Posts made by Paul Beaufait

Good on you, too, Sylvia!

It was a pleasure to read along through mail notifications as time permitted, and as someone relatively unfamiliar with precepts of instructional design, yet one often in awe of the glittering flow of discussion: prompts, responses, amplifications, analyses, and syntheses herein.

Reading along from the periphery, however, I experienced minor frustration in encounters with acronyms. When I encountered them in separate messages (perhaps daily digests), rather than in the context of on-site discussion threads, where those acronyms may have been "[s]pelled out ... on first use" (Always Learning, tip 9, 2011.06.23), I often felt an urge to stop reading along, and look them up.

So, with an eye towards general facilitation of readership, as well as encouraging and fostering participation, I've taken this moment to reflect on the diversity of SCoPE community membership, and the variety of contexts and in which we might encounter acronyms and technical terms from any field under discussion. I hope present and future readers of this discussion will, too.

I'm truly looking forward to upcoming seminars.

Cheers, Paul
Hello, everyone; hi Don:

Another Paul here, very keen to find the paper to which you pointed. Thanks for the pointer and the summary.

However, I got an error message from Trimeritus when I clicked on the link in SCoPE. Here's the gist of that message:

Site Error
An error was encountered while publishing this resource.
Resource not found
Sorry, the requested resource does not exist. Check the URL and try again.
Resource: http://www.trimeritus.com/video
(2011.04.21, c. 16:30 JST)

The URL and display text seem identical. I hope you'll let us know if inaccessibility was a temporary problem, or there is another URL we might try.

Cheers, Paul B.
Thanks to Roselyn, Catherine, Deb, et al., I cottoned on quickly to distinctions among course, program, and professional portfolios. Though external, that is, curricular or extra-curricular obligations, for instance, teacher certification requirements, may fuel developments of each sort of portfolio, buy-in may be a chronic problem. Dan Pink's points about motivation, "functional fixedness" and "contingent motivators" in particular (TEDGlobal 2009, Jul/Aug 2009), may shed light on (in-)effective ways of addressing that problem.

Various discussions during the ePortfolios seminar (SCoPE, May 31-June 13, 2010) precipitated personal reflection on course-based portfolio development schemes that I had undertaken with students in English-as-an-Additional-Language classes, and moved online, and on plans for on-going, blog-based writing course portfolios. I rediscovered that profoundly revealing and deeply reflective portfolios require more than virtually overnight development; consequently, portfolio developments are a tall order for students largely unschooled in self-assessment, and uninitiated to personal or peer-to-peer reflection on processes and products of their endeavours. So my next steps are to continue blending in modest peer-review and personal reflection tasks, in order to lay a foundation for course portfolio developments.

The main question I feel remains unanswered is how it may be possible to resolve a perennial dilemma extending beyond portfolios. Online educational portfolio development schemes, as much as any other ed-tech scheme, are rife with opportunities for cart-before-horsing around, more so perhaps when payload (content), destination (audience/purpose), delivery schedule (timing), and pay-off (benefits/outcomes) resist definition, though cartage already is available for free (open-source) or for hire (proprietary). I'm stumped, and this cart metaphor collapses, when I remember that education isn't freighting, and that the folks who need to create portfolios are neither cargo nor passengers, but rather would-be initiates in a wide stream of reflective (proto-) professional practices.

Thanks, again, for sharing the flow in SCoPE!