Princess Brides and Little Princes....

"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

In the line above from 1987's classic film The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya is speaking of all the events leading up to his impending attempt to storm a heavily fortified castle. The sentiment holds true for this reflection on the end of the second class in my DLL program, so I'll go with it.

Over the past 5 weeks in the EDLD 5303 course, I've been building and revising my ePortfolio, in order to reflect on and demonstrate what I've learned and am learning.

The Simple (Online) Life

Last week I had a Google Hangout meeting with my EDLD 5303 classmates Ann, Brent, and Cindy (insert group secret handshake here, as soon as we get one) where we spent about 2 hours giving each other feedback on our developing eportfolios. I commented at the end of our conversation that it had been encouraging to see how the four of us had very different ways of moving toward the same goal, and all of them worked. That feeling was solidified this week in looking at examples of portfolios provided on Dr. Harapnuik's website for our class to review (Harapnuik, n.d.).

A sentiment I keep coming across in my continuing exploration of educational technology is that, as Harapnuik, Thibodeaux, and Cummings describe in Choice, Ownership and Voice through Authentic Learning, "The best technology...ultimately disappears" (2018, p. 64). We just use it. This is as true of website design as of anything else. It's most useful when it just flows around us as we go after the information and experience we seek. 

Who Owns The Eportfolio?

I bought two sewing machines yesterday.

The reason for buying one sewing machine has little or nothing to do with my graduate coursework. The reason for buying two explains a great deal about why student ownership of the ePortfolio is so important.

I have worn a particular pant size for the past 20+ years. Recently I've discovered that I have...expanded my operations. I'm okay with this on a personal level--my waistline, while larger, is still perfectly healthy. But, while I am healthy, I am also cheap. I don't want to buy new pants.

Why Use An ePortfolio?

As a performer and a performing arts educator, the idea of doing things with an audience runs through my classroom and my life. I often tell my colleagues who teach what we in VA call "SOL" subjects (Standards of Learning, do folks elsewhere use the same terminology?) that those of us in the performing arts have SOL tests just like they do, but we take ours in front of a crowd and need at least a 95% to pass. What that means is that Kolb's learning cycle of experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing (referenced in Barrett and Richter's "Why Reflect?" article on their Reflection4Learning site) happens rapidly and repeatedly. We just sneakily call it "rehearsal." We reflect to ourselves or within our own small circle of performers, and this is our "process," and after a lot of processing, we go on stage and present our "product." For what its worth, arts educators spend a LOT of time talking about "process vs. product," the importance of the former, and the outsized significance the wider world places on the latter.

Who Am I Talking To?

In my coursework toward a M.Ed. in digital learning, I've been involved in a lot of reading, online discussion, and general thinking on ePortfolios. Recently I think that a couple of things have crystallized for me. 

Dwayne Harapnuik calls an ePortfolio "a learner's digital evidence of meaningful connections" (Harapnuik, n.d.). In the same blog post, Harapnuik cites a definition from Sutherland and Powell (2007), defining the ePortfolio as "a purposeful aggregation of digital items – ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback etc, which ‘presents’ a selected audience with evidence of a person’s learning and/or ability." I think these are excellent definitions of the ePortfolio concept, but one thing they don't specifically address is who that audience is. And for me, the most helpful thing has been to realize that I am that audience.