H808 Core Activity 2-2: Reflection

This activity was twofold: finding information about the ‘drivers’ behind use and development of e-portfolios in UK, Europe and other countries; working in groups to divide the workload and complete together the table proposed as template in the course’s wiki.

Being behind for technical reasons (lack of Internet connection since the beginning of the course after my return to Switzerland) I am trying to catch up but also I am working on the different activities after the other students, who are further ahead and have deserted the place.

After an attentive reading of the different forum posts and a comparison of the already completed jobs in the wiki with the content of all the bibliographies I read, I decided to complete the table with other countries not covered by my peers.

From experience and from having participated in different conferences (e.g. MoodleMoot, Mahara) I know that Austria already has a strong implementation of e-portfolios in education. I then began to search for information about the ‘drivers’ that underpin the adoption of such a tool and methodology. I also wanted to compare this development in Austria with other Germanic and culturally related countries (i.e Germany and Switzerland).

Where Google and Bing were very useful for finding information about Austria, search engines were not useful for gathering information about countries, such as Switzerland and Germany, which lag behind with e-porfolio adoption.

First observation: it is easy to find information whenever the subject has been highly developed and is fully published on by many authors, but finding details on the lack of something with Google is more difficult. The quality and pertinence of the search string is then more important. The subject has then to be approached laterally and not frontally: it is not productive to search with, for example, ‘e-portfolio drivers switzerland’ but instead it is better to find other related keywords that may find relevant side articles about different pedagogy experiences, linking, perhaps, to  e-portfolio use.

Second observation: where the lamba user will just stop after having searched (and found little information for Switzerland and Germany) the e-learning professional can provide more by using their alternative sources of information: their social network on Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo; their personal contacts encompassing other experts; forums and specialised web sites where he/she knows specific information can be found.

After having contacted two people in Germany and Switzerland, whom I consider as experts on e-porfolios, and having browsed on different academic and institutional web sites from my Delicious bookmarking system, I had sufficient information to complete the wiki with relevant information about Switzerland and Germany.

This shows the importance, for an e-learning professional, to not only develop their skills and knowledge but also to cultivate their networks and relations with peers and other specialist, locally and globally, and to manage all such gathered information in an efficient system for finding, managing, and sharing information quickly, such as Diigo or Delicious.