Saturday, 30 October 2010

A quicker way of showing what you do and having it checked

I was recently challenged by my long standing group of mates to come up with a sentence to describe an e-portfolio. The implication of their question is that I inhabit some mysterious world that requires an explanation because it is not obvious an e-portfolio is.

I imagine at the e-portfolio conference later this week there will be lots of definitions being offered although I doubt if they will be as simple as the one above.

My defintion is heavily influenced by the point that I will be making at the conference which is that the key question is not what an e-portfolio is but what it can do.

Learning styles; Have you found what yours is yet?

There is a constant and generally uninformed debate, that usually occurs when the exam results come out in the summer, about whether the quality of education and learning now is better than decades ago. My answer is always that education and learning is different now and in most subjects you are comparing apples and pears.


One of the major differences is that young people today have usually been helped to discover how they learn. It is quite critical to know whether you are a auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner. Unfortunately when I was at school it was one of a number of secrets that were kept from us. I also do not remember much sharing of learning objectives and course syllabuses. If there had been I might have worked out sooner that I spent a whole term being taught the wrong period of history.


I discovered my learning style totally by accident and for many years could not put a name to it. I just knew that if I wrote something down repeatedly I remembered it and that if I read lots of facts I didn’t.
It would have been nice to have known sooner although in some ways in may have not helped me as much as it does now with the widespread availability of e-learning. I recently had to lay a lawn so dipped into ‘You tube’ discovered a few helpful three minute videos and successfully laid the lawn without having to go anywhere near a book.


Powerful Learning; Ctrl C and Ctrl V

If you were asked to name the three most powerful learning experiences of your life what would be they be. I would be pretty confident that few if any of those moments took place in an educational environment



I have never had any training in the use of computers. My colleagues would confirm that was pretty self evidence. However my ability to use computers was transformed when a colleague showed me how to Copy and Paste. I think it took them five minutes but it changed the way I was able to use computers.


The next key moment was on the best work based course I attended. It was a residential week long experiential course on management with little or no formal teaching. The course was built around a group task and what was clever about the course was in the way that those groups were constructed and the fact that the task was a real one. We had to develop a new structure for a council department and present it to a group of councillors at the end of the week. The revelation was this that the three men in the group got tied up in a leadership battle and produced nothing and the two women just got on with the task and of course did all the work. I can still remember the group session at the end of the course when we reflected on our experience and recognised the importance of focusing on the task.


The final experience did take place in a classroom but again the learning was produced through an experience rather than any formal teaching input. At school I was reasonably good at history. I loved the subject and still do. I arrived at a double period lesson and without warning we were all asked to produce an essay comparing Castlereagh and Canning. I was incredibly put out. How could I produce my normal five pages when I had no chance to prepare so in a fit of pique I wrote Castlereagh did this and Canning did that in a really simple structure nothing like the great literary pieces I usually produced. Of course I got an ‘A’ and in an instant I understood about analysis. Brilliant teacher that Mr Dickens.


It is a salutatory lesson and if I were to reverse the question and ask myself when I was best as an ‘educator’ I would again be thinking of key moments rather than significant learning episodes. I often say people pay me for the 5 minutes of insight.


E-portfolios like blogs are often at their best because they are ideal for capturing moments rather than the ‘big’ learning journeys.

'I don't do CPD ?'

One of the reasons that I am in Australia is to speak at the e-portfolio conference in Melbourne (a sold out event), and to meet with potential partners and customers. The trip also gives me an opportunity to reflect on my own work on e-portfolios over the past decade and also inevitably on my own learning.



Reflections is a significant word to use because the process of ‘selling’ e-portfolios as a great way to capture reflections on the impact of learning on someone’s practice, is so often hindered by the fact that people claim not to know what a reflection is. It is not hard to help them recognise what a reflection is and unless they are incredibly arrogant most people do in fact reflect. Their initial response often means that it is a lot easier to say that they have attended a course, rather than identify how as a result of a particular insight on a course, or more usually a series of ‘learning episodes’ they started to change their practice.


I rarely ascribe anything positive to my early career as a social worker, it is not fashionable to either admit to having been a social worker never mind to have claimed to have learnt something from the experience, however one of the big pluses from being a social worker was the regular supervision which was all about reflection. I can’t claim to have captured all that I learnt, e-portfolios were unavailable then but what it did teach me was the importance of reflection.

Now there is a great way to capture those moments hopefully more people will recognise the CPD that they are engaged in.

Australia; another side of the world?

I have just landed in Australia-it is my first visit. I remember as a child when digging in the sand or the muck there was always the chant in my head that if we dug far enough we would get to Australia. It felt like it was truly the other side of the world. As a I grew older it also started to have the sense of being that place where relatives/friends went out to and often did not come back. This is certainly less the case now, as it has become more of a tourist destination and I have only come out here for ten days. So why come?

Well part of the reason is to answer my own question. There are plenty of signs that this is the right time for the company to come here. Even before the National Broadband Project is in place Australia already has better internet penetration and speed than many countries including the UK. Indeed it leads all English speaking companies. A number of UK e-learning companies are doing well here and CPD for all Australian health professionals is becoming mandatory.

It is therefore a trip filled with genuine prospects-let's hope that I strike Gold?

Saturday, 16 October 2010

Wet Signatures

There are probably lots of people who are getting familiar with Vince Cable's signature as he sends out letters closing qungoes and announcing cuts. He is the new person responsible for Skills and Higher Education amongst other things.It is a large C with a dot strategically placed in the middle.

I had a discussion recently that I have not had for sometime, with some one who was insistng that only a signature is the proper guarantee of authenticity. She is not on her one. We still have various elements of the Adult Funding Agency insisting on what are called 'wet signatures' for funding claims.

It is a difficult argument to sustain when we are prepared to agree numerous financial transactions on the basis of an electronic signature, by which I mean the capacity to link an action back to a person who has been authenticated through the use of a user name and password.

So now we have a Secretary of State whose signature is easily replicable; how much can we trust wet signatures? prehaps it is time to 'move on'.

I wonder whether I can get a copy of Mr Cable's cheque book ? although that will probably be a waste of time because like the rest of us he wont use it and instead rely on electronic transactions. Maybe Department letter headed paper might be more fun?