Eportfolios and Employability

ePortfolios and Employability

Darren Cambridge

Academic Content Management SummitState College, PA

November 6, 2008

Managing Transitions

• Serving automobile industry regionally

• Track competencies and communicate them to potential employers

• Plan ongoing professional development

• Expanding to all of the Netherlands

Competency Matching for Employability

• Choose competency frameworks defined by employers

• Determine and document competency profile

• Compare with career profiles

• Connect to learning to fill gaps

• Match with jobs

Samantha Slade’s Competencies

Symphonic Employability

• Career identity integrates– Human capital

(competencies)– Social capital– Adaptability

• Cultivated by narrative

- Ashford et. al.

Boundaryless Careers

• No longer tied to a single organization

• Projects rather than jobs

• Line between work and home blurred

• “The terrific deal” (Reich)

Corrosion of Character

• Work and identity in the new capitalism

• Interviewed diverse US workers

• Moral values of long-term commitments and enduring relationships

• Alignment of the personal and professional

Enrico and Rico

Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative which made sense in a highly bureaucratic world, Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux; this world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative.

–Sennett, 30

Integrity

• Values, commitments, and actions cohere and interconnect

• Across personal, professional, and civic roles

• Over time

• Made consistent to a systemic understanding of identity

Composing a Life

• Five unconventionally successful women

• Improvisation, interruption, redirection

• “Their own kind of integrity”

• Iterative understanding• Requires time, craft,

stepping out

If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

Bateson, 15

“Finding the Thread in My Life”

• Used by 60,000 residents• Most active users demographically

representative• Use across roles suggests intrinsic motivation

and lifelong learning• Integration of different life roles in single

representation key to impact

I think it'd be difficult to separate completely, you know, who I am and what my immediate family loves are versus just me as a professional educator and nurse. … I am not someone who's isolated to the world of professional nursing education. I also have conflicting, or competing maybe, obligations within my life that I need to balance, just as students do and other professionals do, and I think that that's a good thing, to show … people that are reading my sites, I have other obligations in my life, and I manage to hopefully balance them all and be able to perform to the best of my ability in all those domains.

Tracy

Integrating Cultures at LaGuardia

• Recent immigrants and first-generation college students

• Bridging home and disciplinary culture

• Data showing impact on retention, student engagement, and pass rates

Hawaiian Values at Kapi’olani

• Organized around six native Hawaiian values and four stages of the journey of a canoe

• Bridging home and academic cultures

• Impact on student engagement and learning skills

Network SelfCreating intentional connections

Symphonic SelfAchieving integrity of the whole

From Subject to Author

• Ordering role of institutions and traditions shifted to individual

• From being our values, relationships, and experiences to having them

• Overarching principles that mediate competition

• Thinking about the self as a system you compose and conduct

Environments for Growth

• In both personal and professional domains– Learning as attitude toward life– Supported by inviting

environments rich in content and people

– Technology as a means to guide and support

• Communicated by the portfolios as a whole

• Can inform her profession

Good Work has Integrity

ExpertiseDoing work wellCompetencies

SocialProfessional contribution to society

IndividualPersonal integrity and meaning

EthicsDoing good workValues and meaning

Good Work(Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, Damon)

New Teachers as Integral Professionals at Virginia Tech

Networked

• Play, emergence, entrepreneurialism, flexibility, agility

• Ease, speed, low-cost integration

• Aggregation, association• Relationships

• Collection, list, link, snapshot

• Blogs, social networking sites, etc.

Symphonic

• Integrity, commitment, intellectual engagement, balance

• Time, effort, high cost integration (author, context, audience)

• Synthesis, symphony• Relationships between

relationships• Theory, story,

interpretation, map• Hypertext, ePortfolio

systems, concept mapping tools

Networked Contributions

• Correcting for reconstitute nature of memory

• Captures messiness and situatedness (Hughes)

• Builds social capital• Enables peripheral participation• Combine with symphonic through

layering

Blogging into a Profession

• Julie Hughes’ students in classroom placements at Wolverhampton

• Community of practice through blogging • “Everyday theorizing”

Linking/Thinking at Clemson

Technical Support for Integrity

• Rich and easy to use capabilities for visual design

• Ease in embedding multimedia and distributed content

• Flexibility of hyperlinking and structure

• Granular access control

Technical Directions

• Standardized way to share information about competencies and their relationship to evidence – LEAP 2A / PIOP – HR-XML – IMS/GLC Collaboration

• Method for negotiating meaning of competencies– TAS3– HR-XML – IMS/GLC collaboration– Emergent from actual practice: bottom up as well as top

down

• Means to identify competency information within and link back to integral context of individual career narratives– LEAP 2 RDFa

Adding Semantics

Electronic Portfolios 2.0

• Collection of 24 chapters detailing research from the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research

• Forthcoming from Stylus in December 2008

Ideas?

Darren Cambridge

George Mason University

dcambrid@gmu.edu

+1-202-270-5224

http://ncepr.org/darren/presentations.html