Forums | Eportfolio Advisory Board

08 February 2010, 20:58

Summary of  LGA “Making Connections” Seminar #1, Feb 5, 2010

Beth, Liz Lowe and I attended the first of our monthly LaGuardia seminars, funded by a “Making Connections” FIPSE ePortfolio grant.  We are the third cohort of schools to attend and we are among a group of 11, including Stonybrook, Manhattanville, Pratt,  a few CUNY colleges and community colleges, one NJ community college, and one community college from northern CT…  Following is a summary of workshop highlights and “takeaways:”

• We are probably among the most advanced; Brett Eynon, our LGA leader and a national leader in the field, seemed quite impressed by our pilot program and our use of our Mahara, Open Source template; LGA has been working with ePortfolios for about 8 years, and according to Brett, 30,000 students have created ePortfolios; check out this website to see some sample student eportfolios: http://eportfolio.laguardia.edu/ 
• We now have gained some wonderful resources and networking capabilities:  the “Making Connections” Website, which includes links to many valuable models, colleagues to collaborate with and learn from; two other cohort schools that have already gone through the program and continue to be actively involved (30 teams all together); the global network of schools in UK and Australia that LGA is part of; other national and international eportfolio organizations
• Colleges and Universities have chosen 3 different ways of doing ePortfolios: career focused, assessment focused, learning focused, or less frequently the LGA model of integrative ePortfolios (this is most challenging, making use of all 3 ways,  and seems to be the direction Pace is going in as well)
• Need to get students to take ownership of ePortfolios and to see the benefits of creating them
• Goals of the Program—to gain a broader understanding of ePortfolios; advance implementation within member schools; build ePortfolio network; identify signature practices
• Key principles of ePortfolios: it serves as a pedagogy; there is no one perfect model; we can learn from classroom experience and need to experiment; ePortfolios can serve as a tool to develop the habits of mind to become a life long learner
• We spent some time in group discussions, describing our programs and identifying key questions and issues, including these: how do we make ePortfolios important for students? How do we create buy in at institutional level? Faculty level? How to build in reflection for students and faculty? What role does the ePortfolio have in transforming pedagogy?  How can it be used to foster and assess collaborative and interdisciplinary work? 

Beth, Liz and I were enthusiastic about the caliber and professionalism of the entire day and look forward to our next month’s meeting,  and we don’t even mind doing the homework assignment.