E-Portfolios, PRC, and Beyond . . .



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At a meeting on Friday, October 8, 2004–the final meeting of the SOE E-Portfolio
Review Committee (PRC) of 2003-2004–I discovered that a new School of Education E-Portfolio
Committee would continue the work that the PRC had begun last year.

I feel that the decision to create a standing committee in the School is a
progressive and necessary move for responsible implementation of a new portfolio
system, particularly an electronic portfolio. However, I grow worried that many
of the initiatives of the PRC might be dropped or left unfinished or lost somehow
in the transition.

I wonder how it is best to share ideas on e-portfolios with my colleagues?
The issue can lead to strong or disinterested reactions. But I think most people
are concerned, since the system we use will have a profound effect on students
and faculty alike.

When we left for summer break, our committee had gone pretty far into fleshing
out a particular e-portfolio model. Our model was predicated on developing Web
literacy in students, providing students a means of control of content, growing
the portfolio artifacts out of course work, putting the responsibility of portfolio
development and maintenance on students, developing some "standards"
for documenting standards, and investigating/developing an assessment system
based on the "Baylor
model
." When we left for summer vacation, I had sketched an end-of-year
agenda-brainstorm-type of list for our work to get to the next level. This was
just one-person’s take on the task ahead. But as I re-read it now, several months
later (it’s quoted, in blue, and may be read by clicking the “Read more” link below), I think
the issues might make for some good discussion.

Here’s hoping. Below I’ve pasted in the memo I wrote in May, as our committee
began to turn its attention to developing an "implementation plan":

Here’s what I wanted to suggest at today’s meeting: Maybe
we should form some sub-committees to work on various components of an implementation
plan?

Here are seven or so things I can think of that an implementation
plan might address:

  1. Develop all the explanatory materials
    students will need. I think we need to develop written guides (in a printed
    and online handbook) that address the following areas:

    • Why are students required to develop E-Portfolios
      (possible answers: for "mirror,
      map, sonnet
      ," student/institutional assessment, building programmatic
      coherence for students, technological fluency, reflection on growth, showcasing
      of learning, employment advantages, etc.)?
    • What is a standards-based portfolio (and perhaps
      how it is different from past portfolio models students may have heard
      about)?
    • What constitutes the meeting of an indicator?
    • How many indicators need to be met for each standard?
    • How do students find tech support?
    • How do students find online support?
    • What is a Conceptual Framework and why is it
      important (and what is our CF)?
    • From where will artifacts for the E-Portfolio
      come?
    • Why is the required E-Portfolio considered a
      "minimum threshold" document (additional requirements may come
      from the major, individual instructors in SOE or disciplinary courses,
      or students themselves)?
    • What are the acceptable (and encouraged) use
      policies for Web accounts (the primary use is to support the E-Portfolio;
      but an important use is to form a digital archive of materials that might
      be of use later; students need to be taught to SAVE EVERYTHING).
    • E-Portfolio as a Web site–what are the issues,
      concerns, resources, possibilities, limitations?

I would be happy to work on these documents this summer–preferably
with others, so the approach is comprehensive and balanced.

  1. Develop a specific portfolio assessment
    strategy
    (what else besides having the artifacts assessed in
    the context of courses? Will the "Baylor
    model
    " assessment system be enough for tracking successful completion
    of the E-Portfolio?)
  2. Should there be a specific "Conceptual
    Framework" assignment
    ? (Who grades it? Advisor?) Should
    this assignment serve are the "Reflective Introduction" to the E-Portfolio?
    Should the CF assignment be a kind of "exit" assignment made in
    the POT course–to be assessed at a later time?
  3. What do we need to do with faculty this summer and
    fall to build support for the new portfolio?
  4. What is the Advisor’s role?
  5. How can we develop a strategic plan for Getting
    the Word Out in Fall, 2004
    . (I think there are all kinds of
    inventive ways we might pilot and promote the new E-Portfolio.
  6. Other practical details:

    • Set-up of the student support office
      (room, equipment, student workers, budget, etc.).
    • Recruitment of student tutors.
    • Software license permission
      to copy and distribute Netscape and SmartFTP.
    • Recruitment of faculty to teach
      POT 200/400.

In sum, there’s nothing really new here…but I’m beginning
to think we need to hit the ground a bit with the practical matters. I think
we need the summer, though….

So that’s where we were at the end of spring. We decided in May that we all
needed some time away from the intensities. So we stepped aside briefly; fall
came; and now the passing of the torch to the new committee. I wish the committee
all the best, but I do wish to share with them and others a concern that I would
be disingenuous not to mention. For I have heard rumors the the PRC’s
Web literacy model of e-portfolio may be replaced by a proprietary assessment
system–LiveText, in particular. I definitely think LiveText will bring some
advantages–but at a cost–a double cost to students. I think Helen Barrett
excellently articulates the financial costs, but she only indirectly suggests
the "literacy cost" that a "paste-in" or database-driven
system would have. But I think her review is well worth reading by all SOE faculty
who are contemplating using the system (click
here to read her review
).

Anyway, I hope there might be some interested discussion in the SOE on this
topic, and I hope I might partake in some of that. If you who are reading this
entry wants to respond, you can do so by filling out the "Comment" form
directly below. Join on in….


All Lightning, No Bugs . . . .

September 22, 2004

When in doubt, quote Mark Twain:

  • Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
  • “Always tell the truth; then you don’t have to remember anything. “
  • “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
  • “Don’t let school interfere with your education.”
  • “Heaven for climate. Hell for company.”
  • “Love your enemy, it will scare the hell out of them.”
  • “We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.”
  • “Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.”
  • “The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.”
  • “It is best to keep your mouth shut and be presumed ignorant than to open it and remove all doubt.”
  • “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”
  • “It is not best that we should all think alike; it is differences of opinion that make horse races.”
  • “When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.”
  • “I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.”
  • “If there are no cigars in Heaven, I shall not go.”
  • “I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”
  • “When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.”
  • “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
  • “Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. “
  • “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
  • “If God had meant for us to be naked, we’d have been born that way.”
  • “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
  • “A good lie will have traveled half way around the world while the truth is putting on her boots.”
  • “When in doubt, tell the truth.”

Schema Theory: Dr. Denner, Good Humor, and All the Schema In-Between

September 19, 2004

My most memorable lesson on schema theroy was taught by Dr. Peter Denner in 1980 (or thereabouts!) at Norhteastern University. I was a practicing (emphasis on “practice”) high school teacher at the time (at St. Scholastica Academy), and I had just returned to college to complete coursework and clinical requirments for teacher certification. Dr. Denner was a young professor out of Purdue, with lots of long-hair, energy, and motivational ways (mostly just excellent teaching). I needed some extra motivation, for I felt at the time, as some of my current students do now in regards to their own development, that the best way to perfect the craft of teaching was to take more English, not education, courses. But that’s another story, for another blog. This one has to do with schema theory, one of the great pillars of educational thinking in so many ways….

First, a little side-track on the wonders of this new technological age….

Let me tell the story of my reconnection with Dr. Denner. Here it is: Google.

For the past year or so, I’ve been thinking of culling lessons on key educational and English lessons. I thought: if my students and alumni had access to some kind of searchable, organizable database of important lessons, lesson plans, foundational principles of learning, English, and all related stuff…well, what a wonderful thing that would be…. Schema theory is such one lesson. It’s a paradigm-shifting lesson, out of which whole universes of pedagogical practice can grow. Healthy, correctly-pointing universes. Schema theory opens students to the processes of cognition in a sudden, easy, and robust way. Cognition—reading—understanding—as active, meaning making processes rather than passive, “recipient” processes: so much of high school language arts pedagogy can be built around these notions, particularly as they gain expression and application in reader response theory.

Whenever I had this “culling-into-a-database” thought—and the idea of using “schema theory” as the initiating lesson—my mind always shot back to that ed pysch course, my first teacher education course, taught by Dr. Denner. So, some weeks ago, when I was thinking of writing up my first schema story (in the form of a blog on the dog I met on my Baseball Vacation), I thought, “Hmm…I’ve got to get Denner’s schema story here first!” For Denner’s schema story was one of “those” moments in one’s education: the thing happens in class, and one is changed forever… Not always dramatically or in a life-altering way…. Sometimes it’s just some good learning….

I thought: Denner’s schema story had all the earmarks of “lore.” It was funny, compact, and crystal clear; it illustrated a fundamental epistemological mechanism with a kind of absoluteness. : “Hmmm…this has to be written up somewhere on the Internet.” So I turned to Google and did all kinds of searching—for ice cream, schemata, expectation, anecdotes—anything that could remotely identify and connect with the story. To no avail. Then: “I can’t find the story…maybe I can find the story-teller.” So I did a search on “schema theory” and “denner.” That search led me to a bibliography that referred to “Denner” as “Peter Denner.” That name didn’t quite seem right, though the subject of the article in the bibliography, “Semantic Organizers,” was definitely right up the ally of the Denner I remembered. (I think I thought his first name was “John,”—but I now think I was getting some cognitive interference from “John Denver”—but that’s another story…or is it the same one?). My next Google seach, “peter denner,” brought me immediately (feeling lucky?) to Dr. Denner’s CV and email address. And there it was: “1979-1982 Instructor, College of Education, Northeastern Illinois University.” But he left Chicago in 1982 for a position with the College of Education at Idaho State University, where he still works and teaches, now in a split capacity as professor of education and Assistant Dean of the College of Education.

So I had the email address. I thought: Why not?

Hello, Dr. Denner—I am a former student of yours, and I wonder if I might ask you a favor? First, a long-delayed thank you for your classes, your educational psychology course, in particular. It was 1980 or so, at Northeastern Illinois University. I was an uncertified high school teacher at the time, working at a Catholic school (St. Scholastica Academy). Yours was, I believe, the first course I took in my certification completion program. I did become certified as an English teacher, and eventually went back to graduate school, and now I’m a teacher educator myself, so I suppose I’ve become a type of colleague of yours. I’ve been at Saint Xavier University in Chicago the past eight years, serving as the English Education coordinator. Anyway, you shared a story in one of your classes that has stuck with me lo, these many years. It was just an example of schema theory. It was a narrative full of twists and turns, each one illustrating how much structure and meaning the audience of a story brought to the story-—sometimes to the peril of the intended message.

One thing I emphasize in my methods courses is the power of examples—and I cherish and treasure and store away and re-use the really good ones. Your story illustrated so well the way our expectations run ahead of the data we receive through real-time experience. You’ve got to remember this one. It was so charming and humorous. I don’t remember a lot of it—but I do remember there was a shooting of a gun…follow by the “victim” wiping water from his/her face. There was also an ice-cream sale script being used (or abused)… Does any of this ring a bell? Is this example written up anywhere? Can you help?

If not, don’t give it a thought. I’ve often thought the “idea” of the story is obvious enough, and with a little writing on my part, I could recreate a similar type narrative. But there’s something about the cherished stories of one’s formation—an implicit call to respect and preserve them just so. Anyway, I thought I’d ask. Thanks much!

Your admiring student—Angelo

P.S.: I found you through Google, and I enjoyed being able to read your CV, which thoroughly daunts me (at least insofar as my use of the word “colleague” above). You’ve been busy indeed, and no doubt to continued effect with your students and colleagues out west.

To make a long story short(er), I received a wonderful, inspiring response
from Dr. Denner, the relevant part of which is quote below:

I do recall the story I told, because in the early years I used it here also. These days, I mainly teach statistics, so I have not discussed schema theory for quite a while. The story I told was inspired by and adapted from an example of how schemata function in comprehension presented in one of the early (now classic) articles on schema theory. The reference is: Rummelhart, D.E. & Ortony, A. (1977). The representation of knowledge in memory. In R.C. Anderson, R.J. Spiro & W.E. Montague (Eds), Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. The essential lines of the story are there, but I modified them and elaborated on them for my own teaching purposes. On page 113, the lines are given as “Mary heard the ice cream man coming.” “She remembered her pocket money.” “She rushed into the house.” Later on page 115, when talking about unexpected outcomes, Rummelhart and Ortony (1977), give the example line of “She drew the revolver and shot him.”My version of the story went something like this: “Sally heard the ice-cream vendor.” Then, I would ask the class, “What did Sally hear?” The class would give answers such as a bell or music. I would stomp my feet and say, “She probably did not hear a sound like this, right?” The point I was making was how we use schemata to fill in default values that go beyond the information given (as Bruner said). Next, I offered the sentence, “Sally turned and ran back into the house.” I would then ask the class if that made any sense. The class would answer yes, because she needed to get her money or her purse. I would ask why? This exposed the implicit buy-sell schemata that was expected. I would also ask the class, “How old is Sally?” The consensus tended to be about ten years old. I next offered a third line and asked the class to interpret it. The third line was, “A short while later, Sally returned carrying her pocketbook.” Again, the class thought this made sense because of the implicit buy-sell schema. I would then ask if Sally wanted to buy ice-cream. I would also ask, “what kind?” This would illustrate that when the text does not specify, we are able to fill in the slots of the schema with high frequency default values (such as vanilla), or with our own preferences and thereby identify with the character by assuming that Sally would be like us. The next sentence I offered, was something like, “The ice cream vendor saw Sally reach into her pocketbook.” Then, I would ask, what was she reaching for? The next sentence was the twist. “She drew the gun and shot him.” At this point, we would talk about the schemata shift from buy-sell to shooting. We would talk about the slots in that schema and what was still missing (motive). I would ask again at this point how old Sally was. Usually, the consensus was much older now. We would speculate a bit about motive and then I would share the last line of the story. The last line of the story was, “And, the ice-cream vendor wiped the water from his face.” The class usually groaned. I then asked, “How old is Sally now?” We would then discuss how mystery writers try to get us to keep thinking inside the boxes of our schemata, while all the time leading us to an unexpected twist (although in retrospect there were clues along the way). Does this help? Feel free to use the story, although do give Rummelhart and Ortony (1977) credit for the examples (and me a little too for my adaptation and elaboration of them).

Word Spy



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Check out Word Spy. Even if you know how to define and use “flash crowd,” “metrosexual,” and “slashdot effect,” you’ll find lots to learn and enjoy at this neat dictionary/word play site that lists and defines all the latest neologisms (and changing old logisms…). I think there might be some cool vocabulary lessons suggested here. For instance, take a look at the newspaper parody, News
of the Word
. Here is how the Scout Report
(ever my source) describes the site:

Description: If you’re the sort of person who decries
the use of abbreviations like B2B as being "so five minutes ago,"
then you might enjoy keeping up with the very latest parlance with Word Spy.
Created by Paul McFedries, this site is intended to focus attention on "recently
coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older
words that are now being used in new ways." Each weekday, a new word
or phrase is featured along with its definition and a citation, usually from
a print media source, that shows the word or phrase in context. Recent words
include "yettie," a derivative of "yuppie" that denotes
a "young, entrepreneurial, tech-based twenty-something," and "retail
leakage," which refers to urban residents leaving their own neighborhoods
to shop in suburban stores. The site also offers a mailing list for users
who want to receive Word Spy via email, a searchable index of previously featured
terms, and a specialized lexicon (Tech Word Spy) that contains computer-related
and technical terms exclusively.

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2004. http://scout.wisc.edu/: