Stuck in a techie vice

Rae Allen - http://flic.kr/p/3hDGbd

I'm currently stuck, stuck in the middle of pushing an eportfolio system into the institution as a service and holding back because the infrastructure isn't there.

Currently our portfolio system, Mahara isn't hooked up to the rest of our institutions authentication system. Students who use the system have to use a completely different password than what they use for email, intranet, vle etc.. This is, for me, a major barrier for convincing students to use Mahara. Don't get me wrong, I want students to use the system, but what I don't want is for students to 'attempt' to use the system, fail, walk away never touching it again. 

Mahara does support its own password recovery tools but when does anyone ever ready the information presented after a failed login attempt? There's an opinion floating around that everyone walking through the doors are IT wiz's and unfortunately this vision is far from the truth, we need to cater for low digital literacies and removing even the smallest of steps for students using different systems has to be done. I really want to jump on pushing Mahara into the fold but I'm currently incredibly hesitant to proceed until it is in a situation where the support model is there for passwords, its integrated into the rest of the systems even if its only at an account creation/authentication level. 

I think until this happens, some exemplar portfolios, case studies and clear, concise definitions of what it's effective use is needs to lay the initial foundation, long before any wide scale marketing happens. Do we let technology drive the education or should the education drive the technology? I know what myself and what a lot of educators would prefer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Badge Generator & Issuer using Google Sites/Forms + Source Code

Image
So, the rationale for building this system came from a need for our institution to be able to issue Open Badges , an initiative backed by the Mozilla foundation for standardising the issuing of badges for 'verifying learning'. All the systems that allow you to issue badges to users are all tied in to big and bulky VLEs such as BlackBoard. So what happens when it's a face to face session? How can we issue a badge to a user when they aren't in the ecosphere of the VLE or institution for that matter? We didn't want to have to worry about usernames, registrations, training on another system etc So I had a scout around to see what was about. I came across work by  +Martin Hawksey  where he used Google Sites to wrap up Mozilla's Open Badges Issuer api and a Google Form to serve this api with the correct badge details.  Fab, this is 'sort of' exactly what we wanted. I mean 'sort of' in the greatest respect to Martin's work, simply put, I...
»»» Read more »»»

The Möbius strip of feedback.

Image
gfpeck -  http://flic.kr/p/98X3nk I've taken some time to look into one of the teaching and learning agendas being driven here at my institution. Feedback. I was advised as a starter to read David Nicol and Debra MacFarlane-Dick's (2004) 'Rethinking Formative Assessment in HE: a theoretical model and seven principles of good feedback practice'. This wasn't a massive read but had some very pertinent points about how the general thrust of how feedback should be thought about and articulated. I think one of the points I picked up more quickly than the others due to the work I've done on being a reflective learner was Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick's first principle, 1. Facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning. I think this entails more than just reflection though, it lays a pathway to progress further down the principles and provide more than the normal lines of feedback, the 'This isn't very good' and abruptly s...
»»» Read more »»»

Positive feedback on Elevate's student inductions

Image
Reith Lectures -  http://flic.kr/p/6q5y8N I did post this on the Elevate Blog, however I felt it needed to be here as well :) The latest intake of students at UCS were graced with the Elevate Team's presence during the student inductions, to not only go over our current institution services such as the VLE and the E-portfolio system but to empower students to look at personal learning networks and other Web 2 tools outside of UCS. Demonstrating the benefits of such tools as twitter, diigo etc This has changed greatly from our old student induction approach which was very point and click orientated mainly focusing around the VLE. It seems as though our new approach has certainly guided some students into trying some of the tools we suggested, below is a comment from a student who decided to have a play with twitter.  "Further to our conversation earlier today, I write to continue my eulogising about Twitter as a resource which has helped me immensely with my pos...
»»» Read more »»»