Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment E-Book

Darren Cambridge

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 538

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

This book clearly articulates the foundations of an educational vision that is distinctively supported by eportfolio use, drawing on work in philosophy, sociology, higher and adult education, and elearning research. It is academically rigorous and accessible not only to scholars in a range of disciplines who might study or use eportfolios. It surveys the state-of-the-art of international eportfolio practice and suggests future directions for higher educational institutions in terms of curriculum, assessment, and technology. This resource is written for scholars, support staff, instructional technologists, academic administrators, and policy makers.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

PREFACE

Overview of the Book

Intended Audiences and Ways of Using This Book

What the Book Does Not Do

Acknowledgments

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Introduction

PART ONE - THE POTENTIAL OF EPORTFOLIOS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

CHAPTER ONE - EPORTFOLIOS AND IDENTITY

The Origins of Authenticity

Authenticity in Two Capstone Portfolios

Authenticity and Learning with Eportfolios

Authenticity and Educational Theory

Authenticity and Procedural Justice

Critiques of Authenticity

Authenticity as Manner Rather than Content

Authenticity Through Social Dialogue and the Multiple Curricula

Toward a Dialogical Authenticity in the Use of Eportfolios

Questions for Practice

CHAPTER TWO - EPORTFOLIOS AND VOCATION

Institutions and Careers

Samantha Slade’s Competencies and Employability

Career Identity and Integrity

Career Identity and the Symphonic Self

From Employability to Good Work

The Impact of Integrity on Eportfolio Authors

Implications for Educators

Questions for Practice

PART TWO - EPORTFOLIOS AND ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

CHAPTER THREE - EPORTFOLIOS AND ASSESSMENT

From Expression to Recognition

Principles of Deliberative Democracy

Limits on Deliberation in the Process of Standardized Eportfolio Assessment

Deliberative Assessment with Eportfolios in New Century College

Communication as Lived and Experienced

Challenges in Deliberative Problem Solving

Eportfolios as Conversation Pieces

Deliberation in Eportfolio Practice Elsewhere in Higher Education

Questions for Practice

CHAPTER FOUR - FROM AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT TO EPORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT

Drilling Down: From Numbers to Context

Linking Up: The Whole, the Parts, and the Relationships Between

Digital Media and Professional Learning Outcomes

VALUE and Writing

Questions for Practice

CHAPTER FIVE - ASSESSING INEFFABLE AND MATERIALLY CONNECTED LEARNING

Assessing the Ineffable

Ineffable Outcomes as Essentially Contested Concepts

Eportfolios and Evidence

A Typology of Evidence Use in Eportfolios

Material Participation in Social Networks

Questions for Practice

PART THREE - EPORTFOLIOS FOR LIFELONG LEARNING

CHAPTER SIX - LIFELONG LEARNING WITH EPORTFOLIOS BEYOND HIGHER EDUCATION

Potential of Eportfolios

Independent Lifelong Learning Through eFolio Minnesota

Experimentation and the Living Document

Audience and Integrity

Linking Up Learning in Nottingham

Employability and Lifelong Learning as Competency Matching

Eportfolios and Deliberation Beyond the Academy

Moving Toward Transformation

Questions for Practice

CHAPTER SEVEN - EPORTFOLIOS, BLOGS, AND SOCIAL NETWORK SITES

Blogs and Social Network Sites at the Intersection of the Personal and the Social

Mediated Self-Representation and Managed Interaction

Narrative and the New Capitalism

Databases and the Networked Style

Technology Support for Networked and Symphonic Selves

Layering the Networked and Symphonic Styles in Wolverhampton

Questions for Practice

CHAPTER EIGHT - THE PORTFOLIO PROCESS AND THE PROCESSED PORTFOLIO

Limitations of Current Systems and Proposed Alternatives

A Model for Supporting Eportfolio Practice with Technology

Questions for Practice

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

INDEX

Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cambridge, Darren, 1974-

Eportfolios for lifelong learning and assessment / Darren Cambridge.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-50376-8; ISBN 978-0-470-90127-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-90128-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-90129-8 (ebk)

1. Electronic portfolios in education. 2. College students—Rating of—United States. 3. Education, Higher—United States—Evaluation. I. Title.

LB1029.P67C36 2010

378.1’66—dc22

2010025092

HB Printing

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

To my mother, Barbara Cambridge, consummate lifelong learner, collaborator, teacher, and friend

PREFACE

Lifelong learning is an ongoing process of developing knowledge, skills, and strategies; putting capabilities and self-understanding into action over time; and thereby establishing an identity. To support lifelong learning, higher education needs to look beyond the content knowledge, practical techniques, and professional capabilities that have been its primary focus. Colleges and universities need to commit to helping students craft identities that reflect their own values and equip students to put that self-understanding to work in their communities and the rest of the world. To be meaningful lifelong learners, individuals need to take ownership of their thought and let it guide their action. A major purpose of education is enabling individuals to have agency in the world through their evolving understanding of themselves, their capabilities, and their connections to others.

Addressing this broader conception of the goal of education means considering questions such as: What kinds of people should we be, and how do we find out? How are agency and power to be balanced between individuals and institutions in making decisions in a democratic society? Eportfolios provide a lens for examining these questions and a means to put the answers into practice. As a way to reflect on and articulate identity, eportfolios can guide and reinforce cultural ideals about identity and social participation. As a way to communicate self-understanding in order to make an argument to institutional authorities—for example, “I’m ready to graduate from high school,” “Here’s what I think it means to be an excellent teacher,” “You should hire me as your graphic designer”—eportfolios reflect dynamics of power. The negotiations of which this communication is a part may in turn shape how that balance of power operates in the future in colleges and universities and in the other institutions in which individuals participate throughout their personal, professional, and civic lives.

This books shows that eportfolios are of increasing importance to higher education and that they are proving valuable to individuals outside formal educational contexts as well. Because eportfolios are only one element in a larger set of identity-shaping experiences and interactions with institutions, however, it is important to examine them in a larger framework of cultural ideals that underlie existing practice and might guide practice into the future.

This book’s first three chapters consider three such ideals: authenticity, integrity, and deliberation. The argument for these ideals engages in what philosopher Charles Taylor (1991) calls a “work of retrieval” (p. 22). According to Taylor, a promising strategy for addressing pressing ethical challenges is to look for the cultural ideals that underlie the ways people already act and try to articulate them more clearly: “Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of the ideal that people are already living be more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion” (p. 22).

The opening chapters examine model learners and educators who are “already living” through how they compose, facilitate the composition of, respond to, and assess eportfolios and suggest ways they might live up to those ideals more fully.

One serious consequence of failing to understand the ideals in practice is a misguided bifurcation of individual learning, advancement, and self-actualization, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, programmatic and institutional assessment and the systemic definition of educational and professional competencies. A fuller understanding suggests that the two types of activity can have a symbiotic relationship.

Overview of the Book

Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment has three parts. Part One offers an aspirational view of eportfolios’ promise, drawing on exemplary practices. Parts Two and Three chart the challenges of realizing this promise within less ideal contexts and suggest resources for bridging the gap between current practice and future potential. The book’s introduction tells the story of my own introduction to and evolving understanding of eportfolios as it parallels the growth of the contemporary eportfolio movement. The book’s conclusion draws connections between the transformation needed to realize the potential of eportfolios and consonant movements for change in higher education in the service of learning.

Part One argues that the first two of the three cultural ideals that underlie eportfolio practice, while conventionally assumed to be solely personal, are simultaneously social in nature. This dual nature suggests a necessary interrelationship between personalized learning and institutional assessment and decision making, challenging the widely held view that these processes must necessarily conflict in eportfolio practice. Chapter One introduces the ideal of authenticity through closely examining two eportfolios, which exemplify two common types: the personalized and the standardized. This examination shows that the ideal of authenticity may explain the motivations behind both types, not just the personalized, as often assumed. The standardized model, however, reflects a misunderstanding of what it means to be truly authentic. Chapter Two looks carefully at a professional eportfolio to introduce the ideal of integrity, showing how this ideal reflects the changing nature of careers and professions. Both adults and traditional-age college students increasingly need to articulate their identities as committed and coherent across contexts and over time, and eportfolios show promise in helping them achieve this goal. Such articulation also has the potential to contribute to the definition and evolution of professions.

The chapters in Part Two look at how eportfolios can be used to promote institutional innovation in colleges and universities that capitalizes on both the personal and social potential introduced in Part One. Chapter Three examines how the ideal of deliberation, which derives from deliberative democracy theory, can be used in programmatic and institutional assessment with eportfolios. It details how deliberative assessment works in the practice of an exemplary program and compares it with the more common standardized model of assessment. Drawing on results from the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research and an analysis of the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education project, Chapter Four argues for the importance of taking advantage of the distinctive characteristics of the eportfolio genre, which combines reflection with diverse evidence, as opposed to more limited forms of authentic assessment that consider individual samples of work in isolation from their context. Chapter Five suggests that some educational outcomes that have traditionally been considered ineffable—impossible to assess—can be incorporated into deliberative eportfolio assessment if they are treated as essentially contested concepts—outcomes whose development benefits from putting multiple perspectives into dialogue. The broadened dimensions of learning that can be assessed require a similarly broadened understanding of how evidence functions in eportfolios and require rethinking the relationship between individual eportfolios and online social context.

Part Three examines how eportfolios are being used beyond the academy and how emerging genres and technologies can be used to support the eportfolio process. Chapter Six provides an overview of how individuals, companies, government agencies, and professional bodies are using eportfolios for developing individual and collective knowledge and managing transitions between levels of education, education and the workplace, and places of employment. It argues that the character of the eportfolio genre is often compromised to accommodate existing institutional processes, and that a better balance is needed for eportfolios to maximize their impact. Chapter Seven compares the eportfolio with two other genres that have recently become prominent tools through which individuals articulate their identities: blogs and social network site profiles. It suggests that there are two styles of self-representation and learning—the networked and the symphonic. Although research shows that social software corresponds with the networked and eportfolios corresponds with the symphonic, lifelong learning may be best supported by a combination of the two styles. Chapter Eight examines technology that has the potential to support eportfolio processes. Rather than considering the current generation of eportfolio tools, it surveys a wide range of technologies that could be used to capture and manage eportfolio evidence, reflection on it, analysis of eportfolios, and deliberations about them.

The book’s companion website includes video guided tours, narrated by me, of several of the eportfolios discussed in the book. It provides a more detailed look at the design and content of the portfolios than is possible within the text. The website is located at www.josseybass.com/go/darrencambridge; password josseybasshighereducation.

Intended Audiences and Ways of Using This Book

This book is intended for a broad audience of people involved in, researching, or contemplating the use of eportfolios for lifelong learning and assessment. Readers might include:

• Faculty and staff from a variety of disciplines, including such fields as rhetoric and composition, engineering, history, education, psychology, social work, and medicine

• Learning support staff, such as directors of centers for teaching and learning and instructional designers

• Academic and student affairs administrators, such as deans and heads of personal development planning

• Learning technologists, such as directors of academic technology and learning technology developers

• Leaders of lifelong learning and workforce development agencies

• Policymakers guiding and funding eportfolio projects in compulsory, higher, and adult education and in workforce development.

Teams composed of individuals from several of these categories often lead the strongest eportfolio initiatives. With this in mind, the questions for practice at the end of each chapter are designed for discussion within such teams. While some questions, such as those dealing with curriculum design, may most often inform decisions traditionally made by faculty members, eportfolio research suggests that learning support staff, academic technologists, and student affairs professionals can make valuable contributions to working through them. Similarly, while technology choices have traditionally been in the hands of technologists and workforce development policies in the hands of government employees and policymakers, faculty members and those in other roles within and beyond higher education can also speak to these decisions. While most of this book is not written to be particularly accessible to undergraduate students, it does argue that they have a central role to play in assessment and in shaping initiatives that support lifelong learning. They too ought to be invited to help think through questions for practice.

Nevertheless, readers with different interests may wish to employ different strategies for reading the book. While Part One may be more theoretical than that to which some readers are accustomed, the ideas and examples introduced within it are foundational to the arguments advanced throughout the book; all readers should start here. Like the rest of the book, it does not presuppose any particular discipline or role-specific background knowledge and avoids overly specialized terminology whenever possible. Readers with a particular interest in assessment or higher education will likely want to continue on to Part Two, while those primarily interested in the use of eportfolios beyond the academy may wish to skip to Part Three. In the second two parts, readers who are interested in learning about the current state of research and practice will be particularly interested in Chapters Four and Six, while those more focused on the future potential will probably find Chapters Three, Five, Seven, and Eight most engaging. The opening section of Chapter Eight presents a general perspective on the relationship between eportfolios and technology that is likely to be helpful to all readers, while the remainder of the chapter may be more appealing to readers with a technological bent. The conclusion returns focus to higher education and is therefore most salient to readers concerned with the use of eportfolios in colleges and universities.

What the Book Does Not Do

While Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment presents the most wide-ranging account of eportfolio practice and potential to date, it does not address many important topics and questions. It is not a guide to implementing and managing eportfolio technology or programs, although it does raise issues that implementers need to address. Similarly, it is not a guide to eportfolio pegagogy, although eportfolio teachers will benefit from considering concepts and research it presents. Finally, it does not address in detail the current and potential role of eportfolios in learning and decision making that is independent of institutions such as schools, colleges, universities, companies, nonprofit organizations, unions, and governments. Learning and knowledge creation that is achieved through participation in social networks not sanctioned or initiated by institutions is of great and growing importance, as demonstrated by research on such topics as distributed cognition, emergence, crowdsourcing, long-tail communities of practice, and connectivist and networked learning. The connections between these topics and eportfolios are ripe for exploration. By identifying and exploring the key cultural ideals that are embodied by the eportfolio genre and its best current use—use that is primarily situated within institutions—this book lays conceptual groundwork for such future scholarship.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because this book synthesizes work over the past decade that drew in a multitude of individuals from around the globe, from each of whom I learned something reflected in the pages that follow, this may very well be the hardest section to write. This being said, I especially thank those who were directly involved in the production of this book: my research collaborators, my students and teachers, and my family.

I thank my editor, David Brightman, and the excellent staff at Jossey-Bass for their support for the project and their guidance throughout its completion. I deeply appreciate the thoughtful suggestions of all the external reviewers, as well as the less formal feedback I received on the ideas expressed here through the comments and questions of audience members at presentations I have given, participants in workshops I have facilitated, and educators at institutions with whom I have consulted. Perhaps most significant, I am grateful to the authors of the portfolios and leaders of the programs featured in this book for allowing me to learn from their work.

While the flaws in this book are mine alone, many of its strengths are the result of highly collaborative scholarly work in which I have had the privilege of participating. Coleading the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research has profoundly influenced my thinking, and I thank all of its participants, in particular, coleaders such as Kathi Yancey, Rob Ward, Janice Strivens, and Steve Outram, and members of the George Mason University Cohort III team, including Kim Eby, Leslie Smith, Kara Danner, Juliet Blank-Godlove, and Julie Owen. My understanding of eportfolios has been indispensably enriched through working closely with members of the Open Source Portfolio/Sakai, IMS Global Learning Consortium, and Learning Recording Online development communities. In particular, I appreciate the conceptual and technical conversations I have shared with Simon Grant and Bill Holloway.

Although I have learned through all of these collaborative contexts, I also treasure the powerful experiences I have had in the classroom as both a teacher and a student. Thanks go out to all of my students at George Mason University and the University of Texas and to my professors across the university from my years in Austin, who seeded the interdisciplinary breadth of my work, and to my teachers at Wabash College, who grounded it in rigorous analysis and a rich ideal of intellectual community.

It is within this group that I turn to the people without whom this book would never have been written. Peg Syverson and the late, great John Slatin at the University of Texas at Austin were not only responsible for my first experience with eportfolio learning that I describe at the beginning of this book but they also provided resources—both intellectual and material and far beyond what I could reasonably expect over the next six years—that launched my career.

I am profoundly grateful to my family for the inspiration, support, and tolerance without which writing this book would not have been possible. In particular, I thank my incredible wife, Kara Gotsch, who was with me from the genesis of this book to its completion, and my miraculous son, Oliver Angelo Cambridge, who came into the world alongside it.

I thank my mother, Barbara Cambridge, most of all and dedicate this book to her. She alone has played a role in each of the categories I have listed here. Her responses to the manuscript shaped each chapter of the book, adding clarity and concision. Serving together with her as a coleader of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a coworker at the American Association for Higher Education, and a copresenter and facilitator at events over the years, I hope that I have absorbed some of her intuitive grasp of how to help people understand their strengths and how they connect to those of others in the service of change that promotes learning. Throughout my education, the efforts of my teachers have been multiplied through her influence, and one of my greatest satisfactions has been to see how she too has learned from my experiences as I have developed my own professional identity. Besides all this, she is a loving and attentive mother, grandmother, and friend. I have a lot to live up to.

Darren Cambridge Washington, DC May 2010

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darren Cambridge is assistant professor of Internet studies and information literacy in New Century College and affiliated faculty in the Higher Education Program at George Mason University. Previously he was a director at the American Association for Higher Education, a fellow with the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, and assistant director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. A frequent speaker and facilitator, he consults with colleges, universities, software companies, publishers, nonprofit organizations, and governmental bodies worldwide.

He coleads the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, through which sixty teams at institutions of higher education in six countries are investigating the impact of eportfolio use on teaching, learning, and assessment. He also serves as chair of the board of directors of the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning. He headed the IMS Global Learning Consortium work on eportfolio technical standards and George Mason’s participation in the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education project. Lead developer of the award-winning Learning Record Online, he has been active in the Sakai open source community.

His work appears in such journals as Campus-Wide Information Systems, Computers and Education, the Journal of General Education, and Metropolitan Universities. He is coeditor of Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact (Stylus, 2009) and is currently completing an edited volume on the global diffusion of eportfolios and leading development of the Augusta Community Portfolio.

More information about Cambridge’s work can be found on his website at ncepr.org/darren.

INTRODUCTION

My first experience with eportfolios was as a learner. In the fall of 1996, I began work on a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in computers and English studies at the University of Texas at Austin. It was an important time in my life, during which I was trying both to make sense of the sea of knowledge into which I had plunged and to find the shape of my life as I progressed further into adulthood. One class that fall asked me to compose an eportfolio that documented and reflected on my learning and development, not just in terms of specific goals of that class but also in relationship to my learning and development as a whole. Through the eportfolio, I was able to validate the academic concepts and ideas I encountered in the course by connecting them to my distinctive passions, interests, and ways of seeing, as well as to concepts and ideas from other courses and to experiences from my life both within and beyond the university. Over time, through capturing critical moments of my development and collecting samples of my work, both formal and informal, I began to accumulate the materials for understanding and communicating what I was coming to know, be able to do, and be committed to. Although I abstractly valued such reflection before I entered the program, it became concretely powerful for me because the class offered me an audience. As I read and responded to my colleagues’ eportfolios and considered their and my teachers’ responses to my own, I began to see my learning and development as part of a process of both becoming and being a member of a professional community. While my understanding of myself and my understanding of the discipline had up to that point felt like largely private matters, through composing an eportfolio I began to see articulating them as part of my participation in a social world to which I very much wanted to contribute.