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.