…Barton, K., Westwood, F. (2006). From student to trainee practitioner – a study of team working

as a learning experience. 3 Web JCLIhttp://webjcli.ncl.ac.uk/2006/issue3/barton-westwood3.html

Barton, K., Cunningham, C.D., Jones, G.T., Maharg, P. (2006). Valuing what clients think: standardized clients and the assessment of communicative competence. Clinical Law Review, 13, 1, 1-65.

Maharg, P. (2007). Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, chapter 2, 64-67.

Petraglia, J. (1998). Reality by design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Scoggins, J., Winter, R. (1999). The Patchwork Text: a coursework format for education as critical understanding. Teaching in Higher Education, 4, 4, 485-99.

Websites:

See Simulated Client Initiative, http://zeugma.typepad.com/sci

these slides @ http://paulmaharg.com.

Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA

http://webjcli.ncl.ac.uk/2006/issue3/barton-westwood3.html

http://zeugma.typepad.com/sci

http://paulmaharg.com/

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Email: [email protected]: https//works.bepress.com/paul-mahargWeb: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides
