nils_peterson's blog

Andy Carvin and Jimmy Wales have started a public conversation to see what educators have to say about Wikipedia. They asked questions that focus on Wikipedia in the classroom:

These questions suggest a perspective that is misses what Carvin suggested in an earlier post on this topic (see the example 5th grade class mid-way down).  The broader, better question I think Carvin and Wales mean to ask is, "How can Wikipedia be used to meet education goals like critical thinking, research, and collaborative knowledge generation?" This question gets away from issues of the factual accuracy of Wikipedia and toward transforming educational instituions -- and even defining how a Wiki-versity would be created.
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Carvin's prompt seems to be focused on K-12 education, Washington State University is able to provide perspective for Wikipedia in Higher Education, which we think may inform the K-12 conversation.

Catherine Howell's reply to Andrew Middleton raised the idea of persistent identity, to which Stephen Downes responded :
[quoting Howell] "persistence creates the illusion of fixed identity, whereas higher education explicitly conceptualises its mission as formative and processual." Well, sure, you grow and develop when you learn, but you don't change your name. You can keep a persistent identity even as you grown.
I reject the notion that seems to be implicit in Howell's comment that as learners we are unformed prior to a process, and then are 'finished' (my word) and at that point would want a stable identity. I believe I am continuing to grow as a learner and that my responsibility to myself and to you the reader is to connect my current self to my past selves and to explain how I understand the evolution. In "The Social Life of Learning: How can Continuing Education be Reconfigured in the Future," John Seely Brown talks about a spectacular failure and what he learned from it. He connects to failure associated with his past identity.

But I digress, the thrust of this post is about identity. I had been thinking that one of the strengths of a university portfolio offering was that the university was in a position to offer a stable identity and to certify that the identity had certain credentials. That would put the university in the interesting role of guarantor of a person's identity -- not a role to accept lightly.

Which gives me several questions: How do you know my identity? How to I conserve it over time? Why is this important?

Its important because, with persistent identity comes the ability to build reputation, and with that comes the ability to navigate communities of practice.

How might it work? Our students come to us with identities already established on multiple systems: email, IM, gaming. Unlike me, most of them do not have the same user ID across the systems they use. So, how do I know that "fratboy" on aol and "cougar21" at Washington State University are the same individual (and, for that matter, how do you know that nils_peterson at Educause is nils_peterson at WSU)?. How is it that I am convinced of the claim that all the elements in multiple portfolios are indeed the work of the same individual?

In a course design meeting today we came to something of an answer. We were talking about assignments that had students extending an entry on Wikipedia. Lets say the student has a university identity that differs from their Wikipedia identity. In the university identity the student built up an evidentiary trail as they prepared to edit Wikipedia, posting and analyzing resources, other authors, previous diffs of the Wikipedia entry, and drafts of their proposed new version of the Wikipedia entry. There might be comments and other critique from fellow learners in this preparatory work. Now, using the Wikipedia identity, the student makes the edit. And then, again using the university identity they write a reflection about the process, what they think the diff shows about them as a student of the topic, what the subsequent diff when their work is edited means, etc. I, as a reader of all this, could make a decision about the likelihood of the student's claim to be both identities.

So, where I had been thinking that a single persistent identity was essential, I can now see that for each of a person's communities of discourse a different (but stable) identity might be workable, and also a way that multiple identities, with varying levels of persistence, can be woven together to provide a picture of a single individual across communities.

Catherine Howell replied to Andrew Middleton's call for comments on the idea of using a blog for an ePortfolio. Stephen Downes responded with concerns over assumptions behind Catherine's post:
But finally is the overall assumption in this post that an e-portfolio is something that we (an educational institutional institution, presumably) provide for a student. That gets the equation exactly backwards.
My perspective on this from within Washington State University's experience. I have a mantra for portfolio thinking: collect, select, reflect, and communicate with others at each stage of the way. I also find it helpful to my thinking to dis-aggregate "portfolio" into repository of artifacts and presentation of artifacts for a specific purpose or audience. But note, repository and presentation are tangled, I might have a repository filled with presentations (be they CVs or PowerPoints or other ePortfolio presentations).

We (CTLT) began hosting a university blogging tool last August (a brief history). Because we had an ePortfolio initiative underway at the same time, I tried to keep our smaller blogging project out of the ePortfolio space, but I came to understand that was not possible. A blog is, at minimum, a presentation of a repository of journal entries. But since those entries can be selectively reflect on other posts, the blog can occupy the entire eportfolio space.

I had (fleetingly) hoped we could have one repository, or give the end user the impression of one repository. But, with in my personal portfolio experiments I've come to understand that there will be multiple repositories and multiple presentations ('a multi-folio'). For example, I own these: my email sent box, my hard drive, documents I've placed in the CTLT document repository (a collaboration space), my blogs (WSU and Educause), Flickr, del.icio.us, CiteULike. We are about to launch a teaching and learning wiki, based on MediaWiki, where I will have a portfolio of all my contributions to the wiki. We are also preparing to launch OSPI 2.0, which was origially viewed as our monolithic ePortfolio solution.

So, for me its not a question of ePortfolio tool vs blog, its much richer integration that is required, which makes Scott Wilson's post, on making portfolios using FOAF and Atom, interesting.

On 2/14/05, Karen wrote:
I read through the CTLT website after being directed there from an article written in the most recent Innovate journal. While I my initial interest was in another subject, we at RIT are also trying to incorporate blogs into the academic landscape where appropriate. Our new CMS Desire2Learn has personal journaling capabilities but we are trying to figure out the purposes of using blog software versus doing it in a class. We have several recommendations but nothing in print yet for faculty. I guess I am hoping your project is further along and either you have recommendations of when to use which software or you have some evidence of how successful (for academic purposes) blogging is. I would appreciate any feedback you can provide.
 
Karen
Our engine is called PBJ (portal-based journal). Its not fully integrated to our portal yet.
Here are some notes I wrote last fall, while watching a webinar on blogging in higher ed.

Your question prompted a chance for some mid-project reflection.An earlier reflection is here.

Here is our short history of blogging:

CTLT staff have designed a variety of courses for our Distance Degree Program. In the summer of 2003 two of our designers examined some of the more successful offerings of those courses with the objective of learning what was working and what could be improved. One outcome was several observations about threaded discussions

• Threaded discussions are trees, which are inherently dispersive of conversation
• Authors are often separated from their texts when the academic term ends
• Courses implemented in learning management systems are inflexible containers, there is no trans-course dialog (Learners were seen trying to tell classmates about what what happening in another course's discussion, as it related to the first course.)

In Jan, 2004 we launched a project to address those findings. We started to look for a new tool and settled on blogging as possibly addressing each issue above. We launched our blog engine in Aug 2004, based on an open source tool called .Text. (This post is on Educause's instance of .Text.) Anyone at Washington State University with a Network ID can create a personal blog space, no approval is required. We feel we have adequate support for this in pre-existing copyright and academic freedom policies and existing practice of giving anyone with a university-hosted email account 10MB of space on a web server.

Almost immediately we disabled unauthenticated comments, to avoid blog comment spam. We added a search engine. We maintain a discussion of features within the blog. One of the requested features is group blogging-- which is proving complex to implement on top of our current code base.

Recently we have added Crimson Tags to make quotation/citation easier. And now we are exploring making concept maps from the interconnections among blog posts.

We have a concurrent project to launch the OSPI ePortfolio for the campus, so I have tried to steer the blog away from the ePortfolio space, to avoid confusion. It refuses to be steered. If a writer has a collection of posts in a blog, they, by default have the artifacts for a portfolio, and depending on the posts, perhaps the reflection as well. Further, see my personal exploration of integration of a blog with a more summative and reflective portfolio.

What have learners done?
We know there are WSU students who blog, for example LiveJournal, but I don't see academic content there. Several sections of General Education are trying our blog as a device to turn in homework. Look at the bottom for the assignment (by Jeff Sellen). The work may be typical, it is not exemplary. It shows no evidence of discussion or linking between posts and the linking to resources is not web-aware stylistically (but the assignment does not expect this). Further, random sampling of these students does not indicate that they are using the blog for anything but homework in this course.

What have instructors done?
There have been requests for group blog spaces, and notably, for private group blogs. Other than the GenEd sections, no course have ventured in. Our course designers are suggesting blogging among options for faculty, and there may be some nibbles, mostly coming from faculty looking for point-n-click web publishing without the weight of using WebCT, see this exploration.

What has CTLT staff done?
Several staff are regular bloggers, and are exploring our tool's potential. Several are infrequent bloggers, but evidence is they are lurkers. But, significantly, blogging has not altered our culture. About the same time that the blog engine came up, the CTLT web site was converted to a content management system, eliminating the need for CTLT staff to go through a web master to update the site. This change has involved more CTLT staff than blogging has-- perhaps because, in effect, the CTLT web site has become a group blog (or group wiki) about the business of CTLT.

Prospects?
We still believe in the the observations that launched this project, and don't see why a blog engine should not meet the requirements.
We've been at this six months and are still learning.
We have not done a lot of publicity, partly because we are still building out some features and don't want too big a burden of users to migrate to a new system.

Note to self. Write another update on this project at its first anniversary.

The strength and weakness of the mechanism that I proposed in my previous post is that I assumed a high-level moderator and a partially synchronous process on an international scale. I said:
The facilitator could announce on the list a that a new reading was posted. That post might look like this:
"This month's reading for the ePortfolio Study Circle is..."
and some prompts for the discussion
The strength comes from having someone providing motivation, "read this item." The weakness comes when your campus is not ready to discuss the item suggested. Your campus needs to discuss what you need to discuss -- the curriculum needs to be contextualized to the learners.

The proposal that follows is contextualized to the local situation, distributed and asynchronous:

What is happening at http://del.icio.us/tag/eportfolio is that people are adding resources as they find and value them -- that is, people posting to Del.icio.us are recording their interests and learning, but, there are two weaknesses of Del.icio.us:

1. There is no controlled vocabulary -- "eportfolio" can be used to tag what ever, by whom ever
2. There are no greater connections between items than that they share a common keyword. Even an individual's collection in Del.icio.us has little coherence or rhetoric, for an example, see mine.

So here is a revised, specific recommended course of action to create and document our distributed reading circle (our own distributed curriculum):

1. Organize a reading/discussion forum on your campus as suits your local circumstance.
2. Some members of the group should regularly scan for an item their group would like to read. Among the places to consider scanning is http://del.icio.us/tag/eportfolio or subscribe to the RSS feed http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/eportfolio.
3. The local group needs to take some reflective notes on their discussion. The notes should contextualize the current reading relative to other articles the group has read, and also contextualize it to the local situation. In other words a critical thinking response to the article-as-prompt.
4. The notes should be written -- these notes becomes the group's history and a portfolio of the group's journey. The notes should include URLs of articles and other documents referenced (e.g. other blog posts, sites to examine, etc). If the group's opinion is divided, fine -- create minority reports.
5. The notes should be posted in a blog. (Educause provides one good choice, but any blog engine that does ping/trackback will do.)
6. The URL of your group's blog post should be posted in Del.icio.us, with the tag, "eportfolio."
7. If your group creates some other resource, or finds a good resource -- a sample portfolio an article, etc -- it should, at a minimum be posted in Del.icio.us and ideally, be contextualized to your discussion in one of your blog posts.

Why do to all this work? Why blog rather than use a listproc to share?

• Most of the work is really about you being a scholar of the topic -- find sources, read critically.
• Posting to Del.icio.us takes only seconds, but both captures documents for your reference and announces your categorization of interesting documents to others. (When I visit Del.icio.us, I walk the web from a document that interests me, to people, to documents, and I almost always locate something new of interest -- that is, the sharing of others pays off for me, so I can only assume my sharing helps others also.)
• Posting in a blog connects documents with more metadata than Del.icio.us can, see this post for my argument -- think of your blog as your group's development portfolio of its exploration of ePortfolios.