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...
Personal Blogs
Week 6
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:13
Week 5
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:49
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
Week 5 seemed a little lighter on the workload for the compulsory topics, so allowed me some time to go back, add some references to the eportfolio items from the early activities, test the revisions feature of mystuff, post a few reflections to here and get up to date with other people's blogs.
I've now set up a feedreader to read the blogs of the other students on the course. It a shame more students aren't blogging, but then not everyone has the time or the motivation to do so.
It was interesting to see some of the tutors comments about how the course is going, particularly Robin's comments about the first group activity, in which he seems to have felt it didn't go as well as it could. As I've already said on here, I found it quite enlightening, so a very useful activity even if it didn't (in fact because) it didn't run smoothly. I posted a comment to him to let him know.
The needs analysis grid was a useful task to get an idea of self-assessment and setting objectives. I posted some reflection on this task as a separate post here.
I was interested in contributing to the supplementary activity for this week and collated a lot of the points from the needs grids that were shared on the wiki. Once I'd done this, the other students who had contributed appeared to stop (possibly because they'd moved onto the next section), which made me question whether I should continue as it wouldn't really be a group task if I did it myself and it seemed less useful to do the task on my own. However, Helen did point out that it was worth perservering with anyway and adapt to any collaboration that comes along.
I've now reduced the list slightly myself and will have another look at it later. All collaboration welcome, if anyone wants to revisit this activity, the overall list is on the wiki at:
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Skills%2FCompetencies+list+for+PDP+Grid
I've now set up a feedreader to read the blogs of the other students on the course. It a shame more students aren't blogging, but then not everyone has the time or the motivation to do so.
It was interesting to see some of the tutors comments about how the course is going, particularly Robin's comments about the first group activity, in which he seems to have felt it didn't go as well as it could. As I've already said on here, I found it quite enlightening, so a very useful activity even if it didn't (in fact because) it didn't run smoothly. I posted a comment to him to let him know.
The needs analysis grid was a useful task to get an idea of self-assessment and setting objectives. I posted some reflection on this task as a separate post here.
I was interested in contributing to the supplementary activity for this week and collated a lot of the points from the needs grids that were shared on the wiki. Once I'd done this, the other students who had contributed appeared to stop (possibly because they'd moved onto the next section), which made me question whether I should continue as it wouldn't really be a group task if I did it myself and it seemed less useful to do the task on my own. However, Helen did point out that it was worth perservering with anyway and adapt to any collaboration that comes along.
I've now reduced the list slightly myself and will have another look at it later. All collaboration welcome, if anyone wants to revisit this activity, the overall list is on the wiki at:
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Skills%2FCompetencies+list+for+PDP+Grid
OU URLs
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 13:22
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:08
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the URLs the OU tools use. Surely, it would be beneficial to make these more user-friendly?
If we didn't have to visit the appropriate item to find out the URL (I can't remember any of the URLs below for example, so if I wanted to post them again I'd have to re-look them up), then it would be easier to share these in blog posts, discussions, etc and might encourage us to do it more.
To highlight this, here's a selection of the URLs I'm currently using for this OU course.
Further Tidying
These could all be further tidied by using something like mod_rewrite (depending on what runs the OU's servers) to tidy up the URLs even further.
eg
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
These would be much easier to work with.
If we didn't have to visit the appropriate item to find out the URL (I can't remember any of the URLs below for example, so if I wanted to post them again I'd have to re-look them up), then it would be easier to share these in blog posts, discussions, etc and might encourage us to do it more.
To highlight this, here's a selection of the URLs I'm currently using for this OU course.
Blog
Main blog page:
http://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=ob735
I already have a unique username given to me by the OU (ob735), why do I need a separate number for the blog? Is the backend for the OU blog really limited to using numbers for usernames?
Surely
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=ob735
would be a lot more obviously mine and easier for others to access.
MyStuff
Item for Activity 2.1:
This isn't very obvious what it is or who it belongs to. There is no way I could post a link to this with going to the item and copying the URL.
This is probably very dependent on the backend, but might be worth feeding back to the developers and bearing in mind when other choose eportfolio platforms.
Wiki
Alan's Tutorial Group Page
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Alan's+group
OK, this is semi-friendly as the pages are referred to by name. Would it not be easier if the id was the course code instead (ie H808+08I). Again is the wiki id really limited to numbers?
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
Further Tidying
These could all be further tidied by using something like mod_rewrite (depending on what runs the OU's servers) to tidy up the URLs even further.eg
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
These would be much easier to work with.
Sharing on MyStuff
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 12:50
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:51
So far, MyStuff doesn't seem to make getting formative feedback on your work very easy, especially as it's very difficult to know when someone has commented on items.
With regards to sharing, I'm not really sure that this is serving much purpose with H808 at the moment. I'm not sure if anyone other than Alan has looked at any of the items I have shared, and I haven't looked at any one elses items (another thing I will have to make time to do, but where to start? What benefit would it offer?)
If these were referred to in reflections and discussions on blogs, then there would be more incentive to view them. Links could be included in the discussions to help view the items. This would be easier if the URLs were more user-friendly (in general all the OU technology could benefit from reviewing the URLs used, but I'll save this for a separate post).
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