Trial run - flexibility of webfolios.

I have contacted Prem Kumar and Glenn regarding a trial run of PebblePad ePortfolio with the a group of IP students.

As mentioned in the IP session 2 post below the students generally produce low tech, but very effective presentations. I believe changing this element of the IP sessions would be counterproductive and students would simply get bogged down with 'having' to use technology for technology's sake.

I propose a solution where the students supplement their IP sessions by recording their learning, just as they do with the paper based portfolio forms handed out at the session, but electronically. The aim of this would be to create a record of all IP case studies over the duration of the course.

The students will be using the webfolio tool in PebblePad to record their learning and populate it over the year. The ability of being able to merge/add one webfolio into another means that students can create individual webfolios for each year specifically for IP and then merge them into one webfolio covering all years. In addition to this students can create an overall webfolio for the MBChB course and populate with the IP webfolio, the SSA webfolio as well as other webfolios created for other modules/subjects on the course.

The webfolio can then be exported into a HTML format at the end of the course for the student to keep for future reference. There may also be a opportunity for the Medical school to keep/archive a copy of each students work for future reference, audits etc.

The ability to embed one webfolio into another brings the opportunity to create a felxible eportfolio. As stated above, webfolios can be created for each module/subject on a yearly basis. These yearly webfolios can then be either drawn together as an overall webfolio for the module over the duration of the course, or be compiled to give an view of learning during an academic year for whole course, i.e. embedding webfolios from each module/subject for a particular year into MBChB 1 for example. As well as this, students would be able to create a custom eportfolio for a specific purpose; for example, bringing together webfolios from different years and modules to show a particular learning path/story.

Each of the boxes in the simple diagram below represents a webfolio. The idea is that students pull together specific webfolios into any particular sequence they require; like building with Lego bricks, you decide what parts you need for any particular model.

IP Session 2nd Year

Attended second year IP session with Glenn Matthews. This particular group seemed to be quite active and engaged in the learning process being able to independently assign each other tasks, brainstorm around a new case study and formulate mindmaps from the brainstorm. Presentations were innovitive, well thought out and it was clear that learning was taking place as the information was disseminated back the rest of the group and feedback received.

One noticible point was the lack of technology used during presentations. OHP acetates were used and had been hand written which would possibly indicate either a lack of presentation/powerpoint skills or last minute preparation. The room had only an OHP, whiteboard and OHP screen for students to use to present. This may need to be address when looking at the use of ePortfolios to support IP. After the session Glenn had suggested that this was a particularly lively group and did not need to interfere with the session as the students were more than capable of directing their own learning. We met with another member of staff who had also just given an IP session in which she found the students needed a fair amount of support. It may be beneficial to sit in on one of these sessions to gain a better veiw of the learning processes and how an ePortfolio tool may benefit those students that experience difficulty with the case studies.

Overall the session was a positive experience and I have been invited back to the follow-on session on 3rd March, as well as attending a first year IP session on 26th Feb.

Catching up

Initial project meeting:
Had a very positive meeting with Prem Kumar (IP module owner) who provided a good outline of the IP module with specfics as to how the module is run. Arranged to pick up facilitator guides and attend and observe IP sessions from years one and two. The outcome of the meeting is the statement of work whcih can be found here:

Statement of work - Medical LIP IP


Mind Maps:
Looked into mind meister which seems to be a very competent tool, however the free version only allows 6 mind maps and the eduction version free trial only lasts 30 days and costs $15 (US) per year.

The education version has added features, some of which maybe essential such as the ability to creat and edit mind maps offline. The free version has enough features to satisfy the requirements of most student needs and the limitation can be overcome by creating more than one account per group or editing and export and rediting the same maps.

Mind Meister is a fairly simple tool to use and can export to a variety of formats including GIF, JPEG and PDF, as well as text based (RTF) output. However, some added functionality is lost when exporting to these formats, such as links and attachments. However, these are not required for this course.

PowerPoint can also be used to create mindmaps with aid of the drawing tools and text boxes. PowerPoint has the added benefit of being available across campus as standard, although students may not have MS Office installed on personal computers. Exporting can be output to a number of formats including JPEGS.

I have found a good resource for mind map information: www.mind-map.co.uk which explains and provides guidance on mind mapping techniques and also has a list of tools available commercially. Most of the tools however, are quite expensive.


ePortfolio Best Practice (ongoing research):

Penn State's E-Portfolio Initiative (Johnson and DiBiase 2004)"the nature and potential benefits must precede the design and deployment of an enterprise e-portfolio"

Institutions should not skip steps that are critical to understanding pedagogical issues related to ePortfolio implementation

Beyond the Electronic Portfolio: A lifetime Personal Web Space (Cohn and Hibbitts 2004): This paper poses the question of whether e-portfolios are the way forward, and whether a system carried by the user through out a lifetime is more beneficial. Although some of the ideas seem excessive I believe it is essentially what we want from an e-portfolio tool.

Purpose of this blog

I intend to keep this blog as ongoing record of my workflow in the project development for Integrated Problems, as part of the Learning Independence Project. The first few postings will be a catch up and subsequently I will log progress of the project. It will also be a place for me to store links and thoughts about the project.