ePortfolio News

Studio Supervisor Jennifer Worth is out sick today.  As a result, the studio will not be open until noon today, but will remain open until 8pm.

In order to become better acquainted with individuals from across the curriculum who are interested in using technology and writing strategies in the classroom, and to share ways ePortfolio can be incorporated into classes, this feature will regularly present a member of York College faculty involved with the ePortfolio program.

Today’s featured Faculty member is Phebe Kirkham, Substitute Lecturer in the English Department.

1. What drew you to the ePortfolio initiative?

We have been talking in the Writing Program for a while about doing some form of portfolio. Originally, the idea was to do a paper version, which always struck me as possibly cumbersome. I thought the idea of doing a portfolio online would capture the best parts of having a portfolio (the ability to select work to feature) while eliminating the problematic part of it (lots of paper for students and teachers to lug around and store.)

2. In which class/es are you employing the tools of the e-Portfolio?

I’m using e-Portfolio in my sections of Writing 303. Writing 303 seemed like the perfect class in which to try out e-Portfolio because the main goal of the class is to produce a substantial research paper and many students do work that they are proud of and therefore may want to showcase.

3. How are you using ePortfolio/eWriting to help meet the pedagogical goals of your class/es?

So far I have been experimenting both with blog posts and pages. For the posts, I have asked the students to do some less formal writing about the research process–one assignment asked them to summarize an article and then explain how it had spurred their thinking. I have also asked them to create pages to post their final reseach proposals along with commentary about how they revised those proposals. The idea is that they can showcase the proposal and also reflect on their revision process. Next, we are going to tackled the annotated bibliography for their papers, which we will be doing directly in the e-Portfolio.

Our thanks to Professor Kirkham!  If you’d like to be part of Faculty Feature, please send your responses to the questions above to eWriting Studio Supervisor Jennifer Worth at  jworth at york.cuny.edu

WordCamp, a two-day conference for bloggers and programmers and educators who use WordPress (which would include all of us here at York College), is landing in New York on November 14 & 15.

The conference is being hosted at Baruch College, and will include a sizeable number of students, faculty and staff from all over CUNY.  For a mere $40 fee, you can attend a variety of panels and presentations aimed at all levels of WordPress users, from Newbies to Senior Developers, and network with others up and down the east coast who are involved with using blogs and eportfolios in educational and professional venues (and elsewhere).

Of particular interest to our users are the sessions aimed at academic blogging, which include:

Publishing and Sharing Research with WordPress. Lots of web services we use have become very good at letting us save things — We can “star” them, “favorite” them, “like” them, share them, and tag them to our heart’s content. We get suggestions from “followers” and “friends.” It’s great for the “collecting” part of doing research, but what can we do with this all this stuff after we’ve starred or favorited it? How can we find specific things or things that overlap across a dozen web services, with the end goal to actually write something about all this stuff we’ve found? I’ll share some ideas for making this happen, and present some development I’ve done to make WordPress a platform for publishing and sharing research. Speaker: Jeremy Boggs

CUNY Academic Commons. Speaker: Matt Gold.

Every Freshman at Baruch College is Blogging: Now What?. In Fall 2009, 1200 first-year students began writing to 60 blogs about elements of their transition to college. Their posts (close to 3000 thus far) have been published both to their individual blogs as well as to the central portal for Freshman Orientation. Each seminar blog is overseen by a peer mentor, and the project is directed collaboratively by Baruch College administrators and the presenter. This session will detail how and why the project was launched, explore the pedagogical, curricular, and intellectual implications of the endeavor, and crowd source some of the technical challenges created by our use of WPMU as a platform for Freshman Orientation blogging. Speaker: Luke Waltzer.

The 10-Minute Course Website.
With WordPress’s famous 5-minute install, you can have a blog up and running quickly. If you have just five more minutes to spare, you can use Courseware, a plugin from ScholarPress, to turn that blog into a simple, easy-to-manage course website. We’ll take one lucky audience member and help them create a course website from scratch, showing the audience some new features in Courseware along the way. Speakers: Dave Lester + Audience Volunteer.

EDUCHUDS: the Gentrification of Web-Based Education. Given that web-based education has been dominated by proprietary software companies through more generalized visions of the horror of the open web, this presentation will use clips from such NYC film classics as The Warriors, Escape from New York, C.H.U.D., Fort Apache, The Bronx, and several others to illustrate how the insidious process of corporate gentrification in educational technology is orchestrated through a logic of fear. What will be traced throughout this presentation are the shadowy contours of a global conspiracy against the socialist ideals at work in open source communities, which are increasingly being watered down by the iron fangs of capital. And believe you me, those protracted canines are ever-poised to pierce the neck of any attempt to re-imagine the digital landscape of education outside the profit motive we are slaves to. In effect, I will argue that there is a C.H.U.D. under every institutional sewer cap, and they’ll devour more than your puppies — they want your soul! Speaker: Jim Groom.

WordPress-Powered Eportfolios at Macaulay Honors College. Speaker: Joseph Ugoretz.

What It Really Takes To Support Eportfolios. Speaker: Lisa Brundage.

WordPress in K12: Winning Hearts and Minds. This presentation tracks the way we implemented WordPress in a fiercely conservative k12 school system. The presentation follows “Bob” as he progress from paranoid doubter to full-fledged power user. We’ll cover how we scaled the use of blogs from a teacher-driven, one-way communication tool all the way up to community-driven sites based around communication and composed of student-created content. Along the way, we’ll discuss common roadblocks, fears and ways to deal with administrative paranoia. Speaker: Tom Woodward

Roundtable: The Future of WordPress in Education. Facilitator: Mikhail Gershovich.

Other soon-to-be confirmed sessions: Public vs. private in academic settings, several others.

You can find out more about the guest speakers and sessions, and register online for the conference at the WordCampNYC site.  Regular registration ends Wednesday, November 4.

In order to become better acquainted with individuals from across the curriculum who are interested in using technology and writing strategies in the classroom, and to share ways ePortfolio can be incorporated into classes, this feature will regularly present a member of York College faculty involved with the ePortfolio program.

Today’s featured faculty is Casandra Silva Sibilin, Adjunct Lecturer of Cultural Diversity.

1.  What drew you to the ePortfolio initiative?

I had heard of e-portfolio through teaching at LaGuardia College and was interested in learning more about it. I had seen students take some pride in their e-portfolio work and I thought it would be good to see that in my class. Also, there was the stipend offered.

2.  In which class/es are you employing the tools of the e-Portfolio?

I am using ePortfolios in my Western Civilization class: CLDV 210 QQR.

3.  How are you using ePortfolio/eWriting to help meet the pedagogical goals of your class/es?

So far I have used it to practice a free-writing activity for the first essay.  After setting up a blog I asked the students to practice answering the question for 15 minutes. My goal was for this to help make the writing process less intimidating.  In the future I would like to use the e-portfolio for similar activities and also for students to be able to team up and offer some writing criticism to each other given standards that we have reviewed in class.

Our thanks to Professor Sibilin!  If you’d like to be part of Faculty Feature, please send your responses to the questions above to eWriting Studio Supervisor Jennifer Worth at  jworth at york.cuny.edu

We in the eWriting Studio are pleased to announce that we have a new way to offer blog help and technical support to students and faculty.

Although we’re still available 38 hours a week for one-on-one assistance in the Writing Center, we know that problems never arrive at your convenience (that’s why they’re problems).  So, in order to provide assistance to you when you’re off campus or otherwise unable to get to the Studio, we’ve launched an email account– eportfolio@york.cuny.edu –that is dedicated to fielding any questions you might run into while working within the ePortfolio.

During Studio hours M-F, we’ll be checking our mailbox regularly and responding ASAP (give us at least half an hour, please).  Over the weekend, we’ll have more limited coverage, but we’ll still do our best to get back to you within a few hours.

When you send us your question, please include as much detail as you can, so we can get right to solving the problem, rather than following up with you for clarifications.

Good luck as you continue to use and learn ePortfolio, and let us know how we can help!

In order to become better acquainted with individuals from across the curriculum who are interested in using technology and writing strategies in the classroom, and to share ways ePortfolio can be incorporated into classes, this feature will regularly present a member of York College faculty involved with the ePortfolio program.

Today’s featured faculty is Nathan Austin, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department.

1.  What drew you to the ePortfolio initiative?

I was drawn to the ePortfolio initiative after several semesters of teaching in the WRIT 300 sequence. Experience had shown me that the course is very challenging, and that many students are not as fully prepared for the work as they ideally would be.  The result is that many students struggle with the course.  My hope was — and still is — that ePortfolios might be a useful tool to help students excel at the work we ask of them, and develop the skills that the WRIT courses are intended to teach.

2.  In which class/es are you employing the tools of the e-Portfolio?

I am using ePortfolios in my section of WRIT 303.  Thus far, I have used ePortfolios primarily for informal writing.  Students began the semester by identifying their goals for the course, and posted this text as their first blog entry.  This sort of reflective writing continued as the class finished their Objective Synthesis papers: after submitting the assignment, they wrote reflective blog entries that addressed both their progress with writing and the challenges they expected to confront in future assignments. Read the rest of this entry »

Several students have come down the studio this week with questions about where to upload their responses to class readings that will be commented upon by their peers.

The short answer is:  if you want to enable comments to a piece (or pieces) of less-formal writing hosted on the e-Portfolio website, you must present that writing as a blog post, not as a page.  Blogs are dynamic, pages are static.

Once you get to your Dashboard, mouse over Posts/Add New, and click.  You’ll see the window to compose your text in.  Make sure you click “Publish” when you’re finished.

Pages (or sub-pages) should be reserved for pieces of writing that are

1. longer
2. more formal
3. not intended to be commented upon within the e-Portfolio site

Instructors may ask students to post drafts to a page or (more likely) a sub-page as a record of their work, but day-to-day writing should be presented in the blog format.

If you have further questions about the differences between posts and pages–or anything else e-Writing–please come down the Studio in 1c-18 for assistance.

All faculty and students should know:  NEVER adjust your Privacy Setting to the most restricted degree (the one reading “I would like my blog to be visible only to administrators.”).

If you do, you are effectively locking yourself (and almost everyone else) out of your own blog.   While each individual e-portfolio user “administers” her or his own blog, only York College Webmasters have full Administrative privileges, and they will be the only ones who will be able to access your blog should you restrict your blog privacy at the highest level.

The e-Writing Studio suggests you choose any of the three middle privacy settings.  Students should consult with their professors about concerns and preferences regarding privacy settings.

Due to a scheduling conflict, the e-Writing Studio will be open from 11-8, rather than 10-8 today.

One week into the official opening of York College’s new e-Writing Studio, and we’re off to a great start.

As of last Friday, our pilot group of e-Writers included:

• eight faculty members from five disciplines
• approximately 300 students
• 14 class groups

Six of our faculty have already held an in-class introductory workshop to the new e-Portfolio software, and a handful of students have come down to 1c-18 for one-on-one instruction about what blogging is and how it works.

In the coming weeks, as e-Writing assignments become more common, Anna Charles, Steve Jules and I welcome your questions and and challenges in the Studio.