The Teacher's Hub

Ewan McIntosh posted this article ePortfolios & Learning Management Systems: Setting our default to social a few days back, and as one who is currently at a school grappling with its Learning Management System these points Ewan makes in the article have struck a chord. While I recommend you read and view (he has a video) his original document I want to highlight some of what he says – and it would be easy to highlight the whole article.

• Education has for too long defaulted to secrecy, opaqueness and inward reflection on “what education is”. It’s time to change that default setting.

• [My] plea would be to set our own personal defaults to social: the benefits of others serendipitously bumping into our content, our ideas and our pleas for help greatly outweigh the perceived risk or inconvenience of ‘losing’ a piece of ourselves to the vast online wastelands.

• [Current] preconceptions of what an ePortfolio is for and looks like [are] generally [perceived by] teachers and parents [as something]
  1. for showing the best of a student’s work;
  2. for students to use;
  3. convenient tools for capturing assessments and therefore….
     
  4. for private use, shared with a closed community of the teacher and/or class and/or school, but rarely the open web.
     

McIntosh believes that portfolios are (and this is stated in his video) for students, teachers and parents to use;

1. for showing the workings that led to a final product (it’s time we stopped covering up our learning in English, showing our working in Maths – let’s get the process of learning out there for all to see, contribute to and build upon);
2. convenient tools for capturing anything that might, one day, relate to some learning – light touch tools such as Posterous are transforming blogging from a web-based technically superior-feeling activity in education to something anyone can do, even when they are offline (you post by email with Posterous, so you can ‘blog’ when on a plane if you want to, and let Outlook do the catching up when you hit wifi again).

• ePortfolios for teachers should resemble those useful moments of sharing in the staffroom.
  
• For students, ePortfolios should be the messy learning log or journal de bord that, frankly, not enough of them keep on paper anyway;
• for the whole, open web: otherwise we set ourselves up for nearly only introspective learning with people who share our viewpoints, cultural biases and outlook on learning and life.
• Most Learning Management Systems on the market these days…have their defaults set to ‘anti-social’: private, closed networks that experts and co-learners in the ‘outside’ world cannot see or interact with.
  

As I said earlier, the whole article is worthy of quoting and it’s hard to pinpoint just the highpoints but I want to finish with a longer quote;

The reasons for this [closed system] are normally noble sounding enough: safety of learners, the perceptions of teachers and parents are currently too ‘conservative’ (i.e. they didn’t learn like that) to ‘cope’ with the concept of anyone seeing the work of students. Allanah King in Nelson does a good job asking the difficult (and not-so-difficult) questions of Learning Management Systems in this respect in her post: why would a school spend good money on one?

But the longer teachers put up with these attitudes, rather than challenging them and asking intelligent questions about the balance of risk in not having students share with the world wide web, the longer we do not have conversations with parents, and invite them to spectate and participate in what learning can look like now, then the longer we will continue to do a disservice to the digital footprints, competitiveness and understanding of otherness in our young people.

Full article: ePortfolios & Learning Management Systems: Setting our default to social

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