YOU: A Course of Personal Writing -- My Reflection

After autumn term, the break flew by with various conferences and family obligations. I wanted to look back at my new course for ICU 2nd year students called YOU: A Course of Personal Writing.

Here's the link to the course blog.

http://you-personal-writing.blogspot.com/

It has the various course materials and links to student blog and writings.

This was a very fun course to teach, and I learned a lot. There's a saying that "the best way to learn something is to teach it" and this was very true, once again.

Basically, I allowed students free choice of topic, genre, and deadlines, and they just had to complete 20 blogs of free personal writing, and 3 published pieces that were drafted, revised, edited, and published on our blog.

The creativity of my students was very impressive. I also wrote a few pieces for practice, but since I have done very little creative writing since...high school, it was a very new and anxious process for me. I was very honest about that with my students, that I am not a professional creative writer in any way, and I was just one of the writers in the class trying to discover what is meaningful to me in terms of themes, and trying new genres.

How can the course be better? Students made excellent suggestions in their final reflections including adding a group project, introducing more examples of good writing, and ways to evaluate more transparently, and ways to help them squeeze out their creativity a little more efficiently with deadlines of some sort--so that not everything will be done at the last moment just before the end of the class.

I'm looking forward to teaching it next year!

Todai 30th in University Rankings...CalTech No.1...but No.1 in what?

What makes a good university?

This article in the Japan Times today shows that the rankings by a British magazine called Times Higher Education.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20111007a8.html

Todai is 30th. CalTech is No.1. Harvard and Stanford are No.2.

So...what does that mean?

Apparently the ranking is based on "their teaching and research capacities. The institutions were also judged on their international mix of staff and students, ability to transfer research into commercial gains, and research influence based on the number of citations."

I dug deeper, going to the Times Higher Education website, where they explain the weightings of the 5 areas of criteria:

• Teaching — the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score)
• Research — volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent)
• Citations — research influence (worth 30 per cent)
• Industry income — innovation (worth 2.5 per cent)
• International outlook — staff, students and research (worth 7.5 per cent).

I'm curious about how they assess Teaching / the Learning Environment, but information on that is hard to find.

From an "undergraduate education" point of view, I'm concerned about their weight on Research/Citations/Industry Income, which adds up to 62.5% of the weight. Certainly it is important for students to be taught by professors who are active in their field and able to publish articles that get cited and get grants, but is it more important than the teaching side? For graduate students who are at a university to become researchers themselves, I can understand the importance. However, for undergrads who are not necessarily going to become academic researchers, and most of whom are going to go into professions that need a generally high level of intellectual and personal development such as the ability to understand, think, and communicate on issues...the learning environment is much more important.

So...I would think a separation of "universities for educating" and "research institutes" in the rankings would be beneficial. In Japan, I think a lot of research may be going on at Todai, but is the university really helping students develop intellectually and as a person?? I hope so, but from what I have heard, this may not exactly be the case.

What I really like about what we do here at ICU is that the focus is clearly on the development of our undergraduate students. Faculty do excellent research here, but a lot of effort goes into challenging and supporting each student on an individual basis.

More information is here.

The Potentials of "Flipped Learning" in EFL

I've been seeing this "Flipped Learning" movement evolve over the last year or so.

I think I blogged on the TED video about Khan Academy, which is one of the leaders in this movement to move INSTRUCTION OUTSIDE of the classroom, and move APPLICATION (like homework problems) and INTERACTION INSIDE.



I believe this change in education is positive and that this flipping trend is going to grow. It just makes sense. This should be the same in EFL.

One-size fits all lectures or monologue explanations by the teacher should be moved online in a movie or interactive form so that students can access them at their convenience, play them over and over, and watch them at their own pace while checking resources for words they don't understand. Interactive quizzes to pre-test their understanding before they come to class should be helpful as well. Lectures in class, where students are forced to come and listen in a non-interactive, not self-directed form, are going to become extinct.

A monologue in person, frankly, has no value over a video. The video is superior because it allows replay and convenient access. The video is superior because it allows annotation, subtitles, and other production techniques to develop understanding.

The value of school/class time is 1) interaction, 2) pressure/atmosphere to be challenged to apply knowledge to a higher level, and 3) opportunities for personal expression-asking questions, stating opinions, making presentations. Students should come to the physical school to interact with the teacher and classmates.

In EFL, lectures about grammar, vocabulary, how to do assignments, and other videos about how to communicate well, format essays etc., the that things that have been traditionally communicated by explanations by the teacher should basically be moved online. Students should access them outside of class at a certain schedule, or at their own pace, and come to class ready to ask questions and work in groups to apply the knowledge.

So, in my current courses, in my current English language program, where do we begin the flipping. I realize that I spend a good 10~20 minutes or so of my class time explaining skills the students may need, or explaining assignments such as how to prepare for the next discussion or how to prepare a writing assignment. Those explanations, ideally, and hopefully, can be moved to a YouTube video...right? Need to give it a try.

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (in the US and Japan)

Just finished reading this. It is a quite detailed and ambitious research report trying to establish that US university students are NOT learning what they need to learn, namely the ability to read, think, and write critically and analytically at an advanced level. 

This claim is based on a standardized test called the CLA, or Collegiate Learning Assessment, which has questions like this (click). According to results of the CLA, many college students don't improve in those key abilities from their 1st year to their 2nd or 4th year.

The open ended writing prompts like these seem to assess very practical abilities, and I am happy to see that these are quite similar to the liberal arts core learning that we emphasize in the ELP at ICU where I work.



The following sample question is from this paper on the CLA "Facts and Fantasies" 
 

Figure 3: Example of a 30-Minute Break-An-Argument Prompt
The University of Claria is generally considered one of the best universities in the
world because of its instructors’ reputation, which is based primarily on the
extensive research and publishing record of certain faculty members. In addition,
several faculty members are internationally renowned as leaders in their fields. For
example, many of the English Department’s faculty members are regularly invited
to teach at universities in other countries. Furthermore, two recent graduates of the physics department have gone on to become candidates for the Nobel Prize in
Physics. And 75 percent of the students are able to find employment after
graduating. Therefore, because of the reputation of its faculty, the University of
Claria should be the obvious choice for anyone seeking a quality education.

Hopefully, my ICU students will be able to take this argument apart and critique it successfully in an organized English paragraph that points out the main weaknesses of the claim "obvious choice".

Basically, the book Academically Adrift is a call to universities to boost the quality of their undergraduate programs, especially in terms of challenging students to read, think, and write critically. Professors and professors in training need to learn how to challenge students to engage in rigorous learning, and need to be given support and evaluation systems that encourage them to facilitate learning in an effective way.

I support this. I remember how my University of Washington undergraduate program (and graduate program, actually) rarely ever included any requirement for revising and improving a research paper. I rarely ever got more than a grade and a one line comment such as "Nicely researched but argument needs development. B+"  Being forced to write papers is good, but formative feedback is most likely critical to any substantial improvement in writing skills.  I had one professor, a young guy teaching me applied linguistics, who tore up a paper I wrote and asked me to revise it prior to a second deadline. I really enjoyed that process and learned a lot.

US universities will benefit from having more curriculum design with tasks that force the young writer to re-think and re-articulate the argument, and the same goes for Japanese universities, where the "academically adrift" situation is actually much, much worse.

What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain (Harvard University Press, 2004)

Based on interviews and other information gathering such as observations, colleague/student comments, and course materials from 63 "excellent" college teachers in the USA, Ken Bain presents his conclusions on how the best college teachers create exceptional learning in their college courses that stimulates and challenges their students.

"Exceptional learning" (p.189) is defined in two dimensions: intellectual development and personal development. Intellectual development includes acquiring subject knowledge, learning how to learn independently, reasoning from evidence, employing abstract concepts, engaging in conversations/communication in speaking and writing about that field, asking sophisticated questions, and developing the habits of mind to continue to employ those abilities. Personal development includes 1) understanding one's self (history, emotions, dispositions, abilities, limitations prejudices, assumptions, passions, 2) understanding what it means to be human, 3) developing a sense of responsibility to one's self and others, including moral development and the ability to exercise compassion and understand and use one's emotions.

I think that list above covers what I aim for. I hadn't thought about the "personal development" side of exceptional learning very deeply before, but feel that I aim to help my students with their personal development through the liberal arts academic English courses I teach, especially when I am able to include a sufficient amount of personal choice and reflective writing in the learning curriculum so that students can explore their interests and create meaningful learning experiences for themselves.

The book can serve as a good introduction to what good college learning should be, and has much value there, especially for college professors who may have never studied recent learning theory and methods and are stuck in traditional lecture and test-giving models of college courses that fail to stimulate intellectual engagement.Unfortunately, for teachers who are already conducting teaching according to the "learning-centered" principles that the book introduces, it lacks well-developed specific examples of good practices, and primary goes on and on about abstract descriptions of what good teachers seem to do, supported only by a few rather vague quotes. When some interesting practice was mentioned, I kept wishing for more details, or at least a reference to some documentation that could shed more light on how to carry it out.

Some interesting practices that I want to explore (more) in my teaching are:

1.Writing a syllabus as an inspiring list of invitations to a learning environment and promises for discovery and personal development based on adherence to community guidelines, rather than requirements with penalties. What abilities can you learn/develop in this course? Why are those abilities important? (Who gives a damn?) How can we work together to make that happen? How will we assess whether you are being able to develop those abilities? How will we assess whether the course is optimally helping you develop those abilities?

2. Write a book like this on "What the best college English teachers in Japan do?" employing research methods similar to his. Has this already been done? Who might be interested in working with me on this?

3. Students must learn to judge their own quality of work. Best grading is to some extent based on a final reflective essay that explains what they learned or developed and how they want to improve further.

4. Create an archive of student research results that other students can see (Richardson case, 1999 Texas University). ICU really, really needs this. Students each year are doing very inspiring work, but their work is rarely ever made available to peers or the world. We need a system for publishing student work--some kind of balance between requiring all students to publish and only publishing student work that is exceptional--publishing work that student/teacher/peers have worked together to polish and engage readers should be a standard practice for this learning community, especially in the end of the first year + second year of ELP, as it should be in the major courses as well. And how about senior theses? Are those available easily online, and why not?

5. Expect personal development from students - mention this explicitly as a learning objective - compassion, find new passions, responsibility, understanding oneself, human society, and one's community.

6. Ask an inpartial third party consultant (Director? Staff member? Another student?) to come into the class around mid-term (and also at the end, possibly) to ask students their honest views of the learning in the course and any suggestions or expectations.

7. Building a convincing teaching portfolio each term - Class materials, observations, student reflections/evaluations, quality of student work. I guess my blog can act as this, but what would help organize the process more effectively?

Nice ideas to explore and experiment with in the new term. Good stuff.

10 Skills Every Student Should Learn

I read through this article this morning, and wondered what I myself would list and how I would rank them by priority.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/08/11/ten-skills-every-student-should-learn/

The list/order (which may not be a ranking) in the article was as follows. Some items seem to overlap, but it is a good list that includes many of the skills and concepts I try to prioritize in my college liberal arts courses:

Every Student Should Develop the Ability to...
1. read, enjoy reading
2. type quickly - 40 words per minute and use electronic media fluently to get/send ideas
3. write (meaningfully, persuasively in an organized, engaging way)
4. communicate effectively and respectfully (especially in situations of conflict, high pressure)
5. ask questions / analyze the quality of answers- Could you explain this again? What does this mean? Why is it significant? etc.
6. be resourceful - find what you need proactively, creatively
7. be accountable - be responsible/get things done
8. know how to learn - get needed info/ideas/help
9. think critically - evidence based thinking like a scientist, make decisions and solve problems creatively
10. be happy - have/get necessities + positive outlook on life

Also mentioned = Find one's passion for something, have global empathy, prioritize, put others before oneself, be persistent

I agree that all of the above are important, though "typing quickly" seems a bit too micro compared to the others. I would just include that under the ability to write or communicate.

I would probably put "The ability to learn actively and autonomously" (as opposed to passively/dependently) as the main skill students need to learn. Of course, that skill would include many of the other skills because effective autonomous learning requires the ability to find something one is passionate about, set priorites/schedules, ask questions, get needed resources, read, understand and evaluate the materials critically and communicate what is learned in order to get feedback/reactions from others.

TED Talk by Deb Roy on The Birth of a Word + Patricia Kuhl on Linguistic Genius of Babies

This is an amazing introduction to how researchers are gaining insights into how language is used in human interaction and how children acquire the language word by word.

Roy video and audio recorded every word of language interaction in his house over several years and created computer programs to transcribe, trace and analyze the data. Wow.

He shows an example of how his son gradually learned the word WATER, starting from Ga-ga. The child experiments with various versions of the sound until arriving at a very close approximation in his second year.

I followed my son's English speech development for three years also, but not like this. The potential for understanding first and second language acquisition is immense once tools like this become more available.

Also, below is another very cool TED talk by Patricia Kuhl of my alma mater UW showing that small children (up to 8 months?) can learn (=distinguish) between all types of foreign sounds by being exposed to them in person (not recording). A clear indication of the critical period for sound recognition such as the difference between the American /r/ /l/ and the Japanese /r/

Amazingly, they have a magnetoencephalography machine that can put babies in to see what is happening in their brain. Cool.

Reflecting on Reflection - A Reflection Taxonomy by Peter Pappas

I stumbled across this link on a Google Reader feed from another teacher's blog and thought it was a very useful framework for understanding reflection in education.


This Prezi presentation, also by Pappas is a very nice introduction to the importance of reflection. Need to learn how to make one of these. I wonder how long something like this takes to make.

The Reflective School by Peter Pappas on Prezi

An Open Letter to Educators - Raises good questions about the meaning of university

Dan Brown, who reveals that he dropped out of university because school was interfering with his education, sends the message that traditional institutional education needs to change to keep up with the information revolution of the Internet.

So, how exactly should university education change?

Dan is a bit vague on this, but his main point seems to be that teaching/memorizing facts should not be the purpose of university. He seems to have had some unfortunate experiences with his first few university classes, but I think all universities agree that the purpose of higher education should not be memorizing facts, but learning valuable skills and attitudes that will support the student's life and contribution to society in the future.

At the same time, it is true that many university classes still have a less-than-ideal tendency to focus too much on factual knowledge. Dan's best point is that the value of lectures where professors explain facts is falling as more and more information (including high quality lectures or interactive learning for basic facts and skills) is available for free. It is true that an increase in active learning tasks such as student-led discussions or debates, group projects and presentations still seems needed in many institutions, including my own.

----------
In relation to this, here is an example of a class video mini-project done at the University of Denver, apparently for an Technology in Education class for the purpose of getting students to know each other, work together, and identify some key points of using technology in education.

It may not be funny if you don't know the show The Office which it is spoofing, but it is a nice student movie. What kind of short movie could one of my classes at ICU make? Why not put together something for Academic Speaking on good or bad discussions, or on how to write an essay in Academic Writing?

効果10倍の(学び)の技法 シンプルな方法で学校が変わる! (PHP新書)

生徒も先生も頑張ってはいるが、従来のシステムに束縛され、学びの改善に関する進歩は滞っている。そう感じている教員は多いのではないでしょうか？私も同じ気持ちを持っています。

人はどういう時に効果的に学べるのか、「良い学び」の本質を理解し、教員たち自身が自分たちの仕事に関して良い学びの技法を実践することは非常に重要で す。そのための実用的な方法や導入例を書いています。是非おすすめです。また、著者のEmailが後部に掲載されており、お願いすると追加で学校改善とン 学びの「理論編」を送ってくれます。この内容もよくまとまっていて参考になります。


さて、あとは、読んだだけのままにせず、自分が何をやるかです。

自分が何をやるか：

まず、第一章に出てくる内容で、学校の中で教員同士で行う学びを実行したいと考えます。

１）何人かで持続可能的な教育研究レポートの作成・発表のサイクルをスタートする
この本で紹介されている上越市高志小学校の例を参考にしたいです。
・大きなビジョンを共有し、それに向かって実践する
・「やってみてよかった」ことのレポートを書く（A4サイズ一枚の簡単なもの、月に一枚なら問題なく可能なはず）
・レポートを貯蓄し、共有する
・月に一度のワークショップで情報の共有をする（グループで２０～４０分シェアし、感想を全体に一人４０秒で報告するなど）

２）同僚とコーチング形式で、お互いの授業を見て、批判的友達として１）良い点を指摘し、２）気になる点を質問し、３）感想のラブレターを書く
今の大学でお互いに授業を見て意見を交換したいと思うのに、スケジュールの関係などで実践できていません。その解決として３人のグループで一人が二つのクラスを合同で教えるま間に授業観察を行う、という手法がとても実用的です。

とりあえず、上記の二つができたら満足です。

この他にも
・計画・実行・改善の３部の振り返りジャーナルの持続的な使用（自分は今不定期）
・他の先生と同じ疑問を持ったら実践研究をおこなう（これはある程度行っている？）
・学びサークルやBookClubを作り、本を読み、課題を話し合う（これは学外ではあるけど、学内ではない）
・まじめに雑談をする時間の確保（これは今ほとんどない。廊下の立ち話のみ）
・学びのリーダーと模範は校長である（しかし先生同士でも十分だと思います）

第一章でこれだけいいアイデアがありました。
このほかにも学内の会議や研修を元気にする方法、学生主体の授業、Cooperative　Learningを実践する方法、親たちと協力して元気のある学びの環境にする方法など、アイデアがたくさんです。

自分自身の学び・教育の方法を考え直すきっかけになる良い本です。

Mark

Making EFL learning real and relevant to students' lives

I found this quote in an journal about Service Learning Studies published at ICU.

"Learning is more fruitful and dramatic when it is contextualized, when it is shown to have relevance to real life, and when it makes a difference in the lives of students and those they serve."

This leads to two questions.

First, in foreign language learning focusing on academic skills, how can we contextualize and make the learning relevant to real life?

For one, we need to show more video or other representations of real academic or professional situations in which effective (or ineffective) written and oral communication is being used. Assignments in classes should be linked to authentic activities and that link should be persuasively shown to students. Hopefully the examples and the tasks can be "cool"--something that inspires and creates excitement and makes students want to engage in.

Second, how do we make activities that can make a difference in the lives of students? The service learning system at ICU is an excellent example. Helping others can often lead to a higher awareness of the need for more learning, for a reexamination of self, one's cultures, and other cultures, and a critical inquiry into the dynamics that shape the world around us.

For language classes, will it make sense to design activities to try to make a difference somehow? Students can always do research on paper etc. with a specific local or global issue in mind, but that does NOT make any connection to real people. How can writing or speaking by about a real need? Interviews...emails...newletters...vodcasts...letter to the editor...presentations to persuade someone to do something...Specific ideas might be

• something to help refugees or other foreigners in Japan, something to an embassy in Japan
  
• something on an issue in an English speaking country that relates to Japanese students (overseas study, visas?, international relationships, depictions of Japanese culture...an letter to the editor or a letter to a policy institution about some cause?).
• something about their own university/community/life/culture - to introduce it in English to students of other countries
• Hmm...in any case, I want to get away from "Write an essay about education" (for me) That's not bad, and motivated students can use tasks like that to improve, but it is not engaging, inspiring, authentic.
  

Communication Strategies that can be used when you get stuck in speaking

Have you ever gotten stuck in a foreign language conversation, not being able to understand what the other person is saying, or not being able to express what you want to express? Did you stay stuck for an uncomfortable amount of time, or were you able to solve the problem and move on in a comfortable way? How many "strategies" for getting unstuck can you think of?

Canale and Swain (1980) include "strategic competence" as one of the four main components of communicative competence along with linguistic (accurate expressions for what you want to say), socialinguistic (appropriately polite choice of verbal and non-verbal language), and discourse competence (making a smooth transition from idea to idea so that you don't lose your partner). Strategic competence is defined by Canale and Swain (1980) as "strategies that speakers employ to handle breakdowns in communication. (p.25)" In other word, it is the ability to "keep going" with your communication in spite of difficulties with understanding or expressing ideas in the foreign language." Judging from my experience with professionals and college students in Tokyo, I feel that strategic competence is one of the areas in which Japanese speakers of English need more explicit practice.

I had read about strategic competence before and had seen taxonomies of strategies such as the one below adapted from Yoshida-Morise's article in Young and He's Talking and Testing (2001), but had never worked through them with a view to introducing them systematically to language learners. I'm considering some kind of introduction in my speaking class next term, but will knowing these be useful somehow? Also, how do I make this list into a usable resource for learners to draw on when they get stuck. What learners are interested in, unlike researchers, is what strategies they SHOULD use, not what they DO use.

Reduction Strategies (abandoning or reducing the meaning)
-Topic avoidance (staying silent or changing the topic)
-Message abandonment (giving up trying to say that idea)
-Semantic avoidance (changing the message to a simpler one)

Achievement Stragies (filling in the gaps of IL to achieve communication of the meaning)
1.Approximation (using a similar meaning when you don't know the right phrase)
--Lexical substitution (similar word)
--Generalization (more general word)
--Exemplification (listing examples to let the listener guess)
2. Paraphrase (saying the meaning in different words)
--Circumlocution (like playing Taboo)
--Word Coinage (two sleep days)
--Morphological creativity (internationalizated)
3. Restructuring - Changing to a different sentence structure
4. Borrowing from their L1, which is usually not effective
5. Cooperative Strategies - Asking the interlocutor for help
-Indicate they cannot explain "It is very hard for me to express."
-Ask how to say something "What do you call the..."
6. Non-linguistic gestures, mimes, pictures, sound imitations
7. Repair - saying it, then fixing it and saying it better
8. Telegraphic strategies--communicating without saying anything, just a pause
9. Fillers (in L1 or L2) nanteyuuka How do I say it?
10. Change of role (Asking a question instead of answering it)

So...all of these are good, of course, in the sense that learners have to do what they have to do to survice with limited language resources. There is nothing wrong with abandoning something that is not working as a message in communication.

Next, the most useful of these, as "good" strategies to teach seem to be:
1) Giving examples
2) Circumlocution
3) Non-linguistic circumlocution (?) - mimes, drawing etc.
4) Asking for help
5) In any case, not giving up on the conversation or going quiet. Continuing to find a way to go forward with the communication (assuming that is the best thing to do, of course)

Question:
What would a conversation between native speakers of English show? What kind of strategies for communication are used among advanced speakers to make the conversation go smoothly? Less proficient speakers definitely should learn from those.
Can a database of academic spoken language shed light on that?
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/ESL/FormulaicExpression/Definition.htm
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/ESL/Clarifying/Intro.htm
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/index.htm

What would a corpus of academic spoken discourse look like at ICU? What kind of speak acts will students actually need to perform? Also, in business or other professional arenas beyond ICU, what will be required of many of our students? (Is it even realistic to try to guess that?) How do we lay a foundation that will maximally applicable to the maximum number of students?

DeepeNing my knowledge of Nings as I create an online course resource

So I'm looking for a good way to create an interactive learning site for academic/professional speaking improvement for non-native speakers of English. I'm mulling over Moodle (not bad, but not public if I use our university platform), Google Sites, a blog on Blogger or Wordpress, or a combination thereof.

And I think I should look at Nings too. I once audited an online course on web literacies that used a Ning for instruction and interation. It seemed to have potential. But is it easy to use for the instructor and students?

Nings basically are communities-social networks of invited persons or people who join an open community on their own. That is basically what a classroom or course should be, in a sense.

http://improveenglishspeaking.ning.com/forum

The features of being able to easily upload videos or audio files make it conducive to a "speaking" class site. The ability to use forums for discussions between members is powerful and easy to use too. That puts it above using a class blog in some respects.

If it were only for my own class, it might be ideal. The problem is that I am trying to create a site not only for one class for a whole department and possibly for English learners all over the world. Of course, it may be realistic to try to do everything on one site.

I may need to combine a combination of Moodle (for institutional things), a Google site (for resources that should be easily accessible on the web without membership/community things), and a Ning for membership things (my class of this semester to share videos of their own speaking like a portfolio?) - Or should all students have their own blog for that, and just use an aggregator like Google Reader for their blogs...

Decisions, decisions. The easiest way is to get started in Moodle, I suppose, and branch out as needed with things that I want public or that Moodle does not support enough, with links back into Moodle...

Hmm...where's the perfect online course creator application with all kinds of options for private/public, resources, quizzes, surveys --like Moodle, only more flexible and restrictively open to the public?

Learning from the VALUE Project + Eportfolios (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education)

How can we really asses whether students are gaining truly valuable competencies?

I found this in my Google Reader's RSS feed to Academic Commons
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/value-project-rhodes-interview

The article is an interview with Terrel Rhodes, Director of the VALUE project and Vice President of the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). He discusses how meta-rubrics of Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) such as Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Written and Oral Communication based on the LEAP project (Liberal Education and America's Promise) are being developed by a number of universities to be used with ePortfolio based assessments of student learning.

Here is the developing draft of the Critical Thinking rubric.

The list of Essential Learning Outcomes is here, and basically includes:

1. Knowledge of culture and the natural world (science, math, history etc.),
   
2. Intellectual and practical skills (critical thinking, communication, inquiry, IT skills, teamwork),
   
3. Personal and social responsibility attitudes (intercultural sensitivity, civic awareness, ethics, lifelong learning), and
   
4. Integrative learning (ability to synthesize fields of knowledge/skills to adapt to new tasks).

That's a nice list. I'm particularly interested in how these outcomes can be evaluated holistically through e-portfolios. I think ICU should be moving toward a 4-year e-portfolio based assessment of projects in various classes, plus reflective essays for each project or class, a crystalization of learning for that term/class.

I liked the following quote by Terrel Rhodes: "We also know, from twenty or more years of pioneering work with portfolios in higher education that periodic reflections on learning by students are critical components of an education. Student reflections, along with self and peer assessments, guided by rubrics, help students to judge their own work as an expert would. These reflections and self-assessments all become part of the collection of work that gets evaluated in light of the Essential Learning Outcomes."

The e-portfolio eventually should supercede GPAs and other fragmented, less valid evaluation schemes as evidence of learning and ability for the student to show graduate schools, potential employers and other parties. One of the most important skill that a college can teach students is the ability to critically self-evaluate and reflect and set goals for further learning directions and interests.

So...are there any examples of eportfolios on the web? Here is a long list of schools in America.

Or, go no further than the authoritative website: https://www.eportfolio.org/conference/

Owen James of ICU has used a Blogspot based epf for his social learning class (example).

Clemson seems to have a nice program: http://www.clemson.edu/ugs/eportfolio/index.html with the following example of an education student: http://beckyportfolio.googlepages.com/

Iowa State University student example: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~mtwetten/documentary_poster.html
City U of NY-Technology has an eportfolio project here, with several samples and this type of project eval rublic. LaGuardia College has a large eportfolio project introduced here with examples like this and student feedback like this: The ePortfolio really helps me improve my critical thinking, writing and communication skills and most of all my computer skills. Learning all the digital tools help me become a better students because it is very helpful for the future. I can do better assignments due to my new knowledge. I also do lots of presentation and computer work for class and this ePortfolio helps me prepare for the future.

Also: Nice data on effectiveness:
"“How much has your experience in this course contributed to your knowledge, skills, and personal development in understanding yourself?” Eportfolio students = 80%, national community college average = 5-%.

The interview says there increasingly are "free Web tools that students can use to construct e-portfolios"...such as?

The Visual Knowledge Project is an important hub for discussions on how multimedia projects should be used in higher education. This article Multimedia as Composition is a How-To on introducing multimedia essays in composition classes instead of the traditional 5-7 page composition. Using Moodle etc. for peer review-another VKP article (Main takeaway is that US students found peer review very useful and draft improvement was quantified-having specific narrow categories to give feedback on is useful thesis, content, organization, development, critical thinking-with a rubric and explanation, students can evaluate papers quite well.)

Learner Conceptualizations of Self-Confidence

Here is another 2008 paper I wrote with colleague Dr. Ohata based on interviews we conducted with ICU students following the end of their intensive first year academic English program.
http://jalt-publications.org/archive/proceedings/2007/E048.pdf