How can e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments best be leveraged to facilitate learning?

This is the last Reflective Blog for this course, although the learning experience that started with this course is not going to end anytime soon. For this module, I learned a lot about e-Portfolios by using resources provided in this module and also from Helen Barrett website.

E-Portfolios allow the students, faculty, and institutions to collect, store, and share information. Students can communicate with instructors, keep track of their learning process, and collect valuable data for future applications in school and work.

Faculty use teaching e-Portfolios to share teaching and learning methods and to document their teaching or research achievements. It helps them to advance their methods and materials, and improve student/teacher relationships.

The goal of an e-Portfolio is very important; the way that information is being organized and presented should match the specific goal. We can easily start with a blog as a workspace to develop and showcase the teaching or learning progress and eventually create an e-Portfolio.

I had used UW Catalyst portfolio tool both as a student and a teacher. It is very easy to collect, reflect, present, and share work using this tool. The privacy setting is well defined and you can decide who and to what level access the data. The whole idea of presenting yourself, document your work, and improving through team work is a great experience for both teacher and student and it can be summarized simply in what Boston University calls it: “Making Learning Visible.”

How is social media changing the world? Is immediate access to information changing the way learners look at the world?

“Things get socially interesting when they get technologically boring”, very true, I really enjoyed Clay Shirky’s talk.

The fast changing social media lets us form groups effortlessly. It has changed our social world. Now we can work together on projects that we wouldn't have known about otherwise. We can find people with remarkably obscure interests matching our own. It has also changed our academic world, Society is moving toward a model of shared knowledge building, where people from all over the world can interact, question, reflect, and reshape thinking in meaningful ways.

At the same time, this change comes with its downsides. For instance, at the same time that it becomes easier for me to find blogs devoted to underlined meaning of a poem of an Iranian poet from hundred years ago, it becomes easier for some to find illegal or dangerous information, even the criminals don’t need to hide as they can make their own group easier with the new tools without going into hiding. We can encourage and guide our students to use social media while being socially responsible.

As for the educational side, information is available 24/7, but do we know how to sort them, to choose and analyze them wisely, and how to turn information to knowledge? We need to engage our student in an interactive learning environment that encourages them to participate and share their ideas, so that we can clarify and guide when needed.

At the end of his talk, Shirky asks: "How can we make the best use of this social media, even though it means changing the way we've always done it"? The points is, we cannot do what we've been doing when our students are not what they had been before. They are changed and we cannot ignore it. Using old tools to teach the new generation is like speaking in an ancient language that no one understands in a very boring way that no one enjoys!

What is unique about the teacher and student experience in an online course compared to face-to-face?

Our own course is my first experience with an online course as a student and that’s what I’ve been: a student. I am learning a lot from resources, discussions, and comments.

I have met most of the people involved in this course only briefly for about an hour (due to schedule conflict) but when I read and reply the posts it feels as real as a face-to- face (f2f) conversation. How did this happen?

Posting the pictures on the site was a great help. They were posted soon after our meeting. I just needed to match the pictures with my memory of everyone sitting around the table, talking and laughing. Then it was the communication, there was introduction section with very clear instructions that guided us to share our professional background and course expectations, as well as our hobbies and more. In a few days, what I knew about all of my classmates and instructors was much more that I could possibly know about the students who would sit next to me in a f2f class. As a student in a traditional classroom, we communicate in real-time (synchronously) during the time of the class and perhaps during office hours or study groups. The asynchronous communication in online courses is more convenient and more frequent (I check the course website and read and reply as many as it takes: first thing in the morning, during the day/night, last thing before I sleep!). Although, we can always use technology (like chats and video conferences), to communicate in real-time I enjoy the convenience of communication at time of choice. Interestingly, through frequent visits to the class website, I “see” my classmates more than I would in a f2f setting.

I should also applaud the strong presence of our team of instructors; it had been a key factor in my pleasant experience as an eLearner and a great model in learning about successful online teaching. As a traditional instructor, we are physically present in the classroom, we enter and the students will see and hear us. For an online instructor, being in the virtual class and reading the posts is not enough, they need to actively participate in the discussions to be “visible”. There is no exact time for class meeting, as convenient as it is to be a student and attend the class at your convenience, it wouldn’t be an easy task for the instructor to keep up with such schedule. In addition, developing the closeness can be a challenge. In a f2f setting, we provide individual attention to our students, we provide 1on1 communication, we listen to them and address their questions and concerns as soon as possible. But in an online setting, it takes much more time and effort to clarify, answer, guide, and be there for our students when they need us.

Being a successful online educator might be much harder than being an eLearner. For now, I am a happy student in an online course; I have great educators as classmates and instructors. I am learning how to be co-creators in learning, how to use technology effectively in online teaching and learning, and I am enjoying our rich (and expanding) library of multimedia and educational resources. What a great summer!

How is technology, social media, gaming, multimedia transforming education?

We live in a time where our students can use technology that gives them continuous mobile access to endless resources and information. They can choose what they want to learn, who they trust to learn it from at their convenient time of choice. The small study groups from the traditional education system are now replaced with people from all over the world that can collaborate on ideas at any time. Students are now accustomed to finding the answers to their unknowns from instantaneous and limitless resources. An education system that ignores these changes cannot be successful.

A successful education system should not compete against increasing usage of technology or prevent students from exploring social media, instead, it should create an engaging personalized system that considers the ever-changing needs of the students and fits students’ daily lives and the needs of their future. An attractive education system should use the endless possibilities of multimedia and social media to support student learning in areas that are of particular concern or interest to them. For example, on my class’s website, I often provide several resources for my students that introduce accurate information while applying interesting methods (like interactive demonstrations, games and videos).

However, there are also a number of challenges and concerns in use of technology in education. For example, students will need to be informed about the inaccurate or misleading information. It is not always easy to recognize the correct information from all the different replies to their questions in a social media or the various resources on the internet. It has cost my students and me much precious time in my physics classroom to erase or replace their inaccurate information about a challenging concept.

The future of the education system can be exciting, beneficial or even scary to us. But regardless, technology is a great part of our education system and will play an increasingly vital role. We educators should be able to utilize these prevailing tools to improve students’ success.

Welcome!

This Eportfolio is an early practice in my attempt to learn about Elearning and will display my work from the class "Elearning for Educators", at Bellevue college, Summer 2010.

This is a work in progress. For now, I am posting a weekly blog about the content of the course. By the end of this course, this portfolio will also include: ELearning Module, an Elearner profile, and philosophy of teaching.