Because I told you so …

I was just reading Stephen Downes’ response to Joanne Jacobs’ posting and a whole bunch of other comments on Freire’s ideas about informal and dialogical teaching and his emphasise on needs-based learning. While I am not conversant with Freire’s doctrines I was thinking of Carl Rogers’ book “Freedom to learn for the 80’s”, which seems to argue along similar lines when he says that if you don’t think it’s relevant, you won’t learn it. You may memorise it and be able to regurgitate it, but it will hardly influence the way you interpret and interact with your environment, i.e. it won’t have a meaningful impact on you.

However, figuring out the relevance of something can be a tedious process that may take time. Time you don’t invest if you are complacently learning what somebody told you to learn in ways somebody else established as ‘recommendable’. By now you may ask ‘How does this relate to a Blog about Web 2.0 learning?’. Well, it does in quite an important way: Learning technologies have ideological allegiances too, they are expressions of educational preferences, they determine whether you guide or control your learners or let them roam and take control themselves. Looking into some open source developer communities of educationally relevant software I find this issue still underrepresented, but atm I wouldn’t know how to successfully draw a larger group of educators into the design process to remedy this problem.

Well, next week I need to map out a comparison of two ePortfolio tools: PebblePad and Mahara. I am planning to concentrate on three aspects (in no particular order): usability issues, integration issues and pedagogical values. Discussing the latter will certainly draw on the discussion started above, why should students use an ePortfolio? The answer is better not “Because we told them so ..”

Social networking and e-Portfolios

Hi, I have been looking forward to this – finally I made some time to get this blog started …

How do we get students to engage with their e-portfolio? Or put differently, how do we even make sure that it is their e-portfolio rather than just another assessment hurdle to overcome in order to get a degree? An interesting working paper from David Tosch (University of Edinburgh) posed these questions in 2004 and I think they are still relevant questions to ask.

At the moment I am looking at ways to align social networking activities with the ideas of an e-Portfolio. More specifically I am looking at Mahara and Elgg, two tools that can be easily integrated with Moodle (our new learning platform You can have a look at the slides I used last Monday here. Of course, they are not entirely self-explanatory but they might give you an idea of what the session was all about.

Cheers, Christian

PS: I am testing these tools in a ‘localhost’ environment, XAMPP is pretty useful if you are working with Windows. You could replicate your entire VLE on a USB-drive, using XAMPP  – Happy to comment this further in another posting.