Thomas' Work Space

What are aspects of portfolios, according to Wikipedia.org? Portfolios “document education, work samples and skills”  “more in-depth than a resume” can. They come in different flavours: “developmental (e.g., working), reflective (e.g., learning), and representational (e.g., showcase)” and can contain “personal information, evaluations, sample work, and awards and acknowledgments”. If they are e-Portfolios, implying online, they can be “updated often” and with ease, and are “assembled and managed by a user” who controls the “varying degrees of audience access”. With this come “problems of exporting data and related interoperability issues” and the pros and cons of portfolios integrated into existing VLEs of educational institutions, who are initially easily available, but may lack in “learner-centered-ness” beyond the institutional affiliation.

In the OneNote ecosystem, there is a lot of student workbooks samples – may be closer to what I mean to be a portfolio, if they would groom it and reflect on their work –, plus a so called “Digital portfolio: Sample digital portfolio of a teacher that contains multiple sets of student work, stored and organized within OneNote. Includes homework, quizzes, tests and projects.”

“If you want to use recordings made in OneNote, be aware that the default recording quality for OneNote is not meant for speech recognition. We use a voice codec and bit rate/sample rate designed to compress spoken word audio as small as can be while still usable by human beings. In OneNote 2007 we increased the settings slightly to make audio search work better, but speech recognition (transcription) requires a much higher level of quality. To set up your future recordings in OneNote to be transcribable, first go to Tools/Options/Audio and Video. Switch the codec to Windows Media Audio 9.1 Professional. ”

8+x computers in the interpreting suite and maybe 8 extra in the language center could get us started. (an configuration of these computers which is different from the it labs configuration may save some money initially, but incurs maintenance cost permanently, which may be somewhat hidden, but is very real. so a site license for OneNote, if the licensing cost is reasonable at all, would probably be preferable. of course we are past the deadline for software image upgrades, i just managed to get the OneNote in the interpreting suite request in before the deadline).

if we want to enable students to work remotely, they need personal licenses. this is not necessarily expensive (ca 40 pounds for a full office 2007 suite from ms directly for students only which i recommend to any student just to get ms-word, much more so if you use more advanced office applications)..

one of the nicest features of ms-OneNote and which, even if i have not had a chance to test, would most likely strongly recommend using, is the following:

we can store these OneNote portfolios as shared files on our intranet so that students can keep editing /adding to them, and Danielle and other staff at the same time, without conflicts or need for copying and keeping files in synch, open for checking and giving feedback.

this seems much more usable than copying and transmitting (email is impossible, Weblearn, sans webdav and learner portfolio feature at least, very inconvenient) large multimedia files.

using this feature requires, however, a network share which the students can write to (which will also be required for the digitization of the interpreting suite, even my personal hack), and, if we want to support students doing this from home, probably VPN access (i do not think the current FTP access to the home drive would help us any with this task).