Some day I’ll get tired of admitting how far ahead of the pack UMW is.

Today is not that day.

So to paraphrase that guy with the egg…

This is your Italian course:

And this is your Italian course on WordPress:

Click the above image to check out a module a UMW Italian professor put together on the Vespa scooter. In the module you watch some vintage Vespa commercials (in Italian, via YouTube), and answer a series of questions about the Vespa based on the commercials.

How can you not want to take that class?

Jim Groom has more details.

We are reaching the end of our evaluation process here on my eportfolio committee. So in a month of impassioned pleas, I hope y’all forgive me one more. This is the last push.

But I want to do it this time by telling a story.

I want us to pretend it is 1985, and we are considering two competing products for the library. Let’s say that the need is to teach students how to do research circa 1985, and we’ve decided to spend some money on a product to do that. The plan is to develop a “research curriculum” and to get a tool that helps us better understand students’ research ability.One product is called “Thingamajig” and is billed as a replacement for the NYT Index, ERIC, Dialog, and the card catalog. It replaces the Library of Congress system with its own “superior system”, and collates material from multiple subject indexes into its own aggregate database. It has maybe a tenth of the resources available in the library as a whole, but they are well arranged.

In order to do research students log into this tool and use the special Thingamajig™ search tool. Then they give the Thingamajig call numbers to the librarian, etc. And because all their work is logged in the Thingamajig system, we can very easily assess whether these students are starting to get the hang of “research thinking” – Thingamajig can log and score everything done inside of it.

The other product, which we’ll call ResearchRank, just gives some standard ways of assessing student work and pumping out reports. For the actual work, it lets students use the same things they would use outside of the institution: The NYT index, ERIC, Dialog, the card catalog, etc.

In fact, as new resources become available for doing research, ResearchRank doesn’t care – if the professor can understand how the student is using them, he can assess them.

Which is the better product? Which serves the student better?

All of these eportfolio template products we’ve looked at exist in a Thingamajig mindset. Rather than let students use tools that have a broad application outside the boundaries of our college

, they push the student to think of eportfolios as dependent on

institution-specific technology. They keep the student in an unempowered mindset. They force the student to see technology in the wrong way.

To return to our example, imagine it’s 1987 and you’re a professor hiring for an assistantship. You have to chose between two students.

The first student comes in. And when talking about research they tell you how great they are at research – they are, after all, proficient in Thingamajig. They tell you how they used the specialized undergraduate templates to do research in Thingamajig. Are you familiar, for example, with the “Essay Research Template for Political Themes #5”? They did an excellent project using that.

The next student comes in and tells you about subject indexes, the problems of restricted vocabulary, how much they hate the quirks of ERIC, and how low they’ll get a result set on Dialog before they print the list. They tell you a neat system they devised using colored post-its to keep track of where quotes came from. And they tell you about the time it failed and they ended up citing Richard DREYFUSS on particle physics.

You’d choose the second student in a heartbeat. Sure, maybe Dialog rolls out a new version in 6 months, and those skills are irrelevant – but the second student has demonstrated an ability to solve real world problems with real world tools. They understand how to interact with technology – technology extends their will rather than limiting or defining it. And because they have to construct their own environment, they don’t confuse the process of research with the parameters of some school-bought tool.

You’d choose the second student. So would I. And we’d be absolutely right to do so.

The real world tools of reflection today are numerous, but they are not in TaskStream, or ePortaro. They are wikis, blogs, video-sharing sites, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. We can show students how to use these tools to better understand and represent their experience.

Or we can buy them a Thingamajig.

I really think that’s the choice we’re looking at here.

So we watched a presentation yesterday by True Outcomes, and of course I had to hold my nose a bit. I come from the “merit badge” school of Roger Schank, that ideally assessments fall into to the category of “Student X can build a fire, and we know that because he built a fire” (or in Schank’s case because he completed a case-based simulation of building a fire). Align a curriculum more towards doing and less toward demonstrating “qualities”, and a lot of assessment headache goes away. In a doing culture, assessment is healthy, because it maps onto real world goals — can this person solve a real world data import problem using a scripting language? Yes? Great! Merit badge!

But “displays knowledge of data analysis techniques and an understanding of how to automate data import processes”? Mapped onto a one to five value rubric?

That’s assessment, and it happens most often when we think the student can’t do anything of value.

That said, I loved the True Outcomes presentation. Why? Because it was pure assessment. There was no eportfolio product attached to it (or rather, the presentation product attached to it was so slight as to be insignificant). What’s more, the students don’t even have to submit into it — there’s a simple option called “Observation” (as opposed to electronic submission) where professors can assess student work outside the program. So if students want to do an eportfolio project in WordPress or Google Documents they could conceivably do it, and just have the professor save a copy of the artifact to local storage somewhere. They want to videoconference it or Skype it in? Again, not a problem. The system doesn’t care.

The point here is that with assessment loosely coupled, the process can be fluid, and defined by the individual needs of the professors. Because the portfolios can be based on an unconstrained worldware approach, professors sold on a Web 2.0 approach are free to push the pedagogical envelope, and let students do things in Blogger, WordPress, or YouTube.  Professors who don’t want to invest time in those things can tell the students to do something or other in MSWord. 

By not tying the assessment product to the pedagogy, you make sure that you are not hindering your more forward-thinking professors. And you guarantee that as technology evolves outside the college that you’ll automatically benefit from those advances — whether or not you buy the most recent vendor upgrade.

In short, you make evolution possible.

Anyway, I’m very happy about this development. If your institution is currently looking at eportfolio/assessment solutions, I’d suggest that you consider looking at True Outcomes, and put to rest the assessment bit. Then, with the vendor no longer hanging about, suggest a worldware approach to eportfolios and the like.

I’ll keep you all updated on how that goes here.

Here’s the thing – it’s 2000 all over. Eportfolio is the new LMS.

Watching a recent vendor presentation I thought – I can’t believe this is happening again. That single phrase. In a loop. In my head.

Because remember — this happened once before. The LMS vendors came in with an assessment and management tool, and told us it was an elearning solution. At the time, I was on the other side of the equation, with a company trying to sell award-winning goal-based scenario software to colleges who were saying — but we already HAVE an elearning solution. It’s called Blackboard. Or WebCT. Or whatever.

And so Blackboard, an assessment and management tool, determined the pedagogy of colleges for eight or so years. Because teachers wanted to import rosters, we put students in a closed box and told them it was elearning.

When it wasn’t. The truth is the kids were doing more elearning on MySpace than in Blackboard.

How do we avoid it again? How do we avoid imposing something that is just pedagogically WRONG on a new set of students because we need to meet some institutional assessment needs?

There’s only one way — loosely coupled assessment.

If we are going to talk assessment, we are going to have to segregate it. Your assessment tool should ONLY assess.

We don’t need to talk more about student needs wth vendors that supply assessment tools. We need to talk to them less about student needs. It’s not their business.

Literally: it is not their business.

In fact, we should remove student needs entirely from the equation.

The students know they can get far bettter solutions to their problems for free elsewhere. They don’t need a eportfolio system to post thier resumes on.

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the enviroment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?

Anything else is insanity.

So, I’ve just stumbled into a gold mine. Via an inbound link from Stephen Downes, I’ve discovered that much of what I’ve been calling an inverted LMS has been called elsewhere a PLE (personal learning environment):

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. Independently, autonomously.

And it’s true! There is much overlap. But just as I’m about to object that the Inverted LMS goes further than the PLE, I find this post via connections to Downes: Leigh Blackall’s Die LMS Die! You Too PLE! And stuff like this warms the cockles of my heart. All the cockles. Every single one:

Question to the PLE: Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment. Actually I think the PLE idea is better envisioned by the futurist concept known as the Evolving Personalised Information Construct (EPIC). I think we already have EPIC, so why do we need the PLE?

OK — apart from the fact that his was written over a year and a half before, and that it spells personalized with an “s” — isn’t it really Enterprise Learning Systems Considered Harmful to Learning?

The gift keeps on giving: there’s apparently a del.icio.us tag for PLEs. I know because my article was tagged by someone under it. And among those articles are ones that deal with these questions of how loose the PLE should be, ala Blackall.

(Why so few American representatives, I wonder? It’s all Canada, England, New Zealand, and Australia…)

I don’t think any of these ideas are new, really; it’s more that they’ve been refined during the long dark reign of the LMS. Looking at the network of people I’ve stumbled into I can see that they’ve been pushing these ideas outside the mainstream for some time too.

But I can’t help but feel that something is starting to happen here, when so many unrelated people are coming to the same conclusion. The very power of blogs to do what we see here — to organize people and refine ideas, to propel thought forward, to get things done — is what has revealed the LMS model to be such a cruel joke. So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as blogging becomes ubiquitous these ideas, once considered digital utopianism, now can be expressed in very real and practical terms.

And even where the ideas are old, they now relate to a trailing-edge frame of reference — or soon will.

Over the next couple of days I’ll sift through my newly found goodies, and share what I find. I have a feeling it will be pretty extraordinary.

I had the good luck this week to stumble into a very helpful blogswarm. And since it’s best to make use of their expertise while they are still checking back here, let’s cut to the chase.

Here is the new thought, re: eportfolios and other WP projects needing data aggregation.

Append an optional process at the end of WordPress MU setup that pre-populates the category table with canonical terms.

So, for instance, the table could be pre-filled with specific performance indicators appropriate to educational eportfolios, organized around a standardized phrase, such as “Demonstration of Classroom Management Skills (NC 2.1.3)”. You upload the artifact and you or someone bigger than you tags it.

Now here’s the neat part. Since we have faith these terms are the same across MU instances, reports are simply a matter of writing code that cycles through all the MU user tables and finds posts that are tagged with that term. Want a report of all users who have not met requirement NC 2.1.3? Easy.

Caveat: the people here with an intimate knowledge NCATE are still drawing up what the reporting requirements will look like. But then, there’s very little one can’t do with tagging and SQL. So I’m not worried yet.

So question…. does this make sense? Is anyone else using WP tagging in this way? Does anyone have NCATE reporting experience, and what can you tell me?

(Bill, I will eventually look into your neat hack in Drupal as well…]

Not a new thought, but one I’m newly fired up about after talking to Jon Udell last night.

We don’t make enterprise purchases for students when it comes to spiral bound notebooks, pencils, or binders.  So why do we move so quickly to consider e-learning questions “enterprise” questions? When looking at e-portfolio possibilities, why wouldn’t we just direct the students to sign on to a blog provider, perhaps even an ISP of their choice?

Students buy their own laptops and their own software for classes, they purchase required books and materials. There’s absolutely no reason from a student perspective that you couldn’t tell a student, here — go set up an account on Blogger and make yourself an eportfolio.

But there’s the rub. Enterprise e-learning is about classroom management and enterprise reporting. It is about the so-called measurement of learning. We force students to use enterprise systems, because like the email system we “give” them, it makes our lives easier and accomplishes goals that have nothing to do with the student.

What would e-learning look like if we started from the needs of the student, instead of the institution? What would it look like if the overriding question was “How can we use technology in a way that benefits the student?”

My guess is it’d look a lot like life. It would be a wonderful mess of different students and professors choosing different tools on an ad hoc basis. Their choices would evolve over time. And because the students worked with real tools (and possibly even on real problems) they’d graduate with bankable skills rather than detailed knowledge of how to use an LMS that has no analogue in the outside world.

I’m not saying it would be easy: it’s a hard sell to faculty, and there are certainly some institutional goals that such a bricolage would not meet.

But, if we started with the student, there would be no e-learning “system” in the sense of a single integrated application provided by a vendor. Instead of focussing on buying e-learning systems, we’d focus on building an e-learning culture.

If we started with the student.

My wife has an interview tomorrow for a position at the public high school. Tonight, she is preparing by flipping through giant black binder.

What’s in the binder? A lot of stuff. Lesson plans from her student teaching days. Photographs from an inner city school activity she helped direct. The curriculum she developed for her curriculum class, with teacher’s notes. Peer reviews. Evaluations of clinical experience. Projects from most all of her upper level classes. Work from students she’d taught. Certificates of accomplishment. And tying it all together, explanatory text describing the significance of these artifacts.

She put this together as part of a required senior “capstone” portfolio project in Spring of 1997. I remember her assembling it, printing sheet after sheet off of floppy disks from her different coursework, flipping through dog-eared folders of past classes to find her most representative work, tracking down reviews and evaluations and lost projects, and smoothing over the rough edges and lacunae by writing up explanatory notes.

That was ten years ago. Today, she is returning to the black binder for a variety of reasons. After college, she didn’t go into public school teaching. Instead, she has made a living as a practicing artist, art blogger, and teacher of adult classes.

So tonight, she needs to refresh her memory on the difficulties of designing a public school curriculum. She’d like a couple examples of her student work to show. She’s been told to bring lesson plans, and so she wants to raid her old student teaching ones for ideas. She’s got a recommendation from the teacher who she assisted with the inner city school project: a couple pictures from that might make what they did there clearer to the interviewers. And perhaps most importantly, she wants to show how her current work relates very directly to what she learned student teaching.

As she flips from page to page that story becomes clearer.

So here is the great testament to the power of portfolios. It’s been ten years since she put this black binder together. And yet, this week, that binder might make the difference between her being the newest hire and her being an also-ran. And whether she gets the job or not, the activity of flipping through this binder ten years later has reintegrated her college experience into the narrative of her professional life. That’s powerful, powerful stuff.

And, here, I’m afraid, is the great disaster of ePortfolios.

Because do we really believe that in 10 years time any student we set up will be able to access any of their work? Will students really be able to log into Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, or Elgg and retrieve artifacts in the year 2017?

We all know the answer to that. It’s not pretty.

So it’s worth asking this question: How can we make our ePortfolio implementations pass the Black Binder Test of Durability?

[on a related note, check out Jon Udell’s larger piece on the need for durable, centralized digital assets.]