Portefeuille

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...