The UB eportfolio project - reportIn the spring of 2003, Corky Brunskill, Sandy Peters, and Molly Ives Brower applied for and were granted a Faculty Educational Technology Grant to develop an electronic portfolio system that would allow students to collect artifacts that represented their work and experiences at UB.
In a large, comprehensive, research institution, where lower division students take many large-enrollment classes, it's important to make sure that undergraduates are seeing "the big picture" of their educational experience. We wanted to help undergraduate students think reflectively about their undergraduate careers: their course work, their learning experiences, their progress toward a degree, their intellectual growth, and their future plans. The purpose of the eportfolio project is to develop a way for UB students to preserve examples of their work, reflect on it, and distribute it to others.
Each year, a limited number of investigators from UB are awarded money to pursue projects that will benefit the campus community. Interdepartmental collaboration is encouraged, and competition is typically extremely tough. A project like this seemed like a good fit for the Faculty Ed Tech Grants, even though technically all three investigators are staff-not faculty. We were awarded a grant to pay for a graduate assistant to help us with the programming.
In the beginning, the eportfolio project was planned around using a large enterprise system called OSPI: the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (http://www.theospi.org). This ambitious offering from the University of Minnesota was a large database-driven storage system for shared electronic portfolios. It runs on many combinations of databases and servers, including several that we considered. We decided to run it on an Apache server with an Oracle database, as beta testers for the initial implementation of the OSPI, because there were no other beta testers using that configuration. We were one of only a few beta test sites that successfully installed, configured, and ran the OSPI, thanks to the efforts of SENS Associate Director Dave Yearke, who single-handedly implemented the OSPI on SENS' server infrastructure.
However, once we had the OSPI installed and configured, we realized that it would not help us complete one of our original goals: allowing customization of the portfolio for students in different areas of study. It also seemed more granular than we needed it to be, and we found the documentation lacking. While originally we were looking forward to providing better documentation, in the spirit of open source development, we eventually decided that the OSPI was not the development environment we wanted to use.
At about the same time, instructional designer Roberta (Robin) Sullivan assumed a new position in the Educational Technology Center, and was assigned to help guide and assist the project. In her former position in the University, Robin had collaborated on another electronic portfolio project that was very appealing. Data was entered in an XML document, which was used to populate a presentation created in Macromedia Flash. We loved the simplicity and the visual appeal of that portfolio project, but we didn't want students to have to enter data in an XML file. We had the idea of creating a graphical input interface, a more complex XML document, and customized Flash presentations that could use "themes" defined by the builder of the eportfolio.
At that point we were prepared to draw up job descriptions for the student assistants we knew we would need to implement the eportfolio. Because of the time delay caused by our evaluation of the OSPI's electronic portfolio system, we could afford to hire two students and pay them well. We decided to hire a graphic designer and a web programmer. Over the winter break we received approximately 40 resumes for both positions, but only a few applicants stood out as having the skills we were looking for. By January we had hired Penny Seow, an undergraduate who had an extensive background in graphic design in the publishing industry, and Narender Loganathan, who was completing his graduate degree in computer science. They quickly became integral to the team and have participated more in the planning process than student assistants often do, functioning fully as team participants.
The first thing they did was implement a web log, or blog (http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/Projects/eportfolio/blog/), that we could use to communicate, post files, and keep each other updated on our progress. Molly installed Movable Type, a Perl-based blogging application, on the web server, and she and Narender configured it in just a couple of hours. While the blog has been helpful for communication, it is a new concept for most people and participation by all team members was not as extensive as we hoped it would be.
We have a standing meeting every Friday, where we look at what's been done in the past week and decide what to do during the following one. In addition to the regular meetings, Molly and Robin have met with Elaine Casler and Melissa Miskiewicz, both adjunct faculty in the Graduate School of Education, who have given us valuable pointers on incorporating reflection into the electronic portfolio.
Originally we were planning to implement the online portfolio first, and then develop the standalone; however, it was decided that the standalone should be developed first, which required rethinking the process. While the model we had been working with--using PHP to write data to the XML file, which could then be read by Flash--worked well on the web, we needed a different approach for the standalone. Our first thought was to develop a Flash-based form that would pass data from the user's input form to an XML document on the user's hard drive. While earlier versions of Flash could do that, Flash MX no longer supported writing to the hard drive, due to justifiable security concerns.
After looking at several software applications, Narender discovered Runtime Revolution, which Robin and some of the other ETC staff were familiar with in its earlier incarnation, MetaCard. Revolution could do most of what was needed, but the lovely and effective Flash animations that Penny had designed didn't work well with it. Eventually those animations were turned into static graphics that could be used with Revolution, and the standalone was born.
Naren wrote an installer in Revolution that installs all the files, including the graphics files, the Revolution application, and an XML file. [FILL THIS OUT MORE]
(Look at the chart before reading the instructions. Please note that currently the directions on the chart are incorrect; clicking on the objects won't take you anywhere. This will be fixed soon.)
After the eportfolio application is installed, it can be opened by double-clicking on its icon. When the application opens, the first thing a user sees is an a Flash animation of a file drawer. The drawer opens and a piece of paper (the Welcome Document) floats out; the piece of paper has information about the eportfolio project and tells users where to find help. The first time the application is opened, the piece of paper is followed by the documentation opening; after that, the application opens to the editing environment.
The Editing Environment looks like the inside of a file drawer. It consists of five tabbed screens. The first tab on the left allows portfolio builders to add basic personal and contact information: name, address, phone, and e-mail. It also allows resumes to be uploaded. Portfolio builders can upload multiple resumes; we want to encourage builders to add resumes in different formats, and possibly even different kinds of resumes (e.g., functional or chronological). All items have a check box next to them so that the portfolio builder can indicate whether they should be included in the distribution.
Clicking on the Save button will write the Personal Information data to the XML file and create a copy of the uploaded document into the Personal Information folder that was created at installation.
The other four tabs are for other kinds of documents. For the prototype, the tabs are labeled Academic, Extracurricular Activities, Experience, and Miscellaneous. In the working version, users will be able to use whatever labels they want for those four tabs. All four tabs have the same layout (see this image): at the top, a button to browse for files, and a bar for builders to enter URLs of work on the web. At the bottom, uploaded files will appear in a window, and descriptions and titles can be added to them by clicking on the file icon, then adding data in the fields to the right of the file window. Check boxes next to the file icons can also be chosen to indicate when a file should be included in the distribution.
Clicking on the Save button will copy all the files to the appropriate folders and insert links to them in the XML document.
After the portfolio builder has added the Personal Information data and files, the distribution can be created by clicking on a button. Additionally, it can be previewed at any time after the the data has been saved by clicking the Preview button.
The data from the XML document is pulled into a Flash file, which becomes the distribution. In the prototype, the distribution only has one available format; in the working version, portfolio builders will be able to choose "themes" to alter the appearance of the distribution.
A demo of how the distribution works is online here.
The online component of the eportfolio is the next phase of development. It will follow the same basic structure as the standalone version of the eportfolio, but it will use PHP to pass the data to the XML document, which will be written to a server and then copied to a student's personal web space. The distribution will be Flash, and will appear as a downloadable file on a dynamic web page.
