ePortfolio Blog Hussain AbdulHussain

Looking around my backyard on a no longer surprisingly warm December day in Houston, I could have easily thought that I was outside on a balmy spring afternoon. Annuals in my garden that should be long dead are still thriving, alongside exotic potted plants sitting happily on the patio, when they should be hibernating indoors. In this moment I can see that things are not quite what they should be: I can see it, I can feel it, and I have experienced it before. My city was underwater a few months ago, due to "historical floods" caused by hurricane Harvey. This was a 16  months after the last "historical flood"; it appears to me that the term may be rendered meaningless at this rate.  There are reams of scientific data confirming that the climate is changing at an unnatural rate, and that the cause is most likely "anthropogenic", i.e. originating from human activity. Yet by and large in America and elsewhere, this topic is being discussed in terms of a po...

It was helpful to look at ePortfolios made by other Digital Learning and Leading students when I was considering what site platform to use and how to organize and format my information. I first had a look at the various ePortfolio examples, provided in the blogpost by Harapnuik , at the beginning of the DLL program. I decided not to focus too much on content others had posted at the time, such as learning manifestos etc., because I wanted my portfolio to reflect myself and my ideas. It was also helpful to look at ePortfolios of other professionals, both in the education field and beyond, to see how they were used to facilitate professional growth and communication. I reviewed the following portfolios by past DLL students: https://reallearning4kids.com/my-blog/ : Judy Cornelius's blog gives us a great look at her who professional life - from her job as a technology director at a school to her educational philosophy. I see that she has incorporated DLL assignments like the...

Upon reviewing the provided resources this week, it is clear to me that ownership is a crucial aspect of the eportfolio process because of the agency it gives the owner to make meaning of the process and product of ePortfolio. According to Harapnuik , learners are more likely to make meaningful connections with ownership of ideas. Learning activities need to be authentic by connecting them to the real world and allowing learners to decide the “what” and “how”, with a clearly defined “why” provided by the educator. If learners use their own ideas and data they really own the activities/problems/scenarios presented in the ePortfolio and will dig deeper and obtain a much better understanding of the concepts. Therefore, as described in the Creating Significant Learning Environments video, educators need to create SLEs where learning experiences and instructions are planned with learners achieving ownership as a goal. It described significant learning outcomes as being achieved by “conti...

While reviewing Helen Barrett’s 2015 presentation on ePortfolios, I noticed that she defines the ePortfolio as both a process and a product, saying that these two aspects must be balanced. I think that it is useful to examine the merits of ePortfolios in the education system by discussing these two aspects further. As a process, according to Harapnuik , the ePortfolio allows a learner to aggregate a digital collection as evidence of their learning. This is a active process where students are actively learning and making deeper and meaningful connections within the subject matter in order to gain mastery of the content. The use of ePortfolios also allows students to learn using the standards of Choice, Ownership, Voice and Authenticity described in the COVA model by Thibodeaux, Cummings and Harapnuik (2017). In COVA students have greater agency and responsibility in their own learning. Instead of learning material by repetition in order to recall it later, students using COVA ...

Getting Started When I completed my assignments for EDLD 5302, I was conscious of the requirement to build and maintain an ePortfolio, so I created all my assignments in a format that would look good in an e-portfolio. I will work on refining and adding to those during this course. Looking at the EDLD 5303 Getting Started Tips , I see that I need to evaluate if the platform I have chosen, New Google Sites will meet the requirements for an ePortfolio for the next 10 courses. One thing that stood out was the need for the sites to have a comments section, for which New Google Sites has no native capability. I looked to my PLNs and a web search and was able to find an article that proposed an easy workaround. I will also work on the organization and navigability of my ePortfolio as we add further material. Fundamentals of ePortfolios According to Harapnuik , when examining the concept of ePortfolios, we need to consider the domains of “What, Who, How and Why”. The “What, Wh...