Course Portfolios

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Course Portfolios

• 1st Meeting
• SE Disciplinary Commons
• 29th August 2009

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Portfolios

• Marine Architecture

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Portfolios

• Computer Modeling

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Portfolios

• Photography

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Portfolios

• Investment

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What do they have in common?

• The purposeful selection of artifacts to achieve
  an end
• Selection is not random content is chosen to
  reflect the parts that are most important to you
  (and/or your theme)
• What end? This requires consideration of audience
  and purpose
• Our Commons Portfolios may be quite different
  from a portfolio you would compile for promotion
  different audience, different purpose (or it
  may be the same)

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The Lab Report
The Journal Paper

• Title
• Hypothesis
• Materials
• Procedure
• Data
• Calculations
• Results
• Conclusions

• Title page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Materials and Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Literature Cited

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The power of form

• Allows comparability
• Allows for different sorts of research, with
  different emphases
• Content is guaranteed by peer review
• The Journal paper is to research as

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the Portfolio is to teaching?

• Context(or environment or place and space)
• Content
• Instructional Design
• Delivery
• Assessment
• Evaluation

• Allows comparability
• Allows for different sorts of practice, with
  different emphases
• Content guaranteed by the nature of the
  evidence (and how it is structured) and peer
  review

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The Nature Structure of Portfolio Content
Artifact Commentary
Evidence Analysis
What Why

• Paired elements
• Nothing admissible without an evidential artifact
  
• Necessity of capture

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The Portfolio?

• Common headings but how do they fit together?
• I would propose four different formats and
  themes that might be useful frameworks for our
  course investigations and documentation the
  course as anatomical structure the natural
  history of a course the ecology of courses and
  courses as investigations.
• Lee Shulman, "Course Anatomy The Dissection and
  Analysis of Knowledge Through Teaching", in The
  Course Portfolio, Hutchins, Pat (ed.), 1999.

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The Portfolio?

• Anatomy
• parts, structure, part-part relations,
  aggregations of parts, function of parts and
  aggregates.
• Natural History
• developmental trajectory narrative, journey,
  itinerary, coherence.
• Ecology
• programmatic context it's fit within the
  scheme of things.
• Investigation
• course as series of experiments to test learning
  conjectures. What do you want to understand about
  your students?
• Summarized list by Josh Tenenberg

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Developing Reflective Practice

• The Course Portfolio can be thought of as a
  document that provides different levels of access
  to different audiences
• Private
• Protected
• Public

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Portfolio Levels of Access

• Private The Individual Teacher - just you
• This material is for your eyes only. A diary
  space for self-disclosure and reflection.
• Protected The Group of Peers - a few friends
• This is material that you share with your peers.
  For our purposes, we can certainly consider one
  another as peers, though you might want to
  consider colleagues in your department or in the
  broader discipline as part of this group as well.
  Sharing here is relatively safe and contained,
  and will be where well draw most of our peer
  reviews from.

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Portfolio Levels of Access

• Public The Wide Wide World
• This is the material that we will post on the
  Internet, for all eyes to see, the final product
  that is often referred to as The Course
  Portfolio. Well want to ensure that there are no
  gaffes or errors, and, as a result of this being
  accessed by a wider audience, we might want to
  include more context and navigational aids

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More questions

• What is your purpose?
• Personal reflection
• Promotion
• Documentation
• ???
• Implementation?
• HTML
• Word
• PPT
• ???

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Design space for Course Portfolio
public, protected, private
Implementation
Audiences
Purpose(s)
Personal reflection Promotion Documentation
Based on David Gibson
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Begin with the end in mind

• What is your purpose?
• Personal reflection
• Promotion
• Documentation
• ???
• Who is your audience?
• Self
• Department
• Institution
• Community

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Begin with the end in mind

• What is your purpose?
• Personal reflection
• Promotion
• Documentation
• ???
• Who is your audience?
• Self
• Department
• Institution
• Community

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Original Slides by Sally Fincher, University of
Kentlicensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-S
hareAlike 2.0 UK England Wales Creative
Commons License