The year that has been

The year that has been… I woke up this morning realising today is December 7th. 2013 is nearly over.
There has been some good, some great and some less good and some messy! 

I have:
 - deepened my understanding of the scope and role of ePortfolios, researched and analysed methods of implementation outside of schools, inquired into their potential for employability, professional certifications and acreditations, as well as personal branding.
- dived in to identify and articulate the attributes of the Life Long Learner
- related the building of an ePortfolio to digital identity, digital footprints and key digital literacies.
- made sense of the inherent links between personal learning and social learning and how to scaffold them
- assessed ways of restructuring the way we work to make best use of both personal and social learning
- evaluated a range of online tools and services to support the ePortfolio approach
- started using design thinking
- worked on OpenBadges, instructional design
- realized I am only a technology consumer ...
- had a first go at synthesing this into a minimum value proposition to get started with ThinkAgency
- contributed by invitation to many projects and conversations but failed (so far) to get all the stakeholders I have engaged with to contract me…

This has led me to:
 - identify salient common points between the "world of education" and the "world of work"
-  slowly break away from my "edu" echo chamber and go and listen/participate in other communities
-  discover an engaging and switched on to learning professional community
 - see the need for a common vocabulary when labeling and describing skills, strengths, competence
-  invest in attending conferences where I have listened, participated, presented, met with
-  see and work through others' problem with them
-  value openness as the modus operandi
-  talk a lot around dreams and ideas (sigh…)
-  throw myself in a lot of new related stuff wanting to start to understand OpenBadges potential, IT stuff around metadata, experiencing basic coding...
-  feel frustrated by not staying focus



Which in turns has opened my eyes to: (the confronting....)
- how limited I actually am to see the big picture: I find it hard placing boundaries around my ideas to have them evolve beyond just that
- the tyranny of too much autonomy! (especially let lose with a connected device)
- how limited my mastery around IT is beyond using/consuming
- how easily I forget I can't assume and must verify all hypothesis...
- how unable I seem to be at actually establishing my own actionable purpose!

Yet fabulous stuff happened such as:
- experiencing the world of entrepreneurship and start ups
- getting a feel for this whole ecosystem and going in with eyes wide open
- drawing some connections to the world as I have known it so far
- acquiring vast amount of new learning (some of it yet to be connected)
- witnessing what truly persuasive and convincing look like in practice
- starting to understand value in a commercial and business sense
- developing solid partnerships


I have maintained and grown lasting existing friendships.
I have worked on balancing my PLN, opened new channels and participated in a range of conversations.
I might have done it with too much gusto….
My teenage-like heart has fallen in love at first sight with many enlightening, supportive, challenging, critical new friends.
I count on time and actions to tell how these influences evolve!
I live with and love the most honest and caring dragon. I must never lose sight of this.

2013 as the "Year of Trying"! 
In the unstoppable momentum I have been saying yes yes and yes to so many things: I have done, got feedback, got knocked, undone, redone.
Today it feels that in terms of accomplishments for the year, well,  it is close to a "not a lot to show for". 
To move forward into 2014 I will need to do less Yes to learning and more Yes to executing.
I have a few weeks before making New Year's Resolution. Phew.

Why am I doing this?
The ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage for any organization. H. Jarche
Can I build a business model around this?
I have the ideas, the people, the want and the drive.
2014 will be the Year of the Concrete Steps.

Digital Presence? Digital Identity? Digital Citizenship?

Introducing, facilitating, training and talking about ePortfolios inveriably leads to consider digital identity, digital competencies and digital citizenship. These are the concepts bandied in educational circles. Increased use of tools purposefully to support learning and framed targeted use of tools to make sense of and create own understanding of the information we have access are redefining how we learn.
Developing an ePortfolio is one way to build sound digital competencies, alongside leaving a purposeful digital footprint.
I read an article this week that prompted me to think about Digital Identity, Digital Presence and Digital Citizenship.

In "What digital presence?" Louise Merzeau describes and explains how we build a digital presence from managing our Digital Identity and exercising our freedom to act or think online.
Her view point has resonated with me: while the technology as it stands to date only allows us to take limited steps to fully control our digital identity,  we as individuals can apply consciousness to our actions when using online services, and develop a managed digital presence. And collectively as users we can establish good practice.
Louise's analysis starts with the traces left behind as we use the internet.
She describes some traces as deliberate: we fill in a form when shopping online.
Some others are created when communicating and sharing: we "like" a Facebook friend's status, we leave a comment on a blogpost.
In both cases these traces are left voluntarily.
Our online activity, using a browser or being connected on LinkedIn, also and mainly generates quantities of traces that we leave behind unintentionally. As a result we in fact have very little control over the activity that shapes our digital identity.
Given the current technology, networks and economic strategies, we leave traces that we do not manage and thus we can not manage our digital identity if we reduce it to the traces we leave. While personal data, traces, privacy... are the object of necessary, current political, ethical and technical debates, they take time to concretise.
What to do in the meantime? We can be proactive and build a digital presence, with applying  deliberate behaviors associated with its management. Louise is not talking about an online presence from a marketing perspective though. While having a digital presence, reputation, clout are legitimate quests that relies on the traces left, she talks rather of being digitally present.
She proposes to include elements of temporality, just like in real life: our digital life is not made of traces that accumulate and that can be used in any order. Introducing the concept of time into our digital activity allows to evaluate and give context to the traces that are left behind for ever. And developing a coherent, rich presence in networks is the surest way to leave traces that are managed.
 Gmail and Facebook, amongst others, are free but we actually pay for them with our personal data: it is the currency, it has economical value for these businesses. Rather than being paranoid and buy in the media frenzy around the topic, best is to get informed, investigate options and negotiate what we are prepared to concede.
Developing sound digital competencies, expressing oneself in the right place in the right tone is also empowering beyond protection per se. Digital competence involves moving from being a consumer of services to being a content producer. Digital competence also involves using the tools to serve our purpose, for information gathering, collaboration, etc.  Just as we do in real life, we need to experience different settings, learn about them, adjust our behaviours, develop our memory of what we did, what we chose to forget, what we develop, what we can share when online.
Information on the web has also become highly personalized, we go and get the information we want and often we go to information that has been validated by someone on our networks, Twitter for instance. Information across the board is no longer top down. Louise argues that beyond the public/private debate, it is the high degree of personalization of the information that is influencing behaviors: we are not reading any article, we are reading an article that has been recommended.
The lines between our private (family, friends…) and public (work, community…) lines feel they are blurring since we are using similar platforms to live our digital life. But Louise also argues that not all conversations on networks are to be considered as public, just like the conversation at a nearby table in a café. It is how we use the information we have about others that matters: can we exploit any information we may come across? Is it because it is technically accessible that we can drop our ethical considerations and use the image of a drunken 16 year old to refuse him a job when five years on he presents an otherwise good CV?

All these behaviors are fairly new still and we all are learning together, while big corporate online services companies are moving at a very fast pace with their offerings so that we have little time to pause and think about what we are actually doing!
Schools and universities have a big role to play in framing theses competencies as they have no choice but to work with the tools.
Careful choice around sustainable online practices, scaffolded by teachers who themselves are proactive about their digital presence is attainable for learners from an early age, it is about instilling valuable behaviours that grow and evolve with the different life cycle we go through. Which could be captured, thought about and shared meaningfully and purposefully in an ePortfolio! I know you knew this was coming!

ePortfolio: what tools, what functionalities?

I have recently come across two amazing examples of professional ePortfolios:

- @traintheteacher is a regular and prolific blogger whose reflections are tagged, using the Registered Teacher Criteria, collected and selected for the purpose of her PRT ePortfolio using Wordpress (a powerful blogging platform)

- Don Presant's career ePortfolio presents selected personal information, his CV as well as the services he offers, alongside much evidence of his research and presentations, using Mahara(a purpose built ePortfolio system).

A range of online services can be used and combined and together make an ePortfolio for their owner who want to showcase and flesh out their achievements, skills, and competences beyond the wording on their CV.

Typically the blog (like this one!) is a place of where one goes to put down ideas, or accounts of experience, or reflect on what they have done, where they are now and what they can do next. 
What else is there?
Vizify can be used as a visually pleasing aggregator of the stuff one produces in a range of spaces, for a range of interests (eportfolio for life wide learning!)
About.me can be used as a cover page to your ePortfolio.
Belonging to groups (on Facebook for instance), nings , listserves,  having a twitter account,  etc is a way to bring in the social component to one's learning, where you get some and you give some and where ideas can be tested out.

Using online services like those imply that the user has embedded a level of comfort with publishing online for a purpose that is usually self determined, or for personal branding.

Developing an ePortfolio, and the mindset to go with it, is the result of a range of factors: it is undoubtedly beyond the "tick the box" requirement that any professional body or employer may require. ePortfolios are a place where one can let things stew and develop, as work in progress. They also allow the owner to showcase their stuff when/where/to whom it is necessary or timely. One does not become a reflective practitioner the minute they create an account on MyPortfolio nor do they always keep organised, meaningful traces of their learning with Instagram or SoundCloud. Nor necessarily act on the feedback left on way of comments... That is why I am talking about adopting a ePortfolio mindset! And having a self chosen purpose to get started.

Developing an awareness that any of these tools actually support learning by making it visible to the owner while at the same time making the owner visible to a chosen audience or to the world at large is well worth investigating. ePortfolios have the potential to accompany the development of a range of digital competencies as well as being a space to display them.

I have also recently stumbled upon netice.fr a French start up focused on providing ePortfolio services as well as a Mahara instance, for employability with an emphasis on insertion in the world of work (post formal education or after unemployement)  supported by the development of digital competencies. Netice.fr has caught my attention, in particular as it seems to be what I would like to be part of here in NZ!

So that finally takes me to the point of this entry, phew! Why a dedicated ePortfolio space like Mahara for instance rather than a suite of etools that the owner bundles together? After reading the report of ePortfolio use at Plymouth State University to which Ellen Mary Murphy contributed (and which link is no longer available), here is what I came up with to start visualising what functionalities support ePortfolio development, when they accompany the development of digital competencies and require an element of privacy and control over what is published. Work in progress...