One small step for man

I’ve been trying to make headway on understanding a 21st Century Resume, thinking that it should not be your father’s paper resume. But recently I’ve had a couple “send me your resume” requests, so here it is in all its paginated glory: Nils S Peterson CV.

I’m choosing categories for this post. Milestone is obvious for a noted setback. Reflection-in-action seems an appropriate guide to what I should be doing, but it is Assessment that caught my eye. Clearly, it is assessment that is the goal of keeping a document like a CV. In my experience reviewing job candidates, a CV is a cumbersome tool for assessment.

So, I have added a new section to my CV, at the bottom, Community Activism. My wife’s summary: you defeated WalMart, Saved the Bus, and Chartered a school. But the reflection, and I hope your assessment, is what did I learn doing those things?

I joined the NoSuperWalmart effort in December 2005 hoping to get a chance to apply my ideas about blogs to community organizing. There is a blog, but it did not become a key piece in the communication strategy. I found myself in a role of spokesperson and part of the inner leadership circle, but the communications strategies that carried the day were email, newspaper ads, and handbills.

A year later, I got a better chance to explore the nexus of online and local community organizing. The conclusion that I draw from this work is that the web can be integrated into a local community’s political organizing. It requires effort to make the site participatory (with multiple perspectives) and authoritative (with data that has been collected about the problem and is open to inspection, support or refutation).

My most recent activism has revolved around gaining a charter for Palouse Prairie School in Moscow. This work has been conducted mostly offline, but its given me a chance to think about how to merge the content management of two blogs and Google Calendar into a web site. It not right yet, but its a step beyond the NoSuperWalmart effort.

What I think I’ve learned in those efforts is feeding into a series of blog posts I’m co-authoring regarding transforming the grade book. What we are arguing is that a community assesses its members (and a university education should assess students) by applying a set of broadly agreed criteria across a span of the member’s work. We are exploring the mechanisms by which the learner gathers, organizes, learns from, and demonstrates that assessment. The result will not be a CV, it will be a portfolio and the public assessment of that portfolio. Not a showcase portfolio, but a learning portfolio.

The CV is a showcase, and not even the best one, in that it is a catalog of everything without organizing narrative. What would be more interesting it seems is to showcase an accomplishment and the learning history leading up to it, as George Hotz did in his blog/portfolio on cracking the iPhone and Margo Tamez did in her portfolio on her efforts to prevent a US-Mexico border wall.

In Wikipedia your contribution can be respected even if you are anonymous. The Wikipedia community works because it has a set of public criteria used by the community (and debated within the community) for judging all work. For example, there is a policy around deletion of pages and procedures for implementing it.

In thinking about transforming the grade book, I am concluding that we have reduced the teaching and learning proposition to one core idea: the public presentation of evaluation criteria, the public application of the criteria to a given learner’s work, and a public means for the criteria and their application to be negotiated by a community over time.

I think this is what Stephen Downes is saying in Open Source Assessment, you don’t need a curriculum created by experts, you need this core tool, the assessment.

But, key to making this work is to directly assess what you want learners to be doing. If you use an indirect measure, like a standardized multiple choice exam, what you will get is learners who master that test but may not have the skills and knowledge that are actually desired. Patricia Cross suggests that what you measure and value is what you will get more of from learners.

And, once you have your assessment underway, you need to constantly redefine it by holding the results up against what you would like to have happening. The key is not how well students do on our exams, its how well the exams promote what we want students to do.

John Thomson, writing in response to Martin Weller’s ideas in SocialLearn finds Web 2.0 an awkward fit for higher education and gives among his reasons for why universities can’t/won’t change:

“FERPA has everybody scared. The purpose of the law was to protect student’s personal and grade information from things like the grade list on the door and prying parents. Yet fear over having students work on external commercial systems, which are largely secure from hacking and violate privacy only on the aggregate level of data, causes hesitation from using Web 2.0 systems or attempting to form partnerships with their owners.”

Having students do learning activities in public seems completely reasonable in theater or music where performance to audiences is part of the authentic activity. And I doubt FERPA has a problem with a school play or concert listing the names of the performers in the program even if they are also the members of a class preparing the performance. The difference for me is the authenticity. Forcing a student to blog on a class discussion or post a paper on the causes of World War II, where the activity is school work and not authentic performance is where I have a problem.

If the instructor is giving a grade for the activity, I believe that is FERPA protected, but in a public venue like those above, the audience did its own assessment (not to be confused with grading) and that too is a required part of the authenticity of the experience.

For me, the interesting implications of Learning 2.0 come in taking a transformative view of the whole learning enterprise. Recently, we have been writing on transforming the grade book. The activities we propose, especially in the second and third variations probably could not be conducted within a closed learning environment — they are authentic engagements with a community and need to be on the open Internet. I see no FERPA issue here.

I’m struggling with the problem of my resume (or now my portfolio) again. Looking back, I like the analysis I did a year ago thinking about a 21st Century Resume. It talks about forward-looking and backward-looking documents that serve as reflections about problems and their solutions. We see those same kinds of documents created by Hotz as he hacked the iPhone.

This kind of reflection captures Gregory Bateson’s notion about information “a difference that makes a difference”. That is, reflections about changes in the world that I made or plan to make — not just random speculation. So in addition to capturing reflections (be they grant proposals, articles (such at the one requested by Innovate), or blog posts, its incumbent on me to show that my reflecting was “reflection-in-action” (from Donald Schön). That is, I’m reflecting with the intent to make a difference.

This thinking helps me move further along the path in the previous post, where I was reorganizing elements on my paper CV. Beyond organizing the content, I need to make presentations of myself that are narrative, that show how these reflections and milestones connect to make patterns.

But collecting the necessary evidence is not easy. For an example of the problem, I joined CTLT in the fall of 2000. They were well into the process of creating an online learning environment called “The Bridge.” One of the key, and incompletely developed, elements of the program was a personal workspace. Unlike previous thinking about OLEs, this one provided a resource for the learner, the learner’s own, private domain, that transcended the temporal constraints of a course. One of the key limitations of The Bridge’s personal space was that it was totally private, the mechanisms to authorize others to parts of your workspace were never realized.

I played a role in the retirement of The Bridge. It was a loss, a defeat, because it successor on our campus was WebCT, which had a teacher-centric, term-limited perspective. Personal space for the learner was lost. At the time I did not place much emphasis on the lost feature.

Enter SharePoint. The university was adopting it for administrative productivity reasons, but it also had a MySite feature that captured The Bridge’s personal space and added all the functionality that was never implemented in The Bridge.

I spearheaded an effort to understand SharePoint enough to get CTLT and ITS to implement it as a resource for the university. The personal portfolio and collaboration space of the MySite is catching fire in multiple places in the university.

OK, so here is the problem — what goes into my resume or portfolio from this story? I didn’t put the personal space into The Bridge, I recognized (but didn’t document) its importance. I recognized that MySites had the same feature. I argued, probably nowhere in print, that the university should implement MySites. I was a cheerleader for the explorations by CTLT staff and their colleagues into SharePoint portfolios, but did not do much of the important technical or intellectual work. I co-authored a white paper about some of these ideas, but it does not capture the difference that I made at WSU, though the white paper might yet be seen to make a difference itself. Closer to the mark is this summary of the history of SharePoint at WSU. It documents that a change was made, but doesn’t show either the seminal role of The Bridge or my agency.

So how do I capture the evidence of my past work, my learning? If I were writing project proposals I would have forward-looking reflections. If I were writing publications of my work I would have backward-looking reflections. We have tried to institutionalize these documents in CTLT, but we tend to rush along with the work and not create them.

We (Ashley Ater-Kranov, Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson and I) just put in a proposal for the Educause Learning Initiative 2008 Annual Meeting: Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0, January 28–30, 2008 San Antonio, Texas.

Our proposal is “ePortfolio 2.0: expanding our views of portfolio”

Abstract (50 words max)

George Hotz’ blog chronicling his iPhone hack demonstrates students can collaborate world-wide and create portfolios that make learning visible. Our research suggests students and faculty are equally adept at giving criteria-based feedback. Portfolios capturing learning process combined with criteria-based feedback have implications for teachers, course design and LMS platforms.

Research Results

Ater-Kranov, Ashley and T. Desrosier. Raising the Bar: Communicating High Expectations and Getting Results. Poster. Washington State University Academic Showcase March 2007.

Cho, Yoon Jung, A Ater-Kranov, and G Brown. Faculty Attitudes about ePortfoios: A study for the National Coalition for ePortfolio Research. Poster. Washington State University Academic Showcase March 2007.

Hotz, George. Finding JTAG on the iPhone. Blog. http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ accessed Sept 10, 2007

WSU ePortfolio Contest. Making Learning Visible. Website. http://ctlt.wsu.edu/eportgallery accessed Sept 10, 2007

Session Focus

Portfolios have been used in several ways beyond being showcase of best work, including documentation of learning growth and for personal reflection. In the Spring of 2007, the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at Washington State University hosted an ePortfolio contest that asked students to document their learning growth. The result was a rich array of evidence of learning, and a wide range of portfolio documentation.

More simply, a blog can be understood to be a learning journal, and with suitable summary posts, might serve as a portfolio. George Hotz blog of the hack of the iPhone is one example that illustrates one person’s informal but substantial learning journey enhanced by a collaborative community.

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) integrate both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience and often have a blog at their heart around which the user assembles a range of resources and systems to create a personally-managed space.

To the extent that users open their PLE space for inspection by others it becomes a multi-faceted journal that makes learning processes and outcomes visible. When the user presents that log of learning evidence the PLE becomes an extended portfolio view.

A key facet of the blog or PLE is that the user seeks critical feedback and collaboration on their learning objectives, which typically involves the creation of social networks that cross institutional boundaries and are intended to place the learner at the central node in a learning community. We have evidence that demonstrates that students are at least as adept at faculty at providing criteria-based feedback, which opens the potential that giving of critical feedback can be scaled much larger than what faculty alone can provide.

This presentation will explore the blurring of the lines between portfolio, blog and personal learning environments and a parallel blurring between novice and expert feedback when novice feedback is appropriately scaffoled and guided. We will invite participants to join in the exploration and the implications they have for teachers, course design, assessment of learning, and IT planning around LMS and other supporting tools.

We are going to be working on this (sketchy) proposal for Active Learning Strategies in the session and welcome feedback:

The audience will collaborate in an analysis and deconstruction George Hotz’ blog (ne portfolio) of the hack of the iPhone. Then the audience will participate in a collaborative criteria-based rating. Audience data about itself will be shared and discussed within the threads of the presentation. Following the session, the audience data will be posed for later review by the audience and others.

In Half an Hour: Open Source Assessment Stephen Downes wrote:

What we can expect in an open system of assessment is that achievement will be in some way ‘recognized’ by a community. This removes assessment from the hands of ‘experts’ who continue to ‘measure’ achievement. And it places assessment into the hands of the wider community. Individuals will be accorded credentials as they are recognized, by the community, to deserve them.

We have been talking quite a bit the last few days about George Hotz and his iPhone blog.

The important piece in our conversations is that its easy to ‘recognize’ Hotz’ achievement (and a wide community has), and in the way he structured his blog, its easy to ‘recognize’ that he is a thoughtful and collaborative worker, these last two skills being important traits for employers, and his portfolio an interesting example of how students might demonstrate these global competencies in authentic project-based learning.

Recently John Gardner posted some thoughts on Entre/Intrapreneurs, and what roles especially they play in a university. This sent me to looking for the blog of Clayton Christensen author of Innovator’s Dilemma. What I found was not specifically Christensen’s blog, but an interesting group blog from his consulting organization. I added that to my blog roll because I’ve found ideas in the book shape my thinking about trends around me at Washington State University.

For example, I’ve been thinking about Innovator’s Dilemma in the context of BlackBoard Course Management System and alternatives that may exist to that (increasingly expensive) tool. Alex Slawsby’s post gives me some further insights in applying the ideas of “interdependency” and “modularity” that I think play well with my own Web 2.0 and ePortfolio thinking.

BlackBoard is an “interdependent” system (if I understand Slawsby), with many tightly linked modules. This produces an internally efficient product, but at a cost to the customer. We (WSU) the customer are looking for alternatives that are “good enough” and at lower price points. SharePoint 2007 looks to meet that goal. It also is an interdependent system, but less specialized, it is a collaboration tool used in many business settings. As a course management system, it does not have all the features of BlackBoard, but many faculty don’t use most of the features, so SharePoint may be “good enough.” And for the University, which can amortize the cost of SharePoint over many other collaborative uses, it might be at a lower price point as well. Ehrmann calls tools like SharePoint, developed for other markets and applied to education, Worldware, and argues that they deserve special consideration for being both valuable and viable.

In a previous post, Slawsby discussed a potentially more disruptive, and more modular approach than even SharePoint to challenge BlackBoard’s CMS — online services offering free storage or other free resources (eg Google Docs). These ideas begin to beg the question, what part of the instructional IT should be outsourced completely?

I would have previously said that the University can’t outsource its instructional applications, because the University needs to manage the identity (the login ID) of its students — because it has scores and grades tied to those student identities. I would have said, “You can’t have a student just using Blogger, how would you know who they were or that the work was authentically theirs?”

Enter the student, who is increasingly “swirling” (taking courses from two or more educational institutions concurrently). The student is treating the university programs as modules (Slawsby’s term), mixing and matching courses to make independently concocted programs. The student may use one institution as a home base, bringing in credits toward a degree, or may be jumping around, ultimately looking for someone to credential the melange.

I recently wrote about an electronic portfolio as the core learning platform. In that thinking, the portfolio serves as the place to present to a specific audience the collection of learning experiences and the value and meaning that come from those experiences. Those experiences are probably not test scores or even a transcript, but more authentic products of learning, work, and avocational activities. Such a portfolio should not be a broadcast, but more like a blog, be open to comment, a place for the learner to present her current state of thinking and seek input to evolve understanding.

Which brings me back to my interest in Dr. Gardner’s post on Entre/Intrapeneurship in the University. He says, “It [entre/ intrapreneurship] must be embedded in our WSU culture and our curriculum.” Given that swirling students are already acting like educational entrepreneurs, and Google continues to move in directions that allow those students the potential outsourcing of elements of our instructional IT, I think the time for Dr Gardner’s conversation has already arrived.

Much of this thinking springs from Stephen Downes’ review article, eLearning 2.0. Experiments like ELGG and Dave Cormier’s FeedBook have implemented some of these ideas and added to our (Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at WSU) thinking.

Portfolio thinking/working includes these elements

• Collect your work
• Select from your work important examples, annotate what is important (add metadata)
• Reflect on your work, are you meeting your goals, how do you know
• Connect your work to that of others (may provide context, support, evidence of success)
• Project your work into the community to solve problems (provides context and authentic evaluation)

Following these ideas springs our conviction that platform and tools for creating ePortfolios should be Worldware, rather than custom tools purpose built for education.

Bloggers have foreshadowed our ideas about electronic portfolios, where they are collecting their original writings and synthesizing/ reflecting about their readings.

In thinking about Pandemic Flu planning , we have looked at the multiple points of failure and proposed a loosely coupled teach-in, based on an ad-hoc set of tools.

Our 2007 ePortfolio Contest challenged contestants to document their learning growth — we wanted to explore how to gain insight into the learning that is often masked in a ’showcase’ portfolio.

The more sophisticated blogger uses a blog roll to provide context about what influences them. And that blogger understands they are a “central node” (Resnick) of a (self-assembled) learning community — and the blogger/learner seeks critical input from others via comment and trackback. The blogger is engaged in dialog for the purpose of learning within a community of practice.

We understand the well developed blog to be a portfolio, but find its chronological structure can limit its utility to a would-be portfolio reader. Well developed “review” posts, that link to other posts (supporting evidence) in the blog can serve this synthetic, and demonstrative, role.

Using a portfolio platform allows the blog to continue in the mode where it is strongest, Collection and Reflection, while the portfolio provides a place to make a presentation to a specific audience for a specific purpose. Ideally the portfolio has its own file storage and Authentication/ Authorization structures to supplement the other systems from which it is aggregating.

In our thinking a portfolio (see Pandemic Flu), is a hub that can aggregate (but may not need to contain) artifacts (it might be important to bring the artifacts into the portfolio if issues of AuthZ might keep the portfolio reader from seeing the artifact, or if the artifacts are in locations where they are subject to destruction (an example of the latter might be a page in Wikipedia). Typically, the artifacts lie in native environments most suitable to them (Flickr, Blogger, del.icio.us, etc) and are arranged into the portfolio by tagging and a syndication mechanism (such as RSS).

The piece we are adding with our 2007-08 portfolio contest is the idea to engage with a community (local, national, international) on a problem and its solution. This requires the learner to learn in a multi-disciplinary way in an authentic context.

The portfolio, in this application, likely becomes a “collaba-folio” where the author is collaborating with a community in the work and documenting learning growth. It is not a showcase portfolio of a finished work. In fact, following BioQUEST, we think that authentic learning work is seldom “finished,” rather it is abandoned in favor of new, more important learning pursuits.

The teacher in this model is taking actions symmetric to the learner. The teacher is a more sophisticated learner, providing feedback to novices within a web of teaching-learning relationships. The teacher also understands that, through past reputation, he may have social capital to extend to a learner, and that extension can be done publicly via the teacher’s blog roll or by a blog post that synthesizes some aspect of the work of the learner with other members of the community (who may then provide the learner with feedback or resources). The teacher should be conscious in using social capital, and perhaps earned credentials, to advance the thinking of more novice learners into the communities of practice.

It was ironic that I was at Technorati searching for “Open Assessment” when I stumbled on

Mrs. Kohler’s Lesson Plan

August 3, 2007

Standards: 7C1.3

Objectives: Studnets will take Spelling Lesson #1 test. Students will work on their Vocabulary Squares for Duffy’s Jacket. Students will learn how to create their Weekly Grading Sheet Packet.

DLA-Proofreading

Anticapatory Set: The teacher will explain that the studnets are taking their Spelling Test #1 for Compound Words. She will remind them that some words are closed, and some are open.

Assessment:

Studnets will take the Spelling test, then trade and Grade.

Now, I also make the typo of “studnets” for “students,” but finding Mrs Kohler has me thinking about how I’d want children to go about the task of learning about spelling.

For the record, I care about spelling correctness, but I have a distaste for Mrs Kohler’s method. (perhaps because it didn’t work for me 45 years ago). So, how would I think about “attending to” spelling? - which I think is a question that goes beyond spelling mechanics.

A colleague on the bus I ride, who teaches in the College of Education, was relating a story about his daughter, a first grader, who comes home with perfect scores on her in-class spelling quizzes. She also loves to write and draw and makes greeting cards for family and friends — on which her spelling is poor. He wryly notes that she does not carry her skill from the classroom to the real context. Now– does this mean that he understands that Mrs Kohler’s work is perhaps in vain, students will learn to spell in authentic contexts by the feedback they get in those contexts, and that students may learn to do school spelling for school tests, but that is a different (and perhaps irrelevant) additional skill. If so, how sad for the efforts of Mrs Kohler and the system of No Child Left Behind where she is trapped.

I think the real issue here is not Mrs Kohler’s typos but schoolbook approaches to teaching spelling. The issue is teaching children to be effective communicators and how to work with their mistakes in the process of being communicators. A few typos didn’t deter my understanding of Mrs Kohler. Children should know the same is true. What they really need to understand is when bad spelling and grammar will impede their communication goals. The other thing they need to understand is how to attend to those errors so that the effect is the one they desire. It may not be by becoming good spellers, it may be by learning to use tools as aides. For example, I make both typos and spelling errors, but I use Firefox as my browser to help me avoid publishing them. The unfortunate thing is that children compose with crayons, a very inflexible medium unfriendly to correcting mistakes and they are reminded by their schooling that making mistakes is bad.

I came back to edit this after I found Vivian Cook’s piece The Liter Cide 2 Spelling where she explores some of these ideas in a humorous way to make some of my points above.

Mike Caulfield writes a nice reality check on vendor ePortfolio packages:

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the environment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?

Put it up against The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies Top 100 list of tools favored by e-learning professionals. Looks like a list of Worldware to me, which is as it should be.

I’ve been thinking that my blog is an ePortfolio (I collect, select, reflect and project in this space). My categories filter for different audiences. But this is also a working space, I’m not always good at telling a single story to one audience, so I can see a case for a more formal presentation. But ideally, such a presentation would be built with open tools, and using the identity I chose, not a drop-box closed tool branded with the identity of an institution.

As for what I’d want to put into my portfolio, it would look more like the products and activities that Stephen Downes suggests in Open Source Assessment than a resume or the product of a typical university course.