Nick Carroll

I just completed a factor analysis with SPSS using this guide. The factor analysis was conducted on a survey that was completed by first year engineering students that completed a semester using Dotfolio. The analysis was roughly done, and I’m not sure if I did it right as I had extracted 10 factors, when really I was looking for something closer to 3 or 4. In fact if I use the scree plot I can reduce it to 4 factors, however if I select initial eigenvalues that have a total greater than 1, then I end up with 10 factors.

Nevertheless, on preliminary inspection it appears that one factor is “Interest in a topic” and another factor is “Taking a shallow approach to learning”, and a third is “E-Portfolios are too much work”. I haven’t interpreted the remaining factors just yet. However, what I am interested in finding out is whether or not students that take a shallow approach to learning perceive e-portfolios to be a useful tool in their learning experience. I suspect that they don’t, which is a good thing, because prior research suggests that e-portfolios encourage deeper learning, which may indicate why they require a lot of work to maintain. Which also appears to be a factor as to why students do not wish to use e-portfolios in other engineering units of study. Anyway the factor analysis was kind of cool, and the results look promising. Just as well, because I needed the factor analysis to complete the last chapter of my thesis.

I can see now how businesses would employ such techniques for market intelligence. I guess those pesky marketers that phone you up during dinner asking you to participate in a survey would run a factor analysis on the responses, compile everything into a report and sell them for a lot of money to large corporations with big marketing budgets.

Abstract: Weblogs or blogs, as they are referred to by the Internet savvy, are gaining popularity as a medium for publishing content on the Web. They allow the author to voice their own opinion or ideas, and have the potential to reach a massive audience via the Web. On the other hand, e-portfolios are gaining recognition as a personal learning and development tool, where users can learn through reflection, and are able to showcase their work to demonstrate skills, competencies and capabilities. This paper presents an e-learning system that couples a blog with a learning e-portfolio. The system is called dotFOLIO and is currently being trialled in a first year engineering course taught at the University of Sydney. An evaluation of the system was conducted through a survey to gather the students’ initial perceptions of reflective learning and of using dotFOLIO for a learning activity that was previously paper-based. Preliminary results of this survey are presented.

Citation: Nicholas L. Carroll and Lina Markauskaite. “E-Portfolios and Blogs: Online Tools for Giving Young Engineers a Voice”. Seventh International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET 2006), July 2006. IEEE Computer Society.

Screenshots of Curriculum Central and Curriculum Tracker

It has been a hard slog over the past couple of months working on Curriculum Central and Curriculum Tracker. Finally, I have committed both to the OpenACS CVS repository.

Curriculum Central is a system for managing outlines for Courses or Units of Study. The system is targeted at academics that have to revise their course outlines before a course can be offered. Quality assurance is built into the workflow process, which requires approval from a department or school coordinator before the information is published for students to read.

Curriculum Central was derived from the problem that students came across when trying to work out what courses they need to complete in order to finish their degree. Students want to know what courses are on offer, as well as any corresponding course requisites. This meant that the School or Department were required to publish a handbook containing a list of course offerings and their dependencies. Maintaining the information in this handbook was not transparent to academics, and therefore inconsistencies crept in. This resulted in misinformed students that were not able to graduate, as they had completed courses that were not core to the degree they were undertaking.

Curriculum Central offers a collaborative space for academics to coordinate the curriculum for degree offerings. The information can then be published for students to view. The system offers two view types: course listings; and course maps. The course listing is a page showing a list of courses that are either core or recommended for a degree stream. The course maps is a graphical representation of the same information. Clicking on a course box will show all prerequisite courses in the course maps view. This allows the student to work out what courses need to be completed before enrolling in a desired course.

Curriculum Central also allows the student to export a degree overview from the system as an XML document. The student can then import the XML document into Curriculum Tracker, which is an application designed specifically for students. Curriculum Tracker allows the student to tick off courses that they have completed. This provides students with an overview of their progress through their degree.

Furthermore, the course information has been designed to have Graduate Attributes integrated into it. Graduate Attributes are qualities that a student gains from completing a degree. All courses help contribute to these attributes, which include: Communication; Research and Inquiry; Ethical, Social and Professional Understanding; Information Literacy; and Personal and Intellectual Autonomy.

By completing a course, a student is able to develop their graduate attributes. Curriculum Tracker offers a chart for students to track their progress in developing their graduate attributes. The chart allows students to identify their weaker characteristics, which may influence their decision in selecting future courses to enrol in, so that they can build on these weaker characteristics. Therefore, Curriculum Tracker allows students to manage their own personal development through their degrees.

Curriculum Tracker is a standalone application, but can be integrated into dotFOLIO quite easily. In fact, Curriculum Tracker offers much more when it is integrated with dotFOLIO. Using dotFOLIO’s clipper feature, students are able to clip work completed for a course to the course outlines in Curriculum Tracker. This provides context for the work completed, as they are related directly with the course that the work was completed for.

I believe these additions will make dotFOLIO that much closer to what people envision electronic portfolios to be.

Geo Map Overlay

I signed up for Google Analytics last month as I wanted to gather some statistics for this website. I thought about using Webalizer, which I use for other sites, but I wanted to give Google’s solution a go.

After signing up for Analytics and embedding a chunk for javascript into the site template, I had to wait a further two weeks before the chunk of javascript was detected by Google. Once it was detected it took a further 2 days before any reports were generated. So if you have just signed up, then expect a bit of a wait before you cast your eyes on your website’s statistics.

I was very impressed with the reports that were generated. Apart from the usual stats that you get with other server log file analysers – such as search engine keywords, entry pages and exit pages – you also get a map of the world showing you the location of visitors from around the world. From this map you can see that most of the visitors originate from Australia, Spain and the US. I suspect the Australian visitors are either visits from my friends, or sadly they could just be me. The visitors from Spain and the US are probably those that are interested in e-portfolios, more specifically tracking my progress on dotfolio.

For those visitors interested in dotfolio, I would like to state that I have not forsaken dotfolio. In fact I am working on this other package called Curriculum Central that will add learner focused tracking features to dotfolio. I have about 2 weeks left of development on Curriculum Central before returning to work on dotfolio.

I find the geographical demographics to be quite useful in providing an overview of this site’s visitors. There are other sections of the Analytics report that provides graphs and numbers. They are useful, but not as interesting as the Geo Overlay.

Spent most of the weekend working on a site design for dotfolio.org. I wouldn’t claim to be a graphics designer, but the site came out quite well if I must say so myself. The design was kind of inspired by the theme of this blog, which seems to be the trend these days.

One of the problems with the site is that it doesn’t display well for IE browsers. I can’t be bothered supporting IE browsers as they are cancer to the Web. The fact that they don’t support Web standards like CSS2 and XHTML very well, is a real pain for web developers, and you only realise this after spending some time learning to develop a fluid site using CSS. So if you want a much better Web experience, then ditch IE and use a standards compliant Web browser like Firefox.

I have ceased development on Portfolio (deployed version of dotFOLIO), as Semester 2 has just started, and students will soon be using it. In the meantime I will be merging changes back into dotFOLIO, and releasing it as version 0.3. This version will then be hosted at dotfolio.org.

I have also started looking at OpenLaszlo, a framework for developing Rich Internet Applications. I will be using OpenLaszlo to develop an application for showcasing e-portfolio artifacts as a concept map. The end result will be a flash object that integrates with dotFOLIO through XML/HTTP. Hopefully this will be the last bit of development work for my PhD.

I have registered the domain name dotfolio.org for the purpose of hosting a demo site for dotFOLIO. The site should be up and running in about two weeks from now.

A big “thank you!” goes to the people at SolutionGrove (in particular Caroline Meeks) and Zill.Net, as they have offered to host the site. Both companies do a lot of work using the OpenACS framework, which is the web application framework that dotFOLIO is built on.

I have done a brief search for concept maps and e-portfolios. I have found that there is a strong relationship between the two, and that there is motivation for developing a concept map package for dotfolio.

An example of a concept map can be found at IHMC.

A Norwegian Company called Cerpus have published papers on using concept maps in e-portfolios to assist in learning. In [1], the authors describe a system called BrainBank Learning (BBL), which is a “suite of intuitive tools for learning of concepts and their content”. The pedagogical method for learning is “meaningful learning within a constructivist learning environment”. The core of the system is the “ontology of a topic map for acquired knowledge in a lifelong perspective”. It is worth noting in this paper about BBL is that it has “some similarities with concept mapping as defined by Novak” However there are some clear differences. “It is not hierarchical and it does not (yet) support a map-like graphical display of the knowledge structures”. This is seen as a limitation of the system, but they further state that because it can “store big and complex knowledge structures” then it can be considered to be a “powerful e-portfolio tool”. dotFOLIO already has this funtionality with the Clipper tool. All that it is lacking is a graphical mapping interface.

[2] is another paper published by Cerpus on e-portfolios and concept maps.

In the bibliography section of “Managed Environments for Portfolio-based Reflective Learning“, there is a paper titled “Using concept maps to develop lifelong learning skills: A case study”, the link is broken, but it shows that concept maps have been considered for use within e-portfolios by the folks at http://www.eportfolios.ac.uk.

Concept maps are also used as a method for meaningful learning at the University of British Columbia. They aren’t integrated into their e-portfolio system, but are mentioned together here.

The idea of concept mapping is not a new one. “Joseph D. Novak, Professor Emeriti of Cornell University, is often cited as having developed the idea of using a concept map as a teaching strategy in the 1960s. Novak’s work was influenced by the learning theories of David Ausubel who emphasized the importance of a student’s prior learning and knowledge to his or her success in learning new concepts. Meaningful learning will only occur if the student can consciously and explicitly link new knowledge to concepts s/he already knows.” [3] Novak’s work on concept maps is described in [4].

As mentioned in the above resources, concept maps can be used as a tool for meaningful and reflective learning. I want to investigate its use as a tool for showcasing learning outcomes within an e-portfolio system. There is additional motivation for this, as the data used to generate the graphical representation of the concept maps can be described in XML or RDF, and could potentially be used as a method for exporting e-portfolios between e-portfolio systems. The concept maps provide an ontology and more importantly context for learning artifacts stored within the e-portfolio. So expect to see this within dotFOLIO very shortly.

[1] Lavik, S. & Nordeng, T. W. (2004) BrainBank Learning – Building Topic Maps-Based E-portfolios. IN The First International Conference on Concept Mapping Pamplona, Spain.

[2] Nordeng, T. W., Lavik, S. & Meløy, J. R. (2004) E-portfolios for Meaningful Learning and Automated Positioning. IN International Semantic Web Conference Hiroshima, Japan.

[3] Digital Knowledge Sharing through Concept Maps at TUFTS.

[4] Novak, J. The Theory Underlying Concept Maps
and How To Construct Them. Retrieved from http://cmap.coginst.uwf.edu/info/.

dotFOLIO is now being used by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney. It has been a hectic time for me, to get the site finished before Semester 2 starts at the end of July, but I made it… and with a week to spare. The site is located at http://portfolio.eng.usyd.edu.au. However, you really need to be a student to have access to the system. Although the student blogs will be made available to the general public.

I committed a new dotFOLIO feature to CVS. It allows the administrator to bulk upload a CSV file of users. This feature is similar to the bulk upload process in dotLRN, except that the CSV file for dotFOLIO requires a different format.