This posting by Graham Attwell mentioned the growing interest of eportfolio in Europe because of “an increased interest on personal learning” … “and of course it’s partly due to the ongoing pressure for lifelong learning”.
Attwell defines the following activities in developing a portfolio:
* Identifying learning and achievement
* Reflecting on learning and achievement
* Recording learning and achievement
* Validating learning and achievement
* Presenting learning and achievement
and the sentence that i find most interesting follows: “Assessing plays no part in this.” this really makes me ponder, does assessing a portfolio ‘kills’ a portfolio? if so, how are we going to resolve the assessment issue, which is one of the core concern of our teachers? *hmm*
Physics behind Roller Coaster
Darren shared this learning object with us yesterday. It allows students to experiment with 2 variables, starting speed and amount of track friction. In the “Roller Coaster Science” section, concepts on enery and friction are introduced. It’s a perfect tool for self-discovery of primary science.
Check it out 🙂
How computers make our kids stupid
This article reported the situation that is on-going in Toronto, Canada. Computers and the internet are found (some findings by the children themselves) to have the following effects:
1. distract kids from homework
2. encourage superficial and uncritical thinking
3. lead to compulsive behaviour
4. “MMORPGs” (massive multi-player online role-playing games) are highly addictive and a lot of people have screwed up their lives playing them”
5. things kids read and see online invade their imagination
6. whizzes through homework in half an hour, and then starts surfing, gaming and chatting with friends on MSN until 1 a.m.
7. “I procrastinate a lot more than before and everybody’s marks suffer to some degree if they spend as much time as (I did online).”
How we are going to educate our children to control this ‘beast’ and not the other way round really needs serious pondering … come to think of it, I wouldnt be surprised if some adults are also ‘suffering’ from some of the above symptoms … ?????
3 links for future reference
Gathered this 3 links via my feeds:
1. The big portfolio debate
2. On portfolio – what John Dewey might have said
3. Some eportfolio readings
4. UBC e-portfolio blog
… keeping these for (very near) future reference.
IHMC Concept Map Tool
Institue for Human and Machine Cognition is offering this free to download Concept Map (CMap) tool.
[Source: eSN]