Batson Blog

Peter Elbow will lead a 3-hour workshop on Monday, July 16 at AAEEBL's annual conference.  This workshop is just one reason why you should join us at our conference.

 Elbow’s latest book, Vernacular Eloquence, published this year by Oxford University Press, helps us understand how spoken and written language are changing in our new digital culture.

Peter Elbow has helped shape our understanding of writing since the early 1980s (at least) with his publications, Writing Without Teachers, Writing With Power, Embracing Contraries, and Everyone Can Write. 

As a writing teacher myself, sometimes I only needed to read a phrase from Elbow and my world would open up.  He has a knack for seeing both the obvious and what no one else sees. 

Peter Elbow, an early influence on eportfolio practices and theory, is leading a 3-hour workshop at the AAEEBL Annual Conference in Boston, July 16 – 19 at the Seaport World Trade Center.  His workshop is on the Monday pre-conference day, 8:30 to 11:30.  You need to register for the conference to then register for this pre-conference workshop:  http://aaeebl.org/2012conference

Everyone involved with eportfolios should attend this workshop.  It is a rare chance to spend time with a legend.  Using eportfolios necessarily requires students to write and to write in different contexts, both formally and informally.  In any course, no matter the field, using eportfolios increases opportunities for students to write; the value of good written communication is amplified in an eportfolio-based learning design.  Elbow explores how our concept of “literacy” and our actual literacy practices are changing quickly, and he sees these changes as positive.

I have started reading this book and keep saying to myself “finally! Someone has thought through these issues and is making sense.”  We now “speak” in writing in forms such as Twitter and Facebook, blogs, email.  The controversies around how technology is altering our communication forms leave us grasping for appropriate terms or reasonable perspectives to understand these changes.  Having just read a part of this magnificent book, I already feel better.  I have somewhere to turn for a better understanding and for the realization that the popular issues around writing at this moment actually have a long history.  Reading this book, we not only learn more about current changes but about the whole nature of writing over time.

Rarely do conference-goers experience a plenary workshop.  Usually, a plenary speaker would just speak for an hour.  In this case, Peter Elbow has been generous enough to do a 3-hour workshop and then spend another hour with us on Tuesday afternoon in an informal “conversations” session.  You’d have the chance to attend his workshop and then, the next day, join with him again to discuss your thoughts or questions from the workshop. 

Ideally, you would read Vernacular Eloquence between now and July 16, and then have a chance to engage in conversation with the author from an informed viewpoint during the workshop and the next day during the Conversations session.

One of the most pointed criticisms employers make about college graduates is “they can’t write.”  Ouch.  In Vernacular Eloquence, we find out possible reasons why this is true. 

 

 

This blog is meant less as a statement than a question, as indicated by the title.

As I hear from many quarters, it is now time for our field to start defining a research agenda.  It is now time to start providing evidence for our claims.  It is even time to re-think our claims and perhaps re-shape them as we learn more about our emerging field.  The International Journal of ePortfolio published its first issue only 10 months ago -- other research projects centered on eportfolio use have been underway for a decade or more.  AAEEBL is 3 years old this month.  ePIC is in its 10th year, ePortfolios Australia will hold it's 3rd conference next fall.  ePortfolio as a field, a technology, a set of practices and a community is coming into its own.  AAC&U continues to offer its own annual ePortfolio Forum that continues to grow each year.  ePortfolio California, EPAC and AAEEBL held a year-long series of Webinars that drew substantial attendees. 

But, at the center, what are we about?

Even before we can begin to consider the research questions and the evidence appropriate to our field, we should agree on a vision of our field.

We've identified ourselves with a technology, which is both essential and perhaps inevitable, but still fraught with potential issues.  What if, for example, the technology itself evolves to the point where the name "eportfolio" disappears?  That's one danger of identifying our field with a technology.  A more obvious danger is the possible perception that our field is a technology field and not a learning field.  But, for the moment, that is our terminology. 

AAEEBL was intentionally not named "the eportfolio association" to focus on learning and not on a technology.  Helen Chen adopted the term "folio thinking" as an alternative.  In the case of AAEEBL, we then faced the initial challenge that people searching on the Web for eportfolio information would not find AAEEBL.  Fortunately, that is no longer true as the terms "AAEEBL" and "eportfolio" are now associated in the "mind" of the Web.

But the term "eportfolio" [however spelled] is itself used loosely within our community.  We often personify "eportfolio" as an actor in learning as in "eportfolio helps students learn to reflect."  Or, "eportfolio has had a big impact on how we design our courses."

Or, recently, we have heard that "eportfolio is a high-impact practice" as if eportfolios are always used in a certain way.  We in the field understand these loose usages of the term.  To always qualify the term "eportfolio" would make our discourse cumbersome.  Yet, this loose usage does not, in fact, have a well-defined reference. 

If, as the saying goes, eportfolio is everything, then it is nothing. 

It would seem to me that before we can define a research agenda, we need to define what our reference is.  A research agenda for what?  Are we studying the adoption of innovation?  Doesn't seem so.  A certain kind of learning design or process?  Perhaps.  A new kind of assessment?  A new process of identity creation?  And if any of these are close to what we believe we are doing, what research methodology is most appropriate?

It may be, of course, the eportfolio studies is really multiple sub-fields -- one sub-field that's can be understood by applying learning theory and research, another that can be understood through the lens of assessment theory, another through the lens of educational theory, or anthropology, social science, cognitive science, rhetoric and composition, linguistics . . .   It would seem that our field could adopt a number of research methodologies to study the changes in process associated with eportfolios. 

Reading reports from projects such as The Inter/national Coalition for ePortfolio Resarch and LaGuardia's Connect to Learning Project, we find questions about the impact of eportfolio.  Very important to ask these questions and provide evidence.  But, we have not built a taxonomy of eportfolio designs that we can easily refer to so we know that such and such a result stems from a very particular eportfolio learning design.  I'm commenting on the current state of our field, and don't intend any criticism of these two important projects.

And what is "eportfolio"?  Ah, at the heart of the matter we have a tradition from composition studies that evokes a certain use of eportfolios and envisions them as a genre.  Fair enough.  But does describing eportfolios as a genre lead to a broad set of research questions and to a broad application of research methodologies?

Just to throw out an idea:  what if we thought of "eportfolio" as a kind of learning?  And what if we called that kind of learning "recursive learning"?  Integrative thinking, reflection, showcasing, curating and so many activities associated with eportfolio really involve recursion of one kind or another.  Here's an example of recursion:

"Writing is a recursive process in that the writer can return to a previous stage of the writing process while working on a later stage. In other words, while you are revising a manuscript, you may find yourself thinking of new ideas that could be included in the text. So you can also be planning or brainstorming while revising."
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4280554

"Social recursive learning" adds another layer to this concept. 

The process of managing or curating one's eportfolio is itself recursive because, as you cull evidence, or select evidence, you may see new connections and therefore be employing recursive learning.

If this concept cannot be all inclusive or fails in some other way, fine, no problem, but there is no doubt we need a conceptual core, a center. 

Only with a core concept in our field can we develop essential research questions and therefore begin to build a coherent body of evidence. 

Having just gone through a 90-minute demo of Sakai OAE, my head is spinning.  For more than a decade, the distinctions between LMS’s and eportfolios have been clearly defined:

•       LMS’s are course based; eportfolios are learner-based
•     LMS’s are faculty-centered; eportfolios are student-centered
•       LMS content disappears after the course; eportfolio content persists
•       LMS’s are owned by the institution; eportfolios are owned by the student
•       LMS’s support the status quo; eportfolios anticipate the future

And so on.  In conversations I’ve been involved with, LMS’s almost took on the reputation of a “necessary evil.”  Still, there was no sign of them going away.  And eportfolios, it seemed, continued to hold the place of the minor player on the stage of educational technology.

Now, the distinctions just listed between LMS’s and eportfolios may be disappearing.  One could almost say – though only as a reflection of bias in my case – that the eportfolio gestalt has won the day.  LMSs may be taking on the characteristics of eportfolios:

•       In OAE, all users have equal privileges – students and faculty – except within the tiny “membership” category of a course (one can have dozens of memberships, all treated equally) where there is a slight tilt toward the instructor.
•       Still, the new architecture behind Sakai OAE (“Open Academic Environment”) is “learning centered” – that is, not course centered.
•       OAE easily incorporates “widgets” which might be better termed “apps.”  Within rSmart Academic (based on OAE with extra functionality), you’ll find a kind of “app store” with technologies that can be incorporated into the institutional instance of OAE. 
•       Content can be placed in a library that can be shared on campus to all or to a select group.  The library persists over time and thus takes on the nature of a local OER repository (OER – Open Educational Resources). 
•       Through one’s “profile,” users can create, now, an “almost-eportfolo.”  The profile can in fact be used now for promotion and tenure documentation.  New features are being added as OAE continues to be developed in the community that will flesh out the eportfolio capabilities.
•       OAE now encompasses life and all learning. It reflects the fact that the culture now owns learning. 
•       Probably the most profound statement that OAE makes epistemologically is that “knowledge,” as in the libraries and in the Piazza discussion forum, is a continuing process.  Knowledge is not a thing that can be chopped into segments as in the classic course structure but is a flow. 

This is an architecture that eliminates the distinction between LMS and eportfolio.  By enlarging the problem space almost infinitely (because it’s open to including apps from the Web), it is more than the sum of LMS and eportfolio, but something much larger.

OAE does not yet have the learning outcomes backend that Sakai CLE has.  It is still evolving.  That’s why NYU, University of Michigan, Indiana University, Berkeley, Cambridge, and Charles Sturt University (AU) still use CLE even while they pilot OAE.

What we see is a conceptual breakthrough in LMS thinking that brings LMS’s closer to the epistemology behind eportfolio technology.  This new thinking – and I know it is not limited to the Sakai development community – is a watershed moment in the history of educational technology.  We see both the influence of the social Web and of our accumulated knowledge about learning in this new architecture.  ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.

 

Full disclosure:  I was the chair of the board of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative, which produced OSP (which was inserted into Sakai) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and from rSmart, and leadership from Indiana University. 

 

 

Even for those of us comfortable with change, especially change regarding education, the pace of change is almost bewildering.

Three items of note:

1. The hegemony of the resume may be over in favor of an online profile
2. Recognition of prior learning, or prior learning assessment (PLA) is gathering steam.  
3. The "Google-izing" of our culture and expectation of ready evidence. 
   

At Wende Garrison's site, Out of Practice, I noticed one of her posts that was an aha! for me:  Portoflios Preferred In Job Hunt?  In her post, she referred to an article at ResumeBear, "Are Resumes Obsolete?"

And in that article, another reference was to an article in the Wall Street Journal in January.  Both articles referred to new online ways that employers are getting a more authentic profile of job candidates. 

However, for me, a source of frustration was to read about companies who ask candidates to submit a set of links to online evidence for use in their review process, and to realize these companies had no idea there was such a thing as an eportfolio.  I've talked to two vendors this week who each support the online employment process in one way or the other.  It was clear they both have a market opportunity.

For us in AAEEBL and in academia, what I think is significant is how much our culture is evolving in ways that invite the growth of the eportfolio market, and also, in an important way, how much the knowledge culture is "training" everyone to expect, expect, evidence of claims. 

Recognition of Prior Learning

Prior learning assessment (PLA) is related strongly to the open educational resources movement OERs).  MIT is best known for, but hardly alone in, providing "Open Courseware."  Learners can acquire important knowledge and abilities from many sources.  This is not new, but what is new is the real possibility that learning outside the academy may now result in certification and employment. 

Last Friday, at the AAEEBL regional conference in Providence, RI, Empire State College presented on PLA, a world-wide phenomenon.  Particularly now when so many formerly employed people are changing to a new career, PLA has blossomed.  I heard today of an application that supports PLA (more about that in another blog).  I can see PLA, badges, OpenCourseware (and its kin) all coming together with many other forces to create a path for alternate credentialing either inside the academy (i.e., self-paced learning) or outside. 

Academia is subject to cultural forces as never before.  Either it adapts quickly to what is developing as a "perfect storm" of alternate credentialing, or it will suffer. 

The Google-izing of our Culture

It seems now that many of us are not satisfied to accept, on the face, cliches or supposed truths or assumptions or unsupported claims.  We turn to Google.  "Let's see if that's true or not."  I personally have had to re-learn foundational (but unchallenged) beliefs I've held for years.  Small beliefs, like why leaves change color in the fall.  Since a kind of answer is an instant away, it is now easy to seek evidence for almost any statement or claim.  Google has trained us to expect evidence. 

This habit of turning to evidence has made us all eportfolio-ready. 

Years ago, I wondered if our hype from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s was mere talk.  Suddenly, we have moved so far beyond any hype I could have imagined, I go around in perpetual astonishment.  Seeing such broad swings in consciousness and expectations and practices at the cultural level alerts us to look beyond the campus. 

We need to stop thinking "education" and start thinking "learning."  Learning is a broader enterprise where, yeah, it is happening. 

The most puzzling -- or hopeful? -- aspect of Blackboard's acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot is Blackboard Learn's announcement of their new Open Source Services Group.  Supporting open source?  As the article below suggests, this may not be another example of eliminating competition for the Blackboard LMS but may be recognizing the value in offering both an enterprise-level LMS and a lower-threshold LMS such as Moodle. 

The article:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/blackboard-buys-moodleroomsand-no-this-isnt-an-early-april-fools/4866

But for me, personally, having helped create The Open Source Portfolio (OSP), now part of Sakai, I want to know if Charles Severance, who will run the Open Source Services Group (but comes from the Sakai community) will also steer the group to supporting Sakai and OSP. 


Charles does understand the open source world.  Blackboard Learn may indeed want to support both proprietary and open source applications, as seems the case.  From AAEEBL's perspective, however, we particularly welcome Blackboard Learn to support open source eportfolio systems as well as LMS systems. 

best to all
Trent


Registration is open for our Boston Conference, July 16-19, and lodging is also available at http://www.aaeebl.org/2012conference

Hi, all -- as metaphors go, "The Information Superhighway" got hyped to an early grave, associated only with Al Gore's claim that he "invented the Internet."  Too bad; the metaphor is actually quite intriguing. 

Yesterday, I drove to Three Rivers Community College in Norwich Connecticut.  For some inscrutable reason, my GPS took me to Norwich (from RI) via I-95 but took me back home via state road 165, an uniimproved 2-lane highway through lakes and hills and tall white pines.  The contrast in the two driving experiences was extraordinary.

I learned to drive when our only long-distance driving options were these same 2-lane highways.  Across the country, this was the US road system.

These roads were minimally graded, unpredictably curved, variably built based on vague standards.  They had evolved from the first wagon trails created by the first white settlers based on Native American trails that in turn were based on game trails.  In other words, the highway system in this country until the 1950s had a long history dating back thousands of years.  In some sense, they were "natural." 

Or, in some sense, they were analog roads, limited by physicality.  You drove (or still drive) next to houses, through towns, seeing the utility wires that connect houses, seeing ancient trees that grew next to these ancient trails before even many wagons used these routes.  You are part of human history driving on our US highway system.

The skills you need to drive any distance on these roads:

• staying on the road and still maintaining speed (even at night)
  
• seeing far enough ahead to stay on the road
• avoiding people and cars coming onto the road
• passing slower cars -- anticipating and speeding up before passing and knowing the distance needed to pass and how to bail if you miscalculate, etc.
• knowing how far the next town is where there will probably be a gas station
• passing trucks in the rain while being blinded by spray
• and so on

And then, the Interstate Highway System was built. 

The Interstate Highway System broke with history.  Whole new rights-of-way in almost all cases had to be acquired, cleared, graded and paved.  These rights of way are almost never embedded in human history and have none of the social artifacts of the previous US highway system.  This is, in a way, like moving from analog to digital (although the IHS is of course manifestly physical):  the new system yanked people into a new unfamiliar landscape and new "rules of the road."

The skills you need to drive on the Interstate Highway System:

• driving with the flow -- neither going much faster than other cars or much slower since neither is safe. 
  
• merging into traffic -- initially, entrances to limited access highways had a short ramp, essentially a right turn, so entry to the highways was like a drag race -- getting up to speed before someone rammed into you.  Now, merging has become a science and we have culturally become good at merging
• staying with the flock to avoid getting a speeding ticket -- traffic is almost always going above the speed limit, so you learn how not to get picked off and ticketed.  
• changing lanes
• and so on
  

The two skill sets, beyond just the basic skills of operating a car, are very different.  The entire milieu of the IHS is strikingly different form the two-lane roads of the state and US highways.

Driving yesterday on state Rt. 165 I was immersed in history, culture and society.  I was close to everything.  I was driving where people live.  I could see the history in New England of mill towns and the rivers that provided power.

The Web and Internet are similarly an unfamiliar milieu for most people.  Within that milieu, we are creating a new human history and a new culture.  Despite Al Gore, the metaphor of the Information Super Highway may be useful. 

Beyond the Course:  ePortfolios’ Value for Credentialing

All talk of badges now assumes they are ways for people to not go to college and still get a job and advance their careers.  No where does anyone I know of talk about badges within a formal learning environment through assimilation within an eportfolio. 

 

ePortfolios support an alternate teaching-learning paradigm.  This much we know.  This paradigm applies not only to the course, but to a course of study in a major, to the whole college career and beyond.  Understanding the value of an eportfolio in a course requires one lens, but to understand the eportfolio at the enterprise level requires a different lens.

Once the course is over, if all that students take away from an eportfolio-based learning experience is a grade as validation of their work, the values of eportfolio can seem transient – valuable during the course but not beyond.  Grades as a sole measure no longer convey the information about a person that we once thought they did. 

We in the eportfolio world say that having the evidence behind a grade makes a big difference, but if the world ignores the evidence, the eportfolio work can seem meaningless in terms of advancing in the world. 

Assessment and credentialing methods and values, in the end, largely determine how students learn.  What determines the grade also determines the pedagogy.  How do we build hooks or entry points to the eportfolio evidence beyond the presentational Web page? 

The Move Toward Badges

And, now entering the assessment and credentialing arena is the badge.  Badges are the latest head-nodding hot concept:  say the word “badges” at a conference this month, next month, and possibly the month after, and people will nod.  Sure, we know what badges are and even have a good feeling about badges because the term is associated with the scouts or clubs or games – activities we choose to participate in, often as young people. 

What are badges and how can badges serve in higher education and how, in particular, do they fit within an eportfolio-based learning design?

Badges have always been physical badges, something you sew onto a uniform perhaps, validated by a paper certificate, or a military ribbon, or a badge you receive through gaming or in the world of programming.  Importantly, badges result from demonstrating ability for a specific skill or a skill level, and, often are granted by peers.  See also “micro-credentialing:”

http://charteroakpresident.blogspot.com/2010/04/micro-credentials-next-frontier.html

Recently, The Mozilla Foundation, HASTAC (“haystack”;see http://hastac.org/blogs/mres/2012/02/27/still-badge-skeptic for the latest HASTAC discussion on badges), and the McArthur Foundation joined in an effort to create a national digital badge infrastructure to serve as an independent credentialing mechanism for learning.  See also a blog by David Wiley of BYU: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1996 -- posted in late 2011, not 1996. 

This is scary stuff for administrators in the academy:  higher education institutions no longer own the knowledge of our culture.  With loss of the millennial monopoly on knowledge, higher education institutions are vulnerable to schemas for alternate credentialing.  If badges gain as much credence as a diploma for getting a job, or even more credence, since a badge is more directly related to a specific skill, higher education is in trouble. 

But, notice a very important stipulation that all discussion of badges involves:  badges are outside of academia.  I think this is the worst way to think of badges.  Badges work best and can be implemented now with eportfolios, and they will add value to eportfolios. 

How Badges Can Work Inside Academia

The system in higher education now:  no matter the achievement, only a letter grade results.  Letter grades are the least informative assessment possible.  Letter grades say nothing of the specific ability or skill or skill level they symbolize.  A student can get an “A” for writing a short narrative paper in an introductory course or for senior-level field work spread over many weeks.  It is an undifferentiated, non-specific, teacher-generated abstraction.  To compensate for what has been lost by the nihilistic grading system, instructors then have to write letters of recommendation in a mostly futile attempt – often years later – to create meaning for the grade she or he recorded for that student. 

Badges have caught people’s attention because they address the vague abstractness of grading:  they relate to a specific skill and are generated by peers.  At the very least, badges would add concreteness to abstract grades.  Within an academic setting, badges could then be validated by the course instructor. 

Badges, then, perform a similar function as electronic portfolios: they add evidence for assessment, another data point to fill out the picture of learners’ achievement. 

Badges outside of academia will face the challenge of getting validated by recognizable experts.  Academia may have lost its millennial monopoly on knowledge but it has not lost its experts.  Badges, then, may not challenge academic credentialing directly as an outside alternative, despite the efforts of The McArthur Foundation, HASTAC and Mozilla.  But, within academia, they may challenge the teacher-centered abstract process of academic credentialing.

Is the Badge Movement Good for the ePortfolio Community?

Badges also challenge the eportfolio community.  Will badges supersede the need for eportfolios?

AAEEBL and the eportfolio community advocate evidence-based learning but employers say they don’t have time to read the evidence.  Perhaps our community has yet to make the process of using evidence clear.   Interestingly, the concept of badges may help to do so. 

Imagine an online or PDF resume that includes links to pertinent eportfolio evidence but also refers to peer-generated badges for “Collaborative Project Skills,” “Editing Biology Lab Reports to Publishable Quality,” “CSS Web design Within Collaborative Projects,” or “Distributable Peer Review Expression for Complex Projects” and other micro-skills.  Badges are perhaps the necessary palpable and intuitive bridge needed for eportfolio advocates and practitioners to carry the day. 

Our community faces the challenge of comprehensibility:  eportfolios serve so many purposes it’s not clear they serve any purpose.  The badge, on the contrary, is intuitive.  Not only that, badges may be the actual missing link in the eportfolio cosmos.  They are a marker of a particular slice of the evidence/data in the eportfolio.  They are a shorthand way of summarizing a “report” from eportfolio data.  

We need to consider how we can incorporate badges into eportfolios.  I do know that some or all eportfolio providers are considering badges and how they can be technically incorporated. 

But, a danger faces badges:  if they are granted by teachers, and lose their peer-review aspect, they lose most of their power and usefulness.  If they become a badge for passing a course, then they become just an alternative grade. 

Instead, through incorporating badges, academia has the opportunity to extend the concept of peer-review to undergraduate and graduate students.  Faculty engage in peer-review throughout their career, on tenure committees, on editorial boards of scholarly journals, on scholarly conference program committees, as reviewers of new scholarly books or articles, and so on.  Peer-review is familiar ground as it reigns supreme among faculty. 

And, now, badges provide an avenue to open peer-review to students.  Using badges as a mechanism for peer-review at the undergraduate level would be in step with other efforts to involve undergraduate students in research -- not made-up, “as if” research, but research into openly-contested problems in a field. 

Authentic Learning

We have the means to design undergraduate learning along more authentic lines.  At major research universities, faculty are creating digitally-enabled ways to engage undergraduates in advanced research through visualization and simulation – understanding the principles of physics, for example, in more concrete, manipulable ways despite the fact they may not be able to use the advanced formulas of physics. 

The same impulse is leading many academics to involve undergraduates in the processes of developing knowledge.  Peer review is at the center of developing knowledge and badges are a way for undergraduates to be recognized for achievement in knowledge development.  Being published or making a presentation at a conference may be beyond the abilities of undergraduates, but receiving a peer-generated badge is not.

The McArthur Foundation – HASTAC – Mozilla Foundation initiative is just underway.  I think we as the eportfolio community have a stake in this initiative.  Let’s have conversations regarding badges and discover how the eportfolio community can incorporate badges.

For more reading about badges, go to an article that Randall Rode at Yale University pointed me to at digital pedagog: http://www.digitalpedagog.org/?p=1437

Note: 

The AAEEBL Annual Conference registration is now open.  Boston July 16-19.

Also:  AAEEBL Northeast US Regional Conference in Providence is this coming Friday, March 23, at Johnson & Wales Harborside Campus. 

There is much talk and some truth about the decline in the employment value of the college degree.  Presumably, the talk about college degree devaluation refers to colleges and universities outside the “elite” circle of institutions whose names alone open doors.  And presumably, the talk is not as much about the 2-year technical and vocational degree as about the degree from a four-year college or university. 

But, even so, the “degree devaluation” views can reasonably be applied to a couple of thousand American institutions (50 percent) and perhaps as large a percentage of international institutions. 

Those who do hire college graduates complain about those graduates’ abilities:  they can’t write, are not self-starters, don’t know how to work in teams, and expect all tasks to be scaffolded for them.  In other words, they have learned to be passive learners and not active agents. 

And yet, at the same time that the value of the college degree is dropping, the cost of that degree has reached an unsustainable level.  We have two coincident problems that seem paradoxical:  the cost goes up when the value drops?

Since we have a double-barreled problem – costs of college increasing past the breaking point and the degree dropping in value – an ideal approach to this double-barreled problem would also be double-barreled. 

Fortunately, a trend within higher education is already underway that addresses both problems.  That trend is toward “high-impact educational practices (HIPs).”  The name is from 1998 and I would prefer that they were called “high-impact learning activities,” but I’m not going to split hairs. Shifting toward these practices on a large scale could both improve the value of the degree and lower the cost of getting the degree.

These practices have been widely talked about.  Before publication by AAC&U, they were also validated in all learning settings. 

But the HIPs have been thought of, and were designed as, supplementary to the core curriculum.  Why should they not, instead, be a model for the core curriculum?  Randy Bass at Georgetown has been speaking about this question for several years. 

And, recently, many people in the eportfolio community have begun talking about the dynamite pairing of HIPs with eportfolios.  If you are doing an internship, how great if you also use an eportfolio to evidence the value of your internship?  The same for undergraduate research or service learning and other HIPS.  How great if while involved in a learning community you can also take advantage of the social pedagogy inherent in eportfolio?  Bret Eynon, Director of the Connect to Learning FIPSE Project is emphasizing this in our work with 23 campuses in the U.S.

Re-thinking the core curriculum using student activity and ownership of learning as the base criteria for design addresses the degree-value problem because active students at stake for their own learning are – we believe – better prepared for work today than passive learners who do not own their learning and who do not have a stake in the success of their learning except upon graduation when it’s too late. 

The cost issue can be addressed with a re-design toward authentic, experiential and evidence-based learning.  If students own their learning, if they are working in teams, if they are not just listening to lectures, if they are in fact at stake for their learning while in college, then we can start to see a way to address higher-education’s cost issue.  Students active in their own learning necessarily implies a different role for teachers.  There is a multiplier effect in students taking charge of their own learning -- with guidance from a teacher, a larger number of students can learn effectively than with lecture.  Lecture is not a scalable or especially effective default learning practice.  Active learning practices are. 

And, conceivably, some students could graduate earlier than four years.  If we base a degree on achieving learning outcomes and not seat time, it is only logical that some students will achieve those learning outcomes sooner than others.  Even in the lock-step curriculum model so prevalent today, some students graduate early.  Shortening the time to degree would save money for some students. 

By far the highest percentage of the cost of running institutions of higher learning is personnel.  This cost drives everything.  As state governments withdraw funding from state-supported institutions, colleges and universities have no alternative, with such a high fixed-cost base, but to increase fees and tuition.

Not only people but their benefits are amazingly expensive. From a business perspective, people cost is the major factor to consider in bringing down the cost of education.  Granted, those in higher education have been creating online learning, automated learning, large lecture classes and other ways of extending teacher-centered learning for decades.  These efforts would seem more hopeful if we all still believed in teacher-centered teaching as opposed to teacher-guided learning. 

A more hopeful approach to reducing the cost and increasing the quality of learning is to let the students – the learners – do the work of learning.  I don’t mean a free-for-all approach, but a curriculum design like problem-based learning.  When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to have an amazingly enlightened teacher in social studies.  Many of you reading this may have had equally enlightened teachers along the way.  In my case, when we were scheduled to study the First World War, we did not listen to lectures but instead were challenged with this question:  “What caused World War One?”  We were split into teams and we had to come up with our own hypotheses through research and then present these hypotheses to the class a few weeks later.

How can you answer the question about causality of the war without looking into the history of WWI?  How can you answer that question without puzzling about what causes anything to happen?  We knew the immediate “cause” was the shooting of the Arch Duke, but we also knew that was not what our teacher was hoping we’d find – if that was all that was expected of us, then why create the weeks-long project?

We looked at the situation in Europe, the issue of monarchies, and even the question about What ever causes wars?  We might have even looked at the invention of gunpowder, but I just don’t remember.  In other words, we were learning the art and science of being an historian.

How could I have known then that my social studies teacher was mentoring me for the work I do today?

No, colleges and universities will not convert to a full curriculum transformation to more active learning as quickly as is necessary until a crisis hits – or has it already? – and enrollments start to drop.  But, they can immediately do one thing:  allow students to do more of the work of learning.  In my high school class, we students did most of the work for three weeks of learning about the First World War.  In theory, our teacher could have gone down the hall and got another class going on the same question.  He could have two classes running at the same time. 

This suggests a model of attracting more students to an institution while leveraging teaching faculty more efficiently.  If we had had electronic portfolios in my high school, we could have captured evidence of our process of searching for causes of WWI.  Those electronic portfolios could have been evaluated by anyone with expertise in history learning outcomes for our age.  My teacher could have been running two classes working on historical problems such as ours and still not faced a doubling of grading responsibilities.  Just as, today, some eportfolios are being assessed and evaluated by professionals and peers other than the teacher, my teacher could have been relieved of that job.  

Using designs for active learning, a college or university could create an optional and alternative curriculum toward the degree that is more student work intensive and less faculty work intensive.  Students could choose the “active learning” curriculum or the standard curriculum.  It is not so unusual now for students to have more say in how they construct their degree, and the idea of an optional alternate curriculum degree is either already in operation in some places or as good as in operation. 

The organizing and management capabilities of information technologies make it much easier to customize operations rather than requiring one lock-step program for all. 

A degree that is based on eportfolio evidence of active learning may not now automatically get a college graduate in the hunt for a job to the next round of resume-screening – although this may change in a few months as electronic transcripts catch on and the attractiveness of an online resume with links also catches on – but we should be clear that the move to digital records is the HR direction underway now. (Already, HR people search applicant’s activities on the Web as one data point for hiring decisions).  

Therefore, it is a good time for institutions of higher learning to be working on core curriculum redesign or at least an alternate, optional curriculum design, that we believe better prepares students for the world today.  By the time these alternate designs are adopted, the world will certainly be ready for them. 

 

Reminder:  Register for the AAEEBL Northeast Regional ePortfolio Conference, March 23 (Friday) on the beautiful Harborside Campus of Johnson & Wales University in Providence RI.  This is a one-day conference.  The program is interactive and features regional, national and international leaders in eportfolios.

 

 

 

 

The badge movement – badges are digital applications that are essentially social eportfolios for peer-certified evidence of achievement outside of an academic setting (as one way to see badges) – is about to get a huge boost from the MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC (“haystack”), and Mozilla.  Awards totaling 2 million US dollars will be distributed to the most promising badge technology developers.

Badges add a whole new technology sector supporting evidence-based learning.  Badges take the concept of life-long learning seriously and offer an enabling technology quite different from current eportfolio technologies, and radically different from our current focus on changing institutions.  Those involved in badges envision ways to certify learning outside of institutions. 

To better understand the badge gestalt, here are Cathy Davidson’s own words: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/badges-a-solution-to-our-teacher-evaluation-disaster/2012/02/06/gIQAHiNbvQ_blog.html

Badges, we can see, are not about creating a learning space so much as a social-certification of learning space.  Badges demonstrate achievement.  They are not, as eportfolios are, a way to transform educational institutions, but instead are a way to bypass institutions.  At least that is the current framing of the discussion around badges.  Could badges serve as a new functionality within eportfolio systems?  I see no reason why not (as a first reaction). 

Here is the official press release from the MacArthur Foundation:

http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.4196225/apps/s/content.asp?ct=11221065

In this release, you learn what Mozilla’s part in this initiative is:

“To help advance and encourage this new use of technology, Mozilla is creating an Open Badge Infrastructureundefineda decentralized online platform that will house digital badges and can be used across operating platforms and by any organization or user. This approach will help to make digital badges a coherent, portable and meaningful way to demonstrate capabilities. It will also encourage the creation of "digital backpacks" of badges that people will carry to showcase the skills, knowledge and competencies they have gained.”

It is clear that badges have achieved a status, wide recognition, and substantial support sufficient to require the attention of AAEEBL.  We are working to create an official position paper that will be released for public consumption.  Toward that end, we will hold an informal discussion of badges at next week’s AAEEBL conference in Salt Lake City hosted by Westminster College – see

http://aaeebl.org/february2012

Since AAEEBL is not only about eportfolios but about evidence-based learning, and since badges are a way to provide evidence of learning, there is no inherent conflict between eportfolios and badges, nor between organizations supporting badges and those supporting eportfolios. 

But, collaboration between the two movements will probably be most productive if we initiate a conversation and intentionally find ways to work toward common goals.  To this end, I’ve contacted HASTAC and MacArthur to set up a time to talk. 

Please send me your own thoughts regarding badges – trentbatson@mac.com. 

This is an important conversation and I expect it will be an ongoing one.

Best to all

Trent

For 10 years, I've believed strongly that all education would be improved if more teachers and faculty members used electronic portfolios as the centerpiece of their courses. 

In the last 3 years, I've amped up that belief:  I became convinced that all educational institutions could be better structured around "evidence-based learning" in which all assessment and evaluation was focused on student evidence of learning in eportfolios.  In other words, replace testing as the primary means of gathering information about learning with evaluation of evidence of learning in eportfolios.

Behind this belief was my seeing that if an eportfolio is used in courses but tests still determine grades, eportfolios would never come into their own.  They would always be seen as adjunct to the course, extra work for no purpose.

Yet, with each new national educational initiative, high stakes testing gets lodged ever more firmly as the only way to be "accountable."  It could only be hoped that this overweening emphasis on testing would itself bring down the house of cards; teachers would see the fallacy of such a singularly questionable and thin metric to judge a complex process. 

We may have reached that point.  I have heard of cracks in the walls of the testing fortress.  Testing companies offering eportfolios as an alternative? 

The eportfolio idea seems to have bubbled to the top.  Now, the eportfolio idea bubbling to the top is not about the learning values most of us consider the true merit of eportfolio theory and practice, but is about using eportfolios for evaluation. 

I see no cause for lament, however.  If eportfolios begin to replace testing as a better way to measure student achievement, then that move by itself would increase the value of using eportfolios for learning.  Both teachers and students, knowing the eportfolio would be the basis for grading, would put more effort into creating good eportfolios.

The danger?  Once a good idea has reached the top, sudden and large changes can occur.  Is the eportfolio industry ready for a tidal shift in the national belief system from testing to eportfolios?  Is the eportfolio community ready?  Can we retain the learning values of eportfolios? 

I don't know that this will happen, but I've long suspected it would.  AAEEBL and the entire eportfolio community needs to consider how to prepare for a potential tsunami as does the industry. 

It may be that the mere incremental changes we have known for a few years, not a tsunami, will continue to be the rule. But, hearing that even large testing companies are incorporating eportfolios makes me feel a low rumble in the ground.  What might that mean?