The Living Schoolbook

It may be that the free form portfolio already in OSP will meet some of our needs. The areas surrounded by the green area could be supported by the portfolio tool. The areas outside of that need to be developed.

Another lesson I learned from the OSP 2.5 meeting in Ann Arbor is that there seems to be renewed excitement over the “Free form” style portfolio. LaGuardia Community College is piloting the use of OSP to recreate the portfolio experience that they currently are providing for their students with a commercial tool.

I have to admit, the free form tool always seemed to have the least amount of potential to me and I had dismissed it as “child’s play”. However, after seeing what LaGuardia is doing and thinking about it in the context of the “Class Journal” interaction style, I think that it may have a lot of potential! A few things off the top of my head that I know need to be done to support that interaction style would be to allow students to display structured data on a page of the freeform portfolio.

Functionally, we need to be able to display structured data elements like forms, wizards (and hopefully, assignment data in the future) on a portfolio page. This functionality is not supported yet in the freeform portfolio. If this were rWiki, I could envision a macro that would run an XSL transform against known data types and yield an HTML snippet that we could use in the page.

The ability for students to tag a wizard page with one or more “Goals” is also important to support this interaction style, as is the ability to receive informal assessments (ratings) and feedback from their teachers/peers/friends on each page of the portfolio.

Our interaction style model also states that this is an event that is initiated by the teacher. This is also an important gap that would need to be addressed. Inevitably, teachers would want to schedule multiple portfolio reviews during the course of a semester and have the feedback and ratings attached to those teacher-initiated events.