RAPPORT
Volume 3 Issue 1 (2018)
constructed narratives to support
claims for employability, but also in
connecting to digital credentials
related to curricular, co-curricular and
extra-curricular learning;
o mobility and internationalisation:
including working with distributed/
distance learners and supporting
social and geographical mobility,
specifically by enabling digital
student data portability as envisaged
by the signatories to the Groningen
Declaration 4 , amongst others.
This attempt to locate ePortfolio practice –
and the themes of the Seminar – within the
wider digital landscape was explicitly
highlighted on Day 1 by the contributions
of Mark Brown, the Director of the National
Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City
University, and Kathi Yancey, and on Day
3 by Amber Garrison Duncan, the Strategy
Director of the Lumina Foundation (this
latter contribution on the theme of the
Comprehensive Learner Record). Our
thinking was that, as technological
resources become more developed,
institutions will increasingly need to take
strategic – and economic - views as to
which systems are further developed and
supported within the digital landscape, and
how such systems themselves fit together
to support institutional effectiveness and
above all student development and
success. For example, the connections
between the Comprehensive Learner
Record and ePortfolio implementation in
Amber Garrison Duncan’s final plenary
emphasised transparency, the value of
CLR data as a tool for formative reflection
4
A higher education network initiated at a meeting
held in Groningen in 2012, dedicated to improving
the portability of student data on a global scale.
and planning and institutional or third-party
validation alongside student ownership of
information.
There were several further aspects of
thinking within our planning.
Notwithstanding the high level of positive
feedback from the Edinburgh 2015
seminar, we wanted to learn from the
experience. So, while we retained the
‘core’ Edinburgh model; a blended
format, mixing whole seminar working
within a colloquium setting on days 1 and
3 and a focus upon conventional
workshops and seminars grouped by
themes on day 2, we also made a
number of changes. Specifically, on Day
1, whilst retaining the timeframe, we
included:
1. A more interactive pre-lunch session
aimed at beginning to define the
breadth of the digital landscape, raise
issues and facilitate conversation;
2. An initial parallel session slot at the
close of the day, which we also used to
try out Padlet. 5 This was our technical
option to capture participant reflections
to return to on Day 3, using two
suggested stimulus questions:
• One significant thing I have
learned from this session;
• One significant question I have
as a result of this session.
Participants were invited either to write
their thoughts on a ‘post-it’ (one for
each question) and hand these to their
session facilitator (a member of the
Seminar Planning Group); or to write
5
An application to create an online bulletin board
to display information. See https://padlet.com/
5