Did a ten minute presentation on e-portfolios at our “Improving the Learning Experience event”, and promised to upload the slides to various e-portfolio tools so those who wanted to could follow up by looking at a shared view of my Portfolio. (University of Lincoln staff should just log into blogs.lincoln.ac.uk and send me a friend […]
I’m currently evaluating e-portfolio tools and today’s quick review was about uploading folders and adding them to my e-portfolio. I’ve only had an hour or so today, so I’ve looked at Mahara and Pebble Pad, and I’m not greatly impressed with the capacity of either of them to handle folders. Mahara doesn’t seem to allow […]
As promised, here’s the next report from the Blackboard Users Group conference. E-portfolios and “Personal Development Planning” have something of a chequered history in Higher Education. While there are many enthusiasts for the idea, it’s probably fair to say that students haven’t in general embraced the idea with any noticeable implementation. Tim Neumann from the […]
Here’s a little more from Wednesday’s Midlands Blackboard User Group meeting. As always, Blackboard representatives were present at the meeting to tell us all about their plans for the future, and this proved an interesting session. As a company they have always had a strategy of absorbing, or partnering with other tools, but I was […]
Last week I attended a useful “Research Roadshow”, and I thought it might help to write a few brief notes. We started with an overview of the Research Excellence Framework from Andrew Atherton, who set out the university’s position, and what academic staff needed to do. Essentially, the university is aiming to submit in 14-16 […]
Durham Conference Blog post Part 2 As I said in the last post, a great deal of the annual Durham Blackboard Conference is taken up, not unreasonably, by presentations from users. These are particularly useful since they give you an idea of what other people are doing across the sector. While I couldn’t attend them […]
A second and rather belated report from the Durham Blackboard User Group performance. (Somewhat embarassingly, I’ve lost the notes I made, so this is largely based on the Twitter feed from the conference. Apologies to speakers if I’ve missed anything out. ) The first session of day 2 was the annual session from Blackboard, telling […]
I’ve been asked to look at how WordPress could serve as an e-portfolio for researchers, which I think it could do quite well, but for one annoying little bug. Now, as a researcher, you would want a lot of public pages and posts, so other people who are researching into your topic can read what […]
I’ve been invited to participate in a research project that will look at academic freedom in the United States of America, which is a fascinating topic, but before I jump in, I thought I’d try and link it with my previous project. (My doctoral thesis which I am about to submit. Fingers crossed!). That looked […]
There’s an interesting article in the latest issue of ESCALATE, arguing that PDP (personal development planning) should be delivered separately from the academic curriculum. The reasons given are that: Students don’t see the value in it. Academic staff don’t feel they have the expertise or the time to deliver the personal one to one work […]