learning, teaching and research (archive)

I am shocked to find I have not posted here since September last year! So much going on. I will post here in due course about my Uni’s choice of a new VLE system. Prepared to be amazed!

I am demonstrating and running a workshop on Elgg as a potential e-portfolio tool at the JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire and Humberside, E-Portfolios: A Beginner’s Guide at Leeds University Tuesday, March 27, 2007.

“In its simplest form, an e-portfolio is a tool that allows learners to record and present their achievements and personal progress in a digital format. In a broader sense, it could also support activities such as reflection, planning, sharing, and collaboration. Capturing this information and enabling these activities could take place within a webspace, blog, or in a more structured, template-based system”.

As most of the delegates are from other institutions, i.e. not Leeds Uni, rather than set up a lot of temporary user names for our local installation of Elgg I have set up an Elgg Space called Elgg SandBox to run the hands-on part of the workshop. This also has the advantage of being the current version of Elgg rather than the 0.6 version we are currently using at Leeds. Sadly it does not have the e-portfolio presentation plugin installed that Brighton University commissioned but this is one of the things I will be covering in my initial presentation. The workshop will start with about a 15 – 20 minute demonstration within elgg.leeds but I will be teleporting to elgg.org to show the switching between blog and forum views and to eduspace.net to show the presentation tool. Then the delegates will work through a number of exercises in the Elgg Space I have set up using a worksheet. They will also be going to a workshop to see (possibly try) a commercial structured e-portfolio system called Pebblepad. One of the objectives is to compare the pros and cons and issues involved in using dedicated structured (institutionally constrained?) e-portfolio systems and more student/learner-centred/controlled blogging/social networking alternatives.

If any Elgg users here would like to register themselves with Elgg SandBox just to have a look around or even join in, please feel free. You will be more than welcome and, if any discussion develops there, please make any contribution you wish.