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Personal Learning Environments
Unleashing the Power of Web 2.0
6/1/2008
Students take their ePortfolios to new levels, while the pundits look on and try to fathom what's next, and the market responds with Web 2.0 goodies.
Students take their ePortfolios to new levels, while the pundits look on and try to fathom what's next, and the market responds with Web 2.0 goodies.
The Washington State University ecodesign project began as an exploration of more effective ways to explain a complex field-- and as a way to get the university's engineering students interested in studying it. The challenge broke new ground: Until recently, ecodesign was not likely to pop up on most engineering students' radar. But to solve the problems associated with global warming and climate change, it had become clear that engineers needed to be educated in ecodesign techniques.
So, led by a WSU faculty member collaborating with a research assistant, a corporate sponsor, and a still-growing network of university and industry partners in the US and Europe, the project team eventually developed a framework to help make sense of the diversity in the ecodesign arena, and to establish an evolving bachelor's-level ecodesign curriculum for both US and European schools of engineering.
The project team documented its efforts, conclusions, and solutions in the awardwinning electronic portfolio, "Understanding Ecodesign". Happily, the team's extensive use of multimedia attracted the attention of the WSU ePortfolio Contest judges and snagged it one of two second-place awards. Developed on SharePoint Server (Microsoft's web-based collaboration and document management platform), the ePortfolio includes social networks, video mashups, wikis, access to cloud (web)-based versions of MS Officetype software, and lots of links to Wikipedia and other web-based resources. Project Lead Chuck Pezeshki says the team also made extensive use of Skype for daily communication with Europe, including video when possible.
Pezeshki credits his wife and partner on the project, Kelley Racicot, a WSU graduate with a BS in mechanical engineering and an MA in education, for building most of the ePortfolio, and for all of its technical sophistication. Not so surprisingly, Racicot reveals that Web 2.0 technology was a focus of her graduate studies in education.
"I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we might use some of these new technologies in the classroom, and I feel we used them very effectively in the ePortfolio," she maintains. "But," she adds as a postscript: "I don't yet see these technologies being used to their full potential."
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