Continue reading »]]>

As an ed-tech librarian I’ve been working with different departments on creating an online portfolio piece for their students. Unfortunately, this has been limited so far to portfolios that only demonstrate a student’s work in a specific department or class – not the student’s work across all classes, activities, and experiences.

I would really love to hear from other campers about their exposure to student portfolios or any method that went after a holistic assessment of the student rather than just a single class assessment.  It seems like we are training our students to see their time in college as unrelated little sound bites from class to class rather than seeing the big picture of their overall education.

In my dream world, having this big picture approach would mean students could create projects that span across their classes, including elements from Biology, History, and Literature, for example.  Faculty would get a sense of what their colleagues were doing in other classes because they would see it in their own students’ work.  But I will also be the first to admit that I can be naive about these things, so another part of this discussion might be how such an interdisciplinary approach to student assessment would or would not work.

Continue reading »]]>

photo by Quinn Dombrowski

This is inspired by a similar session I saw at THATcamp LAC 2011.  Anyone who wanted to share a cool tool / app / method that they were using in their classes or personal workflow could use the classroom computer to quickly demo the tool / app / method in about 3 minutes.  We were able to see over a dozen different new things or new ideas applied to old things in a very short amount of time.  It worked out great as an after-lunch pick-me-up kind of session and generated lots of questions, sharing, and quick experimenting.