As this is a longish comment on “The ePortfolio Debate” by Mike Bogle, I post it on my own blog.

Hello Mike,

Thank you for bringing the Twitter conversation onto your blog. That’s how I realized that there was more going on than just the 2 tweets I had seen earlier.

You are correct when you say that e-portfolio solutions (no matter what they may look like) be available beyond educational institutions to ensure that (former) students continue to use them. In contrast to LMSs, e-portfolios center around the student.

I have not yet met anybody from the efolio provider in Minnesota, but from what I can gather from the web site, Minnesota provides space for all its residents to create an e-portfolio at eFolio Minnesota for free (to a certain data allowance).

For Mahara, there are services around that offer free hosting (again, up to a certain data allowance). I do not know how many there are, as there is not yet a list of them, but I have seen FolioSpaces (hosted in Australia primarily). Ian writes a bit about FolioSpaces outside of their web site here. If anybody knows of others, I’d like to hear from them.

In New Zealand, the MyPortfolio services for schools and tertiary education are hosted Mahara solutions that do not sit on an institution server. Thus it is easy for students to take along their portfolio when they switch schools. On myportfolio.school.nz they only have to be put into a different institution. There is not even the need to export and import a portfolio. If they go on to study at university, they export their Mahara portfolio and have it imported into myportfolio.ac.nz. Later on they can export it again and use on another hosted solution or even a different portfolio system (that follows the LEAP2A portfolio standard).

It will be interesting to see how far we can take “lifelong” in the electronic world. Will it actually be feasible to work with one (dedicated) portfolio software for more than 5 or 10 years or will we have to find other solutions and try to archive a certain phase instead of having to upgrade everything to the current software?

Kristina

My learning of Kiwi English continues. And it is an interesting journey.

Almost from Day 1 did I encounter “Ta” in emails from colleagues. As we work in an IT company, my first thought was: check an internet slang dictionary. I found “thanks again” for “ta” in Netlingo. Thus, I didn’t wonder about it anymore.

However, recently, I’ve also been hearing people say “Ta” and not just write it.That got me thinking again. When I asked them what “Ta” actually meant, they said it’s a short form for “thanks” that is very frequently used in Kiwiland. According to the Urban Dictionary, “Ta” already has a long history on the British Isles. As I did not spend much time there, I wouldn’t know how extensive the use is there nowadays.

“Ta” is always used by itself. You wouldn’t say (or at least I’ve never heard anyone say it) “Ta again” or “Ta for your help”. It’s just “Ta”.

So: No mysterious Internet slang. Just a very common Kiwi English word.

OK. I mosey along now.

Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal at Albany Senior High School (ASHS) spoke at Aotea College today about how his high school uses Moodle and Mahara. Albany Senior High (near Auckland) is New Zealand’s first open source school that promotes using open source software but also engages in open education beyond the software aspects.

Since my arrival in New Zealand two months ago, I have been hearing about Mark’s promotion of open source and reading posts by him, particularly on the MLE Reference Group, and finally had the pleasure to meet him and learn more about how his school uses the learning management system Moodle and the e-portfolio system Mahara.

ASHS tries to place as many software tools as possible online so that differing operating systems can still access them without problems and students can also work with their own laptops connecting online through Wifi.

It is up to the teachers to use Moodle with their classes or teach without it. Thus, the knowledge about Moodle can be situated on a continuum. Mahara, however, they have to use for their appraisal process. At ASHS professional development is called professional inquiry because it is an exploration and reflection. Thus, teachers get acquainted with it even if their students happen to not be using it yet.

From next year on, all student portfolios will be e-portfolios. Currently, they can have a paper-based portfolio alternatively.

Mark showed us some of his favorite modules in Moodle, informed us how he uses them in his classes, and how easy it is to set them up. He uses a number of Moodle activities to get feedback from his students on his teacher which he then can also use for his appraisal documentation. For example, students fill in questionnaires about his classes. He also looks at the statistics of activities, e.g. Hot Potatoes quizzes, to find out where students may need some more time because they did not answer certain questions correctly or it took them a very long time to get the answers right.

In just two hours he gave a small group of interested teachers from the Porirua region a good overview of what can be done in Moodle and how Mahara can be used as e-portfolio by both students and teachers and answered questions.

I am looking forward to his talk at KohaCon on October 26, 2010, when he will present on his school’s use of Koha, the open source integrated library system.

The HTC Desire is my latest toy. Instead of an iPhone 4 I wanted to explore an Android phone, especially after having seen a Nexus One of a colleague.

I started transferring all my contacts, installed a few apps and set up my friend streams. Currently, I am in the clean-up phase and have to stop trying to locate the power button on the right-hand side and hitting the home button to turn on the phone.

My HTC Desire and me; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

What I like best

The flashing notification light which alerts me to anything that I asked to be notified about. As I am not attached to my phone like a Siamese twin, it could happen that I went an entire day without turning my iPhone once. A flashing light would have allowed me to respond to messages more quickly.

What I like least

I have to go through my address book and add the birthdays and anniversaries as Google contacts does not interpret the fields from my Mac address book correctly. Let’s see how the sync works out in the future. But at least now I don’t have to run a script to create a birthday and anniversary calendar, but I can subscribe to my contact’s birthdays and anniversaries in Google calendar through my Google contacts.

Agile software development is still a bit obscure to me. As I have been hearing a lot about it recently, primarily through company presentations at the Meet & Greet in preparation of Summer of Tech, I went to a presentation today to find out more about “agile”.

The Agile Professionals Network organized the presentation “Agile Undercover: When Customers Don’t Collaborate” given by Rashina Hoda. Her presentation, as already suggested by the title, focused on the customer and what an agile team can do if the customer is not fully on board.

She has identified 6 types of customers in agile projects in her research in India and New Zealand that she placed on a continuum:

1. Product owner: That’s the perfect customer, a rare breed (in any project).
2. Story owner: The project is split up into multiple stories (in non-agile words: parts) and each one has a person responsible from the customer side. That means that the responsibilities don’t have to be centered in one person who may not always have time, but different people from the customer side are involved at different times.
   This ensures that a customer representative is there at all times. However, I see the danger in not being able to tie everything together. This type of customer requires that the individual story owners talk to each other and keep each other informed so that decisions are made along the same lines.
3. Just demos: Sometimes agile development projects can be happy if the customer shows up for the demos (no other interaction willingly or out of necessity). They then try to sneak in a discussion at the end to go over the development and receive feedback on it as well as some pointers for further development.
4. E-collaboration: Sometimes it’s not possible to meet face-to-face. That’s when e-collaboration comes in handy so that the developers and the customer can still see each other and discuss work. Video-conferencing where possible, but also text chat help greatly to stay in touch and involved.
   I would have placed e-collaboration before just demos because I sense a greater involvement than in the just demos part, but of course, that always depends on the project.
5. Customer proxy: If a customer can’t be present, somebody else from the development team or closely related can act as stand-in to lead discussions and then communicate the results back to the customer, receive their opinion and feed that back to the team.
6. Extreme undercover: That is the worst-case scenario. This can happen when the development team decides to use agile methods, but the customer is not aware of that and thus is not involved in the process. That is often the case if the customer as too scared of using agile or opposes it.

These types of customer are not new because I can also see them in “regular” projects. However, Rashina pointed out that customer involvement is particularly crucial for the success in agile projects, and a team has to find ways of compensating for not-ideal customers.

As I just got a brief glimpse into agile software development / agile methods, it would be great to actually see such a project work and compare it to my project work experience.

This presentation was based on “Agile Undercover: When Customers Don’t Collaborate” by Rashina Hoda, James Noble, and Stuart Marshall which they presented at XP 2010 in Trondheim, Norway, in June 2010.

After a wonderful lunch and small talk at the lunch buffet, we had two more sessions at the EYC unConference today. You can read part 1 and part 2 before continuing if you haven’t already done so.

Low budget user testing

Courtney Johnston offered to facilitate a session on user testing and how to do that on a shoe-string budget.

A lot of user testing can be done by using paper and web site mockups. You also do not need hundreds of users, but can often already get an idea when you ask about 6 people to participate in a card-sorting activity or give them a task to complete on a web site. Some professional usability testers may bury their head in the sand when they read these lines, but here were are talking about testing web site for communities that operate on a very low till non-existent budget who cannot afford to have sessions in a usability lab and use awesome, but expensive software and setups to conduct their testing.

Often, even only with a few number of people, you can get an idea of whether a certain navigation works, whether menu items are named logically etc. However, when you only have access to a small number of people, you should be acutely aware of their ICT background to interpret their answers correctly and not make false assumptions and objectifying these.

Courtney Johnston provides tips of how to do low-budget user testing; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Feeding back to software developers

Tim McNamara offered the last session that I went to for this day of learning more about community involvement online. It was on how to give useful feedback to software developers. That was a dear topic to me as I get frustrated sometimes when people write forum entries or send me emails from which I cannot really make out the problem and try to solve it. It always takes a lot of effort to figure out what the issue might be and how to solve it.

The Google Project Hosting issue tracker is a good example of how to guide users in providing constructive and useful bug reports. When you open a new issue, you don’t just get an empty text box, but depending on your bug report, you can choose a template which then gives a few suggestions of what to include in your bug report. The template for a “user defect report” has the following items:

What steps will reproduce the problem?
Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

What browser (or hg/svn client) are you using? On what operating system?

As these questions are written directly in the text box, people can’t overlook them.

I will have to check if we could also add such pre-populated text in Launchpad for people filing Mahara bugs. That would be very useful.

Now what?

Currently, I am still in the processing phase because there was a lot of information today, a number of web sites to check out, things to try out for myself and wrapping my head around. It was great to meet people who create web sites for non-profits and a lot of times use open source. Joomla was talked about quite a bit as a person ran two sessions on it whereas other CMS were hardly mentioned (we should remedy that next time). However, as was pointed out when the Wordle was shown: Drupal sits on top of Joomla and has “brain” right next to it.

EYC unConference in a Wordle; created by Wellington ICT

A big Thank You to the organizers and volunteers as well as the participants of the unConference who made that day a great learning experience.

As written in the previous post on the EYC unConference, everybody could propose a topic for a session and gather people to discuss it. After my initiated session on how to actually get people to use a community web site in which the attendees greatly participated and did not need a lot of facilitating, I went to a similar session. There the focus was on the use of social media, in particular Twitter and Facebook.

Online communities and social media

People saw the purpose of Twitter and Facebook differently and it always came down to finding where the people you want to reach hang out and picking them up from there.

Another important point that was raised was that not everybody is using social media and should not be forced to do so in order to join a community, but they should have alternative means for engagement. though that does not mean that the lowest common denominator should be chosen. It is worthwhile to educate community members about the possibilities of social media and offer them training so that they can become literate in its use.

Despite that, especially established community members should not be forced to go out of their way to continue engaging. Somebody came up with an analogy to a restaurant that was picked up by Joanna McCleod. When regular patrons come to a restaurant, they should not be made to go out again to find a flyer that is being distributed on Lambton Quay in order to be able to dine at that restaurant. They should still be able to just go inside without any detours.

The session attendees agreed that it is about the way of communicating and not necessarily the tool. Twitter and Facebook can change rather quickly in this day and age. So you may have to switch to another service. However, the idea of the social networking will persist. And you should not be afraid to pull the plug and discontinue using a tool when you realize that your community does not take to it. Your efforts can be used elsewhere more productively.

Never mind the nice weather outside. Community's social media use is as good. CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Web accessibility

Robyn Hunt talked about what everybody could do to improve their web sites to embrace accessibility. That does not only mean that people with disabilities can get more out of a web site, but it also means that the web site is improved for everybody as accessible web sites often also include looking at usability issues that might frustrate “regular” users as well.

I know that I have to improve the accessibility of my blog here, e.g. give meaningful alternative text and not just my picture caption and probably improve a whole bunch of other things that are normally hidden to the eye, but help people greatly who use screen readers.

Learning more about accessibility is a project on my ToDo list for which I will have to set aside a time and either participate in a workshop or read relevant texts.

One thing that particularly stuck in my head was that Facebook is not a good page in terms of accessibility because it is quite busy among things. However, when viewed on a smartphone, people with disabilities can participate as the content presented in the smartphone apps is basically clutterfree making it easier to use. Thus, though the service was not changed, a change of device suddenly enables a number of users to finally participate. And the internet offers independence and freedom to a great many people with disabilities as they can now get information that they had previously no access to and they can also engage in online conversations.

I cover the rest of the day in part 3 on the EYC Conference.

Today the Engage Your Community unConference, initiated by Wellington ICT, took place at the Rutherford House at Victoria University in Wellington. It was “a day long learning event for community webmasters and others using IT for Wellington’s communities”. On top of that, it was free thanks to its sponsors.

Around 90 people fought the urge to stay outside in the wonderful sunshine and rather warm temperatures to engage with like-minded people in discussions around using the web with communities. Some people had already thought about a topic to present beforehand while others decided on the spot.

I belonged to the latter category. After listening to a number of people shouting out their topics in the opening session, I thought I did not want to bring yet another tool-centered session to the table. Therefore, I decided to offer a session on online community engagement after all the tools had been set up and talk about what happens then, how to get people to participate, and how to keep them interested in the conversation.

Engaging communities online

As I do not have eternal wisdom in that area, but wanted to share my experience as well as tips I had learned at WordCampNZ just a couple of weeks ago, in particular from Suzanne Kendrick on Day 1 and Matt Miller on Day 2 (using his example of story telling to not talk about your business but just something interesting), I started the session also hoping that others would want to share their thoughts.

The group of about 18 participants took to the topic and brought in their own perspectives and community management tips that worked for them. Tim McNamara volunteered to jot down notes. It became clear that people in one community do not all communicate in one space, but that community organizers who want to reach their community, should be present in a number of spaces online and offline to cater to the community. Discussions on Facebook may differ greatly from those in a discussion forum on the community site itself. Sometimes just having a “like” button next to a post already helps to engage those (the majority) who would otherwise not comment.

A great book to read on the topic of online community stewardship is Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith.

Whiteboard notes thanx to Tim; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Are you interested in learning more how the day progressed? Continue with part 2 and then part 3.

Today was another event in preparation of Wellington’s Summer of Tech 2010: the Meet & Greet.

40 companies have so far signed up for Summer of Tech and at least 35 attended tonight’s event with one or more representatives.

It was a great and well-organized event. We had the chance to talk to students interested in working for Catalyst IT for their internship and get to know them a little bit. We can take these impressions into account when we go into the next phase which will be shortlisting students for 10-minute interviews.

Meet & Greet; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

In preparation for the event I looked at the profiles and CVs of the students who were interested in our e-learning team position. Some were done very nicely and in an easy to read format. Others however were written entirely in prose. No bulleted lists at all or even keywords highlighted. It was rather difficult for me to stay interested in the novella-length CVs as they just took a lot of time to go through and pick up the important stuff.

I am not a fan of standardized CVs, and the personality of the application should come across. However, some points should be taken into consideration when writing a CV. There are lots of web sites that expound on that. One of my favorite ones is JoblineLMU (because I know the creators and have taken a course with them. ). The resources can be worked through in self-study. It was created having German university students in mind, but others can also find valuable resources and tips in there.

Students writing CVs should keep in mind that people who don’t have much time are going to read their CVs. Being concise, to the point and stating things in a fashion that is easy to grasp are very appreciated.

I am looking forward to the next step, the speed interviews to hopefully find somebody who’d be a good fit for our e-learning team.

My summaries of the presentations I listened to at WordCampNZ 2010 continues. If you missed the previous installations, you can read Part 1 and Part 2. A list of presentation slides can be found on the WordCamp NZ site.

This blog post covers the morning sessions on Sunday, August 8, 2010.

Matt Miller – Business Communities

Matt talked about building an online community for businesses in Hawke’s Bay. Instead of choosing a dry name like “Hawke’s Bay Online Business Community”, they came up with Fruitbowl.

They will soon celebrate their 1st anniversary and have learned a lot of things during the last year. For example, that social media is about people and not hearing about business all the time. That resonates with the other presentations on communities by Suzanne and Courtney.

Very successful posts on their blog (58 contributors already) deal with non-business things, e.g. a list of suggested restaurants and the making of a duck shooting boat. Tell stories and do not promote your business endlessly on your blog because people want to read stories is Matt’s advice.

A cool plugin that Matt showed and uses on Fruitbowl is Author exposed. If an author provided details about himself, these are shown in a small pop-up immediately on the page and you don’t have to navigate away from it first.

Take-home message: Setting up a community for (local) businesses is worthwhile because they can interact differently. The community should not just be a self-promotion and ad space, but a place where stories can be told and where people also connect socially.

Matt Miller; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Jeffry Ghazally – Extending WP e-Commerce through plugins

Jeffry had a talk prepared that led the audience into the depth and intricacies of the plugin that he and his company develop, WP e-Commerce. The main message that was important to me was that a plugin should never be hacked, but added onto ideally via another plugin that hooks into the existing one. That way upgrade issues can be avoided.

Jeffry did a live demo of his plugin showing off the technical side, but also giving us a glimpse at the frontend. For example, he uploaded audio files that were added automatically and retrieved from the database for purchasing. Basic information on the songs were provided and the songs could also be previewed before purchase.

Jeffry reflected his impressions in WordCampUK + WordCampNZ. You can also find his slides there in the recording from WordCampUK.

Take-home message: Leave the original code alone and extend it by writing a plugin. And: live demos can work.

Jeffry Ghazally; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Special mention – Vicky Teinaki

Vicky Teinaki deserves to be mentioned specially. She was called the Twitter Stream Queen because she covered WordCampNZ continuously and exhaustively on Twitter. Her speed of finding references and cranking out the tweets were amazing. She has written a blog post How I Live Tweet Conferences that should be on the reading list of anybody wanting to embark on such a task.

She received a reusable coffee cup and specialty coffee for her contribution to WordCampNZ.

Vicky Teinaki, Bill Bennett, Jason Kemp, and unknown woman; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Final thoughts

The 1.5 days of WordCampNZ were brimful with a variety of presentations that ranged from providing an overview of BuddyPress features to talking about examples of designing WordPress sites to building and managing communities in WordPress (and in general) to nitty gritty technical issues.

One topic that I missed, I realized on my way back home, was the educational sector. Why was there no talk about the use of WordPress at school or university? Are there not so many educational users in New Zealand? Did they think a presentation by them would not fit because all other presenters came from the business field?

My shining example of WordPress use that I refer to when I want to get inspiration is University of Mary Washington where Jim Groom started out with WordPress MU and expanded to BuddyPress. His experiences have been tremendously positive and he gets invited to present at conferences and other institutions to talk about his implementation and in some cases also assist setting up something similar.

In hindsight, I could have asked, once I knew that I would attend WordCampNZ, if there was still a slot available to talk about using WordPress in a university study program. But for some reason I felt far removed from Luxembourg (and it was not only the distance) and especially the university to talk about the use of WordPress in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences during the academic year 2009/10.

During this short conference I learned a lot and not just related to WordPress. A number of presentations that I followed touched upon topics that are of general interest and have impact also on other things and not only WordPress, e.g. community management, creating a custom theme, and writing. But also the sessions that dealt with technical issues were helpful because I could always understand parts of them and make sense of these parts and learned more about the technical side of WordPress.

A big Thank You to all organizers, in particular Jason Kemp, who was the spokesperson and kept us updated before, during, and after WordCampNZ 2010.