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Done!

I wasn't really sure in places how much weighting to put on learner choices vs practitioner choices vs my own experience in the activities.

I found the last part quite hard at first, as it wasn't entirely obvious what "learner experiences" could be looked at above and beyond those that had already been covered.  However, given recent experiences with offering our courses to Chinese students and their differences in expectations from the online course, this seemed like a good option to look at and easily gave me 500 words.

As with TMA01, the main problem with the TMA seemed to be keeping to the word limit given the amount of papers we have looked at to discuss, plus the fact they encourage us to include references to forum posts and also wider reading (using the magic extra time we can all summon up from nowhere).

Finding relevant forum posts to include with this one was a lot harder than TMA01, as the forums have been a lot quieter in this block.  There were some useful points raised in a recent elluminate session though, which I included.

Having not really used an eportfolio before this course, it was interesting to look at some of the alternatives to MyStuff.

I looked at PebblePad and FolioLive.

PebblePad looked more user friendly with usability being it's main focus. However, whereas MyStuff seems based on the same principles of tagging and sharing that major social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are, in PebblePad although these features are present they seem to take more of a back seat.

FolioLive seemed to have less features, it didn't appear to offer much in the way of sharing options (other than to the course tutor) and it didn't look like you could tag work against the syllabus. However, as students paid their own subscription to the portfolio it did fit the lifelong webspace model more than the other 2 alternatives.

In all, all 3 had good features the other 2 lacked. However, in general, I like the principles that MyStuff is built on. Tagging, sharing, revision tracking, comments, etc. As has been pointed out my other students, however, it is quite clunky, but it is also fairly new in terms of development.

The online discussion for this task seemed to be minor, however. It seems a shame that full discussions don't seem to be taking place for these activities. There appear to be only a few students contributing to discussions and most of these take place in the course forums where other discussions take place rather than activity discussions where it seems to be more sets of postings with a few comments.

I'm not sure whether it's just that most students don't have time to look at many of the messages in the forums or whether the rest of the students are taking more of a passive role in the forums. Perhaps more discussion based activities are needed to encourage others to take a part in these discussions to make them seem more of a required part of the course.

I also had a look at the Open Source discussions in the supplementary activity. It was interesting that Martin's points on the open source products seemed to mirror what I had found when I first started using Linux as an open source desktop for my home PC. Given how much the desktop software has been developed over the past few years with the development of major products such as openoffice, it would be interesting to see if eportfolio development has mirrored this, if so some of the open source products could have a lot going for them now.

And now this blog is finally up to date with where I am in the course...

The group discussion task of the drivers for ePortfolios was an interesting experience for week 2.

As I mentioned in my post to the forums reflecting on the activity, I am currently looking into using discussion forums in an online course I administer. I hadn't considered how much extra time you need to allow for online discussion tasks as opposed to their face-to-face equivalents.

John and Mitchell had initially suggested using the wiki to collaborate our efforts on this task. As the task was based around filling in a template, this seemed ideal as it would allow all members of the group to add their thoughts directly to the template.

However, this only highlighted the delays in online discussion, which I feel many of us had not taken into account, as no general concessus was reach over it. In the end as it was getting towards the end of the week and the task would need writing up anyway, I created the wiki page using the contributions on the discussion forum from various members of the group (particularly those of Brian and Colleen).

Mitchell added his additions to the wiki directly later.

As of week 4, the only people who have editted the wiki page for this task are Mitchell and myself. I'm not sure whether this is because the task was essentially done by the time it went on the wiki or whether people are unfamiliar with using a wiki.

Although, it was in some of the introductions, I'm not sure how familiar the rest of the group are with technology. It could be that they are all experts or all complete novices, but assuming there are some people there who are not familiar with wikis, this may have been another factor which slowed getting our work online.

Reflecting on this, I can see that, although it was a useful eye-opener in my experience and so a useful activity for this course, in general, activities using the wiki and discussion forums would benefit, at least in the early stages of a course, from more guidance as to:

• what is expected
• how to use the technology
• how online group tasks differ from face-to-face ones
• the allowances students need to make as a result

The wiki page containing the drivers template