By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. No Portfolio? What’s your excuse?
Various authors, Hacker Noon, 2019/04/01
I've written in the past that employees of the future will be selected based on their portfolio of actual work rather than based on proxies like degrees and certificates. Artificial intelligence will make this a lot easier, as employers will rely on software to pick the most likely candidates. The many different ways of creating portfolios will also help. This set of articles looks at the practice of creating software design and development portfolios. Obviously not everyone will build their own portfolios from scratch the way a full-stack developer would. More...
Construisez votre portefeuille de compétences avec l'outil Transférence
Identifiez les compétences que vous mobilisez chaque jour, repérez et valorisez celles qui sont nécessaires à une évolution de vie professionnelle. Plus...
No Portfolio? What’s your excuse?
The ePortfolio Hijacked
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The ePortfolio Hijacked
It's sort of like a scholastic Heisenberg principle: any assessment changes the nature of the thing being assessed. This is most clearly the case when we look at a student's creative work, as collected in an e-portfolio. If the work is being assessed, then the nature of the e-portfolio changes considerably. It's no longer a place for experiments and failures, but is rather now an exhibit or a performance. The idea, therefore, of using an e-portfolio for assessment is, in essence, a hijacking of the concept of an e-portfolio. There's nothing wrong with assessment. But it should be kept in its proper place. More...
Making a Difference
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Making a Difference
'Free Rice' is a program that gives rice to the U.N. World Food Program people if you define words for them. Get the word right and you successfully donate ten grains of rice. If you're wondering how much rice that is, it's less than a spoonful. Which makes me ask, how much does rice cost? If you define words for a full hour, how much worth of rice have you donated? Well if you want to know about rice you go to rice online, which puts it between $350 to $450 per metric tonne, bagged, depending on the quality of the rice and where you buy it. According to Brett Jordan (who appears to have looked it up) 1000 grains of rice makes 26 grams. That gives each grain of rice a value of less than one one-hundredth of a cent (obviously it costs more if you buy it at Safeway, but the U.N. doesn't buy it at Safeway). So if you define one word, you have earned less than a tenth of a cent. At that rate, if you manage to define 100 words in an hour, you will have contributed 10 cents to poor people. More...
Announcing Freefolio - a Social E-Portfolio
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Announcing Freefolio - a Social E-Portfolio
Graham Attwell and Ray Elferink have created and release, as open source, Freefolio, an e-portfolio system. "Why didn't we work with an existing system? We thought very hard about it. It seemed that many of the dedicated e-Portfolio systems were too restrictive. They started from an institutional definitions of what learning would be represents through the e-Portfolio". More...
E-Portfolios – the DNA of the Personal Learning Environment?
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Portfolios – the DNA of the Personal Learning Environment?
A core value of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is in facilitating reflection. "Facilitating reflection is not simple within a largely 'input based' curriculum where the main goal is to pass a series of prescribed examinations. The danger is that reflection is simply seen as irrelevant to the qualification driven motivation of many students within their school based learning (as opposed to outside school)." I've tried to describe 'curriculum' (if you will) as a process of engagement. There remain people who think this can be planned, as though it were a play. More...
U Michigan expands portfolio with FutureLearn
By Kerrie Kennedy. The University of Michigan has announced a new partnership with UK-based social learning platform FutureLearn to offer three online learning experiences beginning in October. More...
Correspondence On Digital Archives and ePortfolios
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Correspondence On Digital Archives and ePortfolios
Helen Barrett receives an email from Mike Caulfield describing an Inverted LMS, which turns out to be the PLE, independently discovered. More here. She also gets a note from a graduate student, who writes, "I'm trending towards the view that the system we will end up with will use RSS to expose content, tags to organize it, and open ID to selectively share content with certain people." Yes, as people look at the potential of online technology, they begin reaching similar conclusions. More...
E-Portfolios - the DNA of the Personal Learning Environment?
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Portfolios - the DNA of the Personal Learning Environment?
"The idea behind the e-Portfolio," writes Graham Attwell in this long discourse on PLEs, "is that students should be able to use their own tools for learning." What the PLE represents, then, is not some new tchnology that offers us another way to manage (or test) student learning, but rather the idea of (and maybe some technological support for) allowing students to take charge of their own learning. For example, to draw on Attwell's examples a bit, the process of reflection - exploring what they have done or achieved - involves the employment of cognitive tools (such as, say, 'articulating an opinion' or 'defending an opinion') as much as technological tools. The purpose of presenting the content isn't so that it can be evaluated by some authority but rather to place it in focus, in context, so it can be reflected on by the creator (and his or her peers). What defines a PLE, then, is purpose, and not merely function. More...
Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools
Helen Barrett consolidates some of her work on e-portfolios and Web 2.0. "One advantage of Web 2.0 tools is that many of them are free, although WikiSpaces may place ads on the page. There is some concern about security in a K-12 school environment, so care should be taken when using these tools with children." See also these audio clips from some of her e-portfolio presentations. More...