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Exploring ePortfolios and weblogs as learning narratives in a community of new teachers.Drawing upon student narratives, the author explores the extent to which a Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) teaching community at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom (UK), developed an approach to the process and product of e-portfolio which optimised the concrete outcomes required by external professional bodies, while harnessing the technology's potential for promoting collaboration and discursive reflection.
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Becoming an eportfolio teacher.This book: Higher education institutions of all kinds - across the United States and around the world - have rapidly expanded the use of electronic portfolios in a broad range of applications including general education, the major, personal planning, freshman learning communities, advising, assessing, and career planning. Widespread use creates an urgent need to evaluate the implementation and impact of e-portfolios. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the contributors to this book—all of whom have been engaged with the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research—have undertaken research on how e-portfolios influence learning and the learning environment for students, faculty members, and institutions. This book features emergent results of studies from 20 institutions that have examined effects on student reflection, integrative learning, establishing identity, organizational learning, and designs for learning supported by technology. It also describes how institutions have responded to multiple challenges in e-portfolio development, from engaging faculty to going to scale. These studies exemplify how e-portfolios can spark disciplinary identity, increase retention, address accountability, improve writing, and contribute to accreditation. The chapters demonstrate the applications of e-portfolios at community colleges, small private colleges, comprehensive universities, research universities, and a state system.
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Blogging for beginners? Using blogs and eportfolios in Teacher Education.This paper explores the use of an eportfolio and an educational blog within, and beyond, a professional pre-service teacher education programme, the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) for the post-compulsory sector. Writing within dialogic storytelling practices in an online environment allows student teacher development and identity to be seen “as a gradual ‘coming to know’” (Winter, 2003, p.120) dependent upon connections and interactions with others through both text and non-text formats such as metaphor, music and video. The authors explore their personal experiences as teacher (Julie) and learner (Emma) and eportfolio’s potential for longer term impact on and in their professional teaching lives.
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Letting in the Trojan mouse: Using an eportfolio system to re-think pedagogy.E-learning research, as an emergent field in the UK, is highly political in nature (Conole & Oliver, 2007, p.6) occupying a complex landscape which houses policy-makers, researchers and practitioners. Increasingly and more interestingly, the landscape is being shaped by the narratives and experiences of the learners themselves (Creanor et al., 2006, Conole et al., 2006) and the use of Web 2.0 technologies. However, as Laurillard (2007, p.xv) reminds us we still, ‘tend to use technology to support traditional modes of teaching’ and ‘we scarcely have the infrastructure, the training, the habits or the access to the new technology, to be optimising its use just yet’ (p.48). Web 2.0 spaces, literacies and practices offer the possibility for new models of education (Mayes & de Freitas, 2007, p.13) which support iterative and integrative learning but as educators and higher educational establishments are we prepared and ready to re-think our pedagogies and re-do (Beetham & Sharpe 2007, p.3) our practices? This concise paper will reflect upon how the use of new learning landscapes such as eportfolios might offer us the opportunity to reflect upon the implications of letting in the e-learning eportfolio Trojan mouse (Sharpe & Oliver, 2007, p.49).