The E-assessment question

Don Clark recently made an entry on his blog http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ entitled ‘E-portfolios – 7 reasons why I don’t want my life in a shoebox’. Apparently it followed a presentation he had made at the ‘e-Assessment question’ conference. He stimulated a debate with over 70 responses that has been of a higher quality than most that take place at e-portfolio conferences, where, in my experience, people often tie themselves up in ‘interoperability knots’.



My conclusion is that the notion of having an e-portfolio as a means of capturing your own identity, when there are other ‘systems’ out there that do this better like Facebook, is clearly absurd. I am daily told (I don’t look for fear of finding information I don’t want to know) what the ‘status’ of my children is that day by their entry on Facebook. It is their representation of ‘who they are’ that day and it is stretching credibility that they will want to look back to review that in 30 years time, other than in embarrassment or in terms of the generality of how they have developed.


It is similarly absurd that today 90% of people assessing the skills of aspirant hairdressers do so by writing down their observation of a haircut and if they do take a picture, it has to be downloaded, printed and then attached into the relevant section of a paper portfolio. The other 10% just get out their mobile phones take a picture of the haircut on their mobile phone, find the learner’s portfolio on the same phone, add the evidence and make a comment.


There are lots of other examples. The time and effort involved in transferring paper portfolios between different people involved in the assessment process; the car journey to authenticate someone’s evidence, when this could be replaced by simply, temporarily, allowing that evidence to be viewed by the witness and asking them to make a comment.


Similarly if you were a member of a professional body faced with a number of regulatory requirements, it does seem to make sense for you to have one electronic record that you can regularly update and use to meet multiple requirements.


A number of entries on Don Clark’s blog acknowledge that e-portfolios can serve this purpose in relation to vocational assessment.


The challenge is to find a way of making the distinction between this sort of e-portfolio and the one that Don rightly attacks. I have no easy answer other than to say that the word e-portfolio will now be virtually banished from my lips for fear of being misunderstood.

Over engineering learning computer solutions?

I would guess that there are still software engineers and developers who harbour the ambition of engineering the human out of more and more processes. You often hear the retorts that a process would work really well, if only people were not involved. Doubtless there are people too, who would like to be engineered out of particularly tasks and procedures to a point where everything is automatic. But is that really a desirable objective?



The car is now massively advanced from the days when cars had to be cranked up to start by hand. You could imagine we will get to the point where it would be possible to point our car at a destination and, with a combination of satellite navigation and automatic controls, get to where we want to go almost without thinking. Is that really what we want? Isn't part of the enjoyment of a car journey and what captures our interest having to make decisions.

Making decisions can therefore be good and it is important to remember this when engineering computer-based learning solutions. Take e-portfolios for NVQs as one example. There are some systems that in essence make the decision for the assessor, if you have this and this, the following is automatically satisfied. There are others which require an assessor to make a genuine judgement. From a learning pedagogical perspective and in terms of motivating the assessor and learner the latter approach must be better. Providing helpful tools and guides is good, as is removing unnecessary paperwork but if we are over-automating any learning process we are in real danger of turning off all those involved in the learning journey. 

Part of the creativity in developing computer software for learning lies in managing that difficult balance, between automating processes to reduce what the learner has to do but not to the extent where the learner becomes disengaged from the whole process.  

Jamie pays attention to Education

So, yes, it is all artificial and unreal and, yes, there would be few other schools with resources like this and the capacity to bring in top people in their profession, but there is something about this programme that means it is authentic. This week David Starkey’s genuine and successful attempt, to find better ways of engaging with young people and the dramatic impact on a young person, of being told that they have an A plus, not least because they know it is deserved.



I watch the programme from two angles. One, as a former leader of a Second Chance School (2CS) in Leeds I am intrigued to see the parallels between that experience and what is taking place in the Dream School. Already the claims that the staffing levels at the 2CS were too large for the young people we were dealing with, is starting to look suspect. They, as does this group, needed that level of support to try and unpick what had happened to them previously in schools, so that they are enabled to start to learn again. The desire to learn and achieve that is apparent in the students at the Dream School, despite all their disruptive behaviour, was also apparent in the young people in the 2CS.


I am also interested in the use that Jamie is making of technology - or not. Symbolically Jamie’s first action in his class is to collect all the mobile phones, because of the way that the mobile was seen to be disrupting learning across the school. Computers although always seemingly available are not being used in the learning. This is, with the exception this week of the photography class, where technology was partly used, to deliver the most powerful lesson so far, in which the group demonstrated brilliant skills in producing self images.


It is a fascinating ‘experiment’ and now has me glued although I do not have to wait until next week for what comes next, because there is a blog, website, Facebook page to look at. Where shall I start?

It is time that JISC started to provide responsible leadership for the use of technology for FE/HE.

A couple of years ago I found myself presenting a seminar on e-portfolios alongside the person tasked, for this region, with developing good practice in technology, to support the delivery of FE/HE. He produced a bamboozling presentation on the way you could use technology like google mail and other ‘free’ software to create an e-portfolio.



His diagrams were certainly confusing to someone like me with some knowledge of e-portfolios and software development and it’s only purpose appeared to be, to demonstrate that you could do for free, what nasty commercial companies were delivering for excessive amounts of money. To my knowledge, since his presentation, no one has successfully applied this ‘blueprint’ to produce a solution that is ‘working.’ In contrast one of the FE Colleges there at the same seminar decided to buy into our solution.


It would appear from the programme for the latest JISC event ‘Towards a New Horizon: Using Technology to deliver HE in a Changing World’ that he is still mounting the same campaign. There is a session about e-portfolios which is introduced in the following way;


‘The traditional method of assignment work submission is costly in resources and imposes constraints on staff and students alike. However, most of the workable, E-Portfolio solutions available are prohibitively expensive and often difficult to set up and administer, giving no appreciable saving in cost, effort or resources. But there is another way of approaching this problem, using existing resources and knowledge, which is elegant in its simplicity – email.’


Now I accept that this maybe an introduction to a session that someone other than a JISC member of staff is delivering. However the fact that it is has been allowed to be timetabled by JISC, suggests at the very least that this is being promoted as a worthwhile approach to the region. There is also an implication that those learning institutions that are using these E-portfolio solutions are being irresponsible with public money, not least because they do not deliver any appreciable benefits and there is a simple solution,- e-mail.


I am aware that I am in danger of prejudging the session that is about to be delivered but the notion that e-mail can accommodate all the complexity of groups, roles and permissions that are required to deliver robust and quality assured assessment beggars belief. In that process e-mail has a role to play and we use it for witness testimonies to authenticate work based evidence and confirm embedded practice. However this is not without its challenges. Spam filters have a habit of ‘disrupting’ e-mails particularly where there is a complex chain of communication and addresses.


There is a reason why charges need to be made for the e-portfolios that capture effectively work based assessment. It is because to capture that process and make it simple requires highly sophisticated and well engineered technology.


JISC would serve the sector better by recognising that, rather than by giving airtime to half baked and ill thought through proposals. To return to the theme of a previous blog it is about time they found a way of working collaboratively with companies who have been developing truly elegant technology based solutions for many years.

Turning round the Ocean Going Liner

When I worked in local government we often talked about the challenges of turning an ocean going liner by which we meant the council. We imagined that it was too far big a task, indeed one that was so big that we could not contemplated really making significant changes to the way the Council operated.


I recall the moment well when it dawned on me that although I had managed to persuade TESCO to change their recruitment policies so that unemployed people were in an advantaged position in respect of jobs at their store in Seacroft, it was proving impossible to persuade the Council to adopt a similar approach.


Well we were wrong, because the ocean liner is currently being stopped and the Council’s are shedding services and jobs at an alarming rate. Furthermore those organisations that are dependent on government money, distributed through Council funding, are if anything being more affected.


It is therefore no surprise that today the leader of Liverpool City Council had this to say to the Prime Minister;


"How can the city council support the big society and its aim to help communities do more for themselves when we will have to cut the lifeline to hundreds of these vital and worthwhile groups?,I have therefore come to the conclusion that Liverpool City Council can no longer support the big society initiative, as a direct consequence of your funding decisions."


The problem is that there is a captain on the bridge with his trusty lieutenants but there is a huge disconnection between them and the engine room and as a result the boat is paralysed to the point of inaction. It is therefore sad for us to see the pressure on many of the people we have worked with in the public sector, who are now struggling to work out what to do with the services they offer both now and in the future.

A bigger bang for our buck

The United Kingdom Radiological Conference is the UK's flagship scientific conference that brings together 'clinicians, scientists, radiographers, technologists, managers and other professionals to present and discuss the latest developments and challenges in diagnostic imaging and allied radiological sciences.'

I had proposed to the conference organisers that we would deliver a joint session with the Society and College of Radiographers about how the CPD online system, we had developed with them, was being used by radiographers to enable them to apply for consultant and advanced practitioner status.

I was delighted when I received the programme for the event to see that there is now to be a full afternoon session to discuss the emerging models of consultant and advanced practice, with the final presentation by Michael Fell the first radiographer to have successfully applied for advanced practitioner stastus using CPDnow.

The facility to use our CPD online system to apply for different grades within the professional body is proving a great addition and was one of the features that has attracted the interest of the radiographers in Australia.

Hacking over the Careers Service

I recently spent a day with our company Chair Barrie Hopson and other leading experts in Information, Advice and Guidance learning about and experiencing the benefits of agile technology. The purpose was to see whether these group of experts could use this technology to come up with a new tool that would help deliver an effective IAG service. 

Agile Technlogy is full of interestingly named techniques like 'scrums' and 'spiral waterfalls', which have ben developed apparently over many years, although I have not heard of the technique before. Except when they described this approach to building software it did seem very much like what we do. I cannot recall when we last produced a detailed specification for a project and my sense would be that all our customers would describe us as collaborative in our approach, open to change and constantly seeking continuous improvement.

It was therefore interesting to hear about the approach although frankly I am unsure that it will have helped UKCES to make the careers service more effective. This was because the organisers failed to practice what they preached. The developers worked separately rather than collaboratively and only engaged with the practitioners at the end of the day. As a result the whole day ended in disarray and whilst the developers were going on to produce somethg on their own I cannot believe that it will have any impact. An opportunity missed methinks.

Although not for us because we had some interesting discussions in relation to finding homes for our diagnotics that when on the direct.gov site were each accessed by 30,000 individuals every month.