A new keynote topic

I've just sent the following description to the EuroPortfolio conference for my keynote at their next meeting in Cambridge, England on October 27, 2005:

Title: E-portfolios: digital stories of lifelong and lifewide learning
Description: The potential of e-portfolios to support lifelong and lifewide learning is limited only by our current technologies, limited experience, and narrow vision. Let's imagine what could happen if every citizen was issued personal web server space that they would own for a lifetime? This Digital Archive for Life (DAL) would provide space to store the raw materials for e-portfolios, archives of family records, genealogy and digital stories, autobiographies, child development data (such as digital versions of New Zealand's "Plunket books"), evidence of personal and professional accomplishments, and all kinds of personal information. From cradle to grave, see examples of how we could store and celebrate the results of lifelong and lifewide learning.

This keynote will give me an opportunity to focus on a variety of developments that are already taking place, like OurMedia and other websites that offer more limited free webspace, such as this blogging service! I can also share more of our digital family stories. In a half hour, I won't have time to share my thoughts on the importance of reflection, storytelling and deep learning, but I'll make sure I model it!

A Week on Vancouver Island

For the last six days, I have been on Vancouver Island, participating in a Symposium on Assessment for Learning sponsored by Anne Davies of Classroom Connections International. I participated last year in a different capacity, but this year, I came with a project to complete in this "hothouse" environment. It has been an excellent transition to my new role in K-12 education. The week also takes me back to summer sessions in Santa Barbara with my graduate program: intense, rejuvenating, high task but also high touch. I realize now that I miss those opportunities for intense learning, that I came for one reason, but am leaving with other perspectives. I realize how much I get out of these experiences with people who share similar philosophies and values. Of course Kingfisher Lodge is a lot different from LaCasa, but both places now provide many pleasant memories.

A New Article

The first of three EDUCAUSE reports, titled "An Overview of E-Portfolios," is now published at:
http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI3001

According to one of the authors, George Lorenzo, the second and third reports on e-portfolios - one on teaching and learning and another on institutional e-portfolios - are near completion.

Final N.Z. Report

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to New Zealand, taking this opportunity to reflect on my last two days. My conversations with the Ministry of Education on Tuesday were very interesting. In my first meeting with the tertiary (higher education) group, we talked about the need for coordination between the various sectors. We also talked about the potential for using Interact, which I will be following the development with great interest. There was some discussion about Moodle, but I didn't know if an e-portfolio component was under development, like with Interact. We emphasized the importance of building a digital archive that would follow a learner across the different sectors.

My meeting with the early childhood people was most interesting. They shared with me their curriculum materials (I took home a notebook, CD and DVDs, which I still need to read/watch). We found a lot of common ground. They showed me some of their "learning stories" and I showed them excerpts from my granddaughter's e-portfolio. I also showed them some digital stories and we talked about the possibilities with some of their early childhood centers. Many of those learning stories contained digital images plus text, so I explained (very briefly) the process of taking digital images and turning them into short videos with narration (digital stories).

On Wednesday, I met with a group at the University of Auckland. They were intending to use the Open Source Portfolio, and we had a long discussion over lunch about the philosophy of portfolios (purpose, audience, student-centered vs. institution-centered, etc.). When I made the statement that electronic portfolios should begin a birth and last a lifetime, one member of their group immediately said, "I agree!" From then on, our conversation focused around the need for compatibility across educational sectors (echoes of my discussion on the previous day). They mentioned the "Plunkett book" that every child in New Zealand receives at birth from a visiting nurse, where their growth and development is recorded. There was a lot of energy in our discussion around the digitization of the contents of that book, even imagining the potential for digitally updating those records using wireless technology like the delivery truck drivers have now!

We also talked about Donald Norman's concept of the "information appliance" and the direction of the iPod/Palm/iPaq/PDA technologies. We did a lot of visioning and also discussed the upcoming semantic web, something that I really need to study in more detail.

I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. What is intriguing to me is the potential for these visions to become a reality in a country the size of New Zealand. Of course, the infrastructure requirements need to be addressed, especially that seamless digital archive of a learner's development/life work, from cradle to retirement and beyond. Reminds me of that article in Educause that I mentioned in an earlier blog entry.

Beyond the Electronic Portfolio: A Lifetime Personal Web Space
Rather than limit people to the e-portfolio model, why not develop a model providing a personal Web space for everyone, for their lifetimes and beyond?

Those possibilities press so many of my hot buttons: e-portfolios, digital stories of deep learning, digital family stories, autobiographies, etc. I feel so privileged to be a part of these conversations. I am so thankful for this opportunity. I look forward to continuing this dialogue with educators in New Zealand. It is so exciting to follow what is possible when there is a will, and not too much bureaucracy to get in the way!

A Wonderful Week in N.Z.

I have been in New Zealand for a week, and my head is just spinning! First, I participated in the ULearn05 conference in Auckland during the first three days last week. It reminds me of the special quality of our early Alaska computer conferences. It was a special treat for me to reconnect with Ian Jukes as well, who was a favorite presenter at our early Alaska conferences. I enjoyed sharing my passion for digital storytelling, both in a hands-on workshop and in my closing keynote address on Wednesday afternoon. I was really impressed with the special Maori ceremonies that opened and closed the conference. I just wish I understood what was being said.

On Thursday, I traveled to Christchurch, and had a short meeting with the developer of Interact, about the portfolio tools that he is building into this open source learning management software. I am very interested in the development of this software. I had downloaded an earlier version of Interact and placed it on my own server space, since the requirements were simply PHP and MySQL. I am anxious to see the next version of the software, which he hopes to have ready by the term starting in August. On Friday, I met with the Christchurch College of Education, and by the end of the afternoon, I had more converts to doing digital storytelling as part of e-portfolios.

On Friday evening, I flew to Dunedin for the weekend. I spent many hours this weekend with the authors of the book on Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education. My head is still spinning from our wonderful conversations this weekend. I will be thinking about our dialogue a lot over the next few weeks. For the first time, I made a presentation to nurse educators plus some hands-on e-portfolio activities in a computer lab, and showed a lot of digital stories. Yep, more converts to digital storytelling! It became apparent that health care professionals can use digital stories in their practice. It was very special to talk about reflection at such a deep level with these "experts" on storytelling in learning. Today we had more dialogue and I showed more digital stories. Their observations about the poetic quality of many of these stories confirmed my own impressions, shared at the Kean conference in June.

I have returned to Christchurch, preparing for three more days of meetings before my return home. This has been a magical trip. There is something very special about the people of New Zealand! I hope to come back on a regular basis!

One Portfolio for Life?

There is a movement in Europe and in Canada to create "E-Portfolios for Every Citizen by 2010." There is also a discussion of "one portfolio for life" which evokes many reactions. My initial response was to separate the one "digital archive of my work" for life, and the multiple presentation portfolios that I might develop for different purposes and audiences throughout my life. I know there is an effort to build systems that integrate all aspects of our digital lives, or as Serge Ravet expressed it,

• My digital clone - A digital representation/extension of my self – my eSelf
• My work companion - A tool blended into my learning/working environment
• My butler - A service provider to one’s self
• My dashboard - An informative display of the state of my skills and knowledge
• My planner - A tool to plan my learning
• My IPR management assistant - A tool to value and exploit my personal assets

An educator from New Zealand sent me a link to an entry from her blog, discussing issues around digital identity:

In time our e-portfolio record of learning might develop into a massive “learning identity construction” digitized database “A real celebration of learning across a lifetime” that would make today's efforts seem mute, silent screen versions in comparison.

The tension in this extrapolation is that it is not unlike the “consumer identity construction” information databases that can already reveal our predilection for hanging out in wine bars and txting lovers at the end of the day.

The e-portfolio might be likened to "wiki for data from a security camera, VISA card statement and mobile phone bill", in that both allow the construction of digital identity.

And both might misprepresent the complexity of what it is to be human through representing identity as data.

My concern, in our rush to jump on the bandwagon of "a portfolio for all" and "portfolio as digital identity," we are missing the essential purpose of portfolio as a concept and process as well as product. By broadening the concept of the portfolio, we may be thereby weakening its use for learning. Once again, I remember Catherine Lucas' cautions about portfolio use, especially "the weakening of effect through careless imitation." The broader definition of portfolio also serves to confuse the issues.

I recently heard about assignments in an "electronic portfolio class" where students were asked to create an electronic portfolio for a dog or a cat! If the "heart and soul" of a portfolio is reflection, how can you create a portfolio for a dog or cat? It seems to me that they are creating more of a digital scrapbook than a portfolio. Again, the problem is with definition. A portfolio is a personal document, not a documentary. That class sounds more like a website development course, which just furthers the confusion of what an electronic portfolio really is.

NECC05 Conference

I can finally relax. All of my presentations are over. I did a hands-on workshop for NECC on Sunday. Then, I met with the site leaders of the TaskStream REFLECT Initiative research project on Monday. It was a great day. All the time we spent focusing on the planning for this workshop was well worth the effort. We were able to facilitate a lot of discussion among the participants, and to lay out the research plan, and the various components of the professional development (the regional workshops, the online professional development, the onsite visits, etc.). After this meeting, I was more excited about the project. I also realized how much work was ahead of me. This will be much more intense than my PT3 grant. And I thought I was retiring!

The National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) is just like "old home week" or "same time, next year" - my annual renewal with my technology-in-education buddies. It is fun to reconnect, to announce my retirement, and to celebrate with 15,000+ people! I also did a presentation yesterday called, "Enhancing Student Voices in ePortfolios through Blogging and Digital Storytelling." The desciption of the session was:

Are your e-portfolios standardized checklists of skills or constructivist stories of learning? Learn about open-source or free strategies that increase student voice in learner-centered e-portfolios.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction from participants who were there has been very gratifying. I had one of those "Aha!" experiences when I realized at the end of my presentation, the link between my "Choices" digital story and my message about ePortfolios. When I quote Robert Frost's poem (and my last titles were: Go where no one else has gone... and leave a trail), I urged the participants to take the road "less traveled by" with ePortfolios. Make them digital stories of deep learning, not standardized checklists of skills!

Kean Conference

Yesterday was the last day of the Kean University Digital Stories conference. It was also my last day working for the University of Alaska Anchorage. (Those two events are related.) I spent a very busy week, flying to Newark on Monday, finishing up the conference DVD on Tuesday, burning 220 copies of the DVD on Wednesday, and then the conference on Thursday and Friday. I was one of the five "experts" on Thursday, presenting all day. Then I got to just sit in presentations on Friday. There were some magical moments, like the BBC digital stories shared by Joe Lambert on Thursday morning, and the "I/O brush" shared by Kimiko Ryokai from MIT on Friday morning.

This conference had a very special feeling, probably because of its size (200 people) and the location worked well. The weather cooperated, and the conversations were especially rich. I'm hoping they decide to repeat the event again next year. It was a great opportunity to see more stories and share ideas. No hands-on, but a lot of conversation between attendees, mostly from New Jersey, but other participants from 11 states and the Virgin Islands! Many of the stories shown were about family, with two breakout presentations on this topic, including one by my own husband!

The Kean conference DVD was the first draft of a DVD that I want to develop on Digital Family Stories, to support the workshop series that we will eventually launch. Of course, I would not use the Kean faculty stories, but some of the family stories that I am starting to develop with my family and others, beginning in Anchorage last month. Dan and I need to spend some time doing "pro bono" workshops to refine our content and process.

Widgets

I'm writing this entry in a new Widget that is available for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). I have this widget on my Dashboard, and can make an entry quickly! Sort of reminds me of the old days of Mac OS 9 when we had extensions and Apple menu items. But this is cooler and more stable!

New Business Card

Since I am retiring from the University of Alaska as of July 1, 2005, I designed a new business card for myself. I decided it would read:

Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.
Researcher and Consultant
Electronic Portfolios and Digital Storytelling
to Support Lifelong and Life Wide Learning

I just decided I didn't need an organization on my business card... just my mission statement. Maybe I'll make another one for Digital Family Story:

Helping families preserve and celebrate their favorite stories

Clarification

In a comment yesterday, I was asked to elaborate on my statement in my blog entry on the MNSCU eFolio Research: "... These findings further validate my concern that we cannot lump all electronic portfolios in one basket:..." The last part of that statement was, "a rich description of the conditions of implementation is critical to understanding the results." In other words, "the devil is in the details" on all levels: how the portfolio is conceptualized (including the purpose), the process and the product. I have written earlier about 50 Words for Portfolios or Alan Levine's reference to the poem about the blind men and the elephant. Portfolios can be created for many purposes and with many tools. In fact, the AAHE reported six categories of uses and these categories were used in the analysis of the data from the respondents in the Minnesota eFolio study:

• Educational planning
• Documenting knowledge, skills, and abilities
• Tracking development
• Finding a job
• Use for evaluation in class
• Performance monitoring in the workplace

My only criticism of this list is that the terms reflection and learning are not overtly stated, but assumed within at least the first three categories/purposes. I also believe strongly in the impact of Activity Theory on the implementation of electronic portfolios, that the purpose and the tools have an inextricable impact on the outcomes. Here is a diagram from the Theory that shows the relationship between the different aspects of the activity/system:

• Subject - the individual or group whose point of view is taken in the analysis of the activity
• Object (or objective) - the target of the activity
• Instruments (Tools) - internal or external mediating artifacts which help to achieve the outcomes
• Community - one or more people who share the objective with the subject
• Rules - regulate actions and interactions within the activity system
• Division of labor - how tasks are divided horizontally between community members - any vertical division of power and status

There is currently a dissertation in process that will be looking at the impact of purpose and tools in the process of developing electronic portfolios at two universities, using the lens of Activity Theory to understand the differences. I am looking forward to reading the analysis.

More Activity Theory

One of the reasons that I use Activity Theory to understand the impact of tools comes from this discussion:

Activity Theory differentiates between internal and external activities. The traditional notion of mental processes corresponds to internal activities. Activity Theory emphasizes that internal activities cannot be understood if they are analyzed separately, in isolation from external activities, because there are mutual transformations between these two kinds of activities: internalization and externalization It is the general context of activity (which includes both external and internal components) that determines when and why external activities become internal and vice versa.

The Activity Theory emphasis on social factors and on interaction between agents and their environments explains why the principle of tool mediation plays a central role within the approach. First of all, tools shape the way human beings interact with reality. And, according to the above principle of internalization / externalization, shaping external activities ultimately results in shaping internal ones. Second, tools usually reflect the experiences of other people who have tried to solve similar problems at an earlier time and invented/ modified the tool to make it more efficient. This experience is accumulated in the structural properties of tools (shape, material, etc.) as well as in the knowledge of how the tool should be used. Tools are created and transformed during the development of the activity itself and carry with them a particular culture - the historical remnants from that development. So, the use of tools is a means for the accumulation and transmission of social knowledge. It influences the nature, not only of external behavior, but also of the mental functioning of individuals.

This quote supports my belief that electronic portfolio software tools have a major impact on how individuals perceive the portfolio development process.

New Readings

Thanks to the UBC e-Portfolios blog, I found some new online readings.

• "Beyond the Electronic Portfolio: A Lifetime Personal Web Space" EDUCAUSE Quarterly | Volume 27 Number 4 2004 - http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm04/eqm0441.asp?bhcp=1
  Rather than limit people to the e-portfolio model, why not develop a model providing a personal Web space for everyone, for their lifetimes and beyond?
• "Overcoming Obstacles to Authentic ePortfolio Assessment" by Steve Acker. Campus Technology http://www.campus-technology.com/print.asp?ID=10788
• Design and Analysis of Reflection-Supporting Tools in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning by Seung-hee Lee. http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Mar_05/article05.htm
  Individual and group reflective thinking are the subject of this paper. Reflection supporting tools for computer-supported collaborative learning provide learning opportunities that are parallel to individual and collaborative activities in a classroom setting. Collaborative reflective thinking is a product of group sharing through discussion and other reflection supporting tools. Results show significant support for the reflective process, especially in computer-supported collaborative learning environments.

eFolio Research Reported

I was finally able to view the April 14 MNSAT telecast of their Satellite Broadcast, “Electronic Portfolios for Lifelong and Lifewide Learning: Research and Practice.” The content focused on the research that Darren Cambridge completed about the eFolio Minnesota project. Darren surveyed 500 of the 30,000 users, and did in-depth interviews with 20 portfolio developers. His findings, as he reported them in the telecast, are further support for developing electronic portfolios for lifelong and lifewide learning. His definition of the roles of portfolio learning:

Portfolio learning is lifewide in the sense that it tries to facilitate learning that happens not just in the classroom, not just in formal learning, but in the workplace and in family life. It is lifelong in the sense that learning is something that happens throughout one's life, through different stages of life, not just within a particular academic program, but from cradle to grave.

The MNSCU eFolio Minnesota tool is an online environment in which the individual is provided 3 MB of online storage, and the purpose for the portfolio is determined by the owner, although when used in an educational environment the initial purpose may be prescribed. Even so, the telecast described examples of the system allowing layers in the portfolio for different audiences. The website describes it as:

a multimedia electronic portfolio designed to help you create a living showcase of your education, career and personal achievements. All Minnesota residents, including students enrolled in Minnesota schools, educators and others can use eFolio Minnesota to reach their career and education goals.

In the teleconference, I found Darren's findings with the adult portfolio developers in Minnesota to be very encouraging. I see no reason why these findings wouldn't also apply to K-12 students. As he said,

"...what we learned about how people are introduced and supported: the need for a group of peers working together and real audiences to bounce ideas off of in the experimental stage where the portfolio is beginning to form and to take shape is very important. And then looking at the interface of the personal and the professional that has been shown to be so important to the sense of ownership and integrity of the portfolio; that it's not something that's handed to you by an institution or by the government, but that it's something that you've made that represents you as a full human being."

Peter Rees Jones from Leeds University in England was also on the telecast. He reported on some of their experience in building linkages between the world of work and the world of formal education. His statement about learner ownership is also important:

"It is clear that there is a relationship between where people have a sense of ownership and the success of an eportfolio project. Where people have that sense of ownership they do engage with it [the portfolio] and they will use it regularly. "

As I develop the research design and professional development activities for The REFLECT Initiative, these findings will be shared as central to the policies and practices of implementing portfolios in high schools. The finding about the sense of ownership is one that I have addressed before, but now is validated by some of the research. When Darren Cambridge says, "This works!" I hope policy makers will pay close attention to what "this" is: the learner-owned model that the eFolio Minnesota project has implemented with a focus on the individual, not on the institution. These findings further validate my concern that we cannot lump all electronic portfolios in one basket: a rich description of the conditions of implementation is critical to understanding the results.

Palm LifeDrive

I am making this entry on my brand new Palm LifeDrive. It is a Palm with a 4 GB hard drive! It also has WiFi and Bluetooth. I've already made a call through my cell phone, but I'm using the WiFi right now. I'm using my wireless keyboard as well. I have my Comcast e-mail account set up and I have sent and received e-mail over WiFi. The web page browsing is strange, but I'm using the standard Blogger page. I love learning new toys!

Accountability and Portfolios

I am posting this message that did not get sent to the AAHE eportfolio listserv before it was shut down. I was responding to this message sent by Trent Batson from Rhode Island:

... My sense of the eportfolio phenomenon in the US is that the assessment/accountability end of the spectrum is where most of the money is right now. My own hope from the push toward assessment-management is that these systems will get eportfolios in place on many campuses and then other uses will be discovered

Trent, I agree with your statement that e-portfolios are being adopted because of the assessment/accountability needs of institutions. The challenge with that scenario is that we are turning off a lot of students (and perhaps also faculty) in the process because of high stakes accountability. Perhaps formal education is validating Lee Shulman's assertion that one of the five dangers of portfolios is "perversion"! As he says in Nona Lyons' book (1998) With Portfolio in Hand,

If portfolios are going to be used, whether at the state level in Vermont or California, or at the national level by the National Board, as a form of high stakes assessment, why will portfolios be more resistant to perversion than all other forms of assessment have been? And if one of the requirements in these cases is that you develop a sufficiently objective scoring system so you can fairly compare people with one another, will your scoring system end up objectifying what's in the portfolio to the point where the portfolio will be nothing but a very, very cumbersome multiple choice test? (p. 35)

At the IRA conference earlier this month, I got a round of applause for the statement, "High stakes accountability is killing portfolios for learning." In the drive to use portfolios as assessment OF learning, we are in danger of losing the power of portfolios to support reflection and assessment FOR learning. I'm starting to collect stories about student rebellion against this approach, like the college student in a midwest university who ran for student body president on a platform to get rid of the campus-wide assessment portfolio. Then, there are high school students in the Pacific Northwest who built a bonfire and burned their mandatory graduation paper-based portfolios (eSchool news quoted me on this story as the opening of their article about the TaskStream research project.... Of course they didn't quote me on the other story about the high school student who offered a $50 reward to recover her lost writing portfolio.) I tell both of those stories in more detail in the TaskStream White Paper.

I also think purpose is inextricably linked with process (per Activity Theory) and the tools tend to be developed to support the primary purpose. In my incomplete survey of different online tools to construct e-portfolios, it was obvious to me that the tools tend to favor one approach over the other. Those tools that purport to be more "assessment management systems" tend to provide an institution-focused structure that makes it much easier to "score" but more difficult for the learner to tell their own story of their learning. There were some systems that I tried where I could not create the portfolio that I wanted... I was forced to use a pre-set template. For me, the bottom line is "ownership" - and I was pleased at the ePortfolio conference in Vancouver, B.C. last month where the general consensus of the participants and presenters was that learners owned their own portfolios. Based on that statement, the tools should support that ownership in every way possible. I am finding that those systems based on an online database to capture assessment data provide far less creativity in appearance and organization than other tools. So I am making a plea to educational institutions for balance in the purposes for implementing e-portfolios, and to the software developers for more creativity and flexibility in the presentation tools.

Saskatchewan Learning

I just received notification about a new resource posted online at the Saskatchewan Learning Website:

A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY: Facilitator's Guide to Reflection and Portfolio Development [PDF]
This guide has been developed to support facilitators as they lead learners through a process of thinking about what they know and can do (reflection). Through involvement in these activities, learners identify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they have developed, and create evidence of their learning. These general activities are intended to be adapted by facilitators to meet the needs of any group.

This is a great resource for those facilitators who help learners with self-assessment in preparation for PLAR portfolios (Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition).

Reality Check!

Every few years, I need to do a hands-on technology project with school-age students, as a reality check on my theories about electronic portfolios or digital storytelling in education. This week, I worked with two dozen eighth grade English students (my daughter's students at a private school in Anchorage). The experience was eye-opening, exhausting and exhilarating! We produced 22 digital family stories, between one and three minutes long. We spent one day in a portable classroom, where only one computer had Internet access. I had a small office to do the audio recording, which did have high speed wireless Internet. As a private school, there are not the technology resources available (the classroom computers were still using Windows 98). There was no computer lab available to us during the period when the class met, but we reminded ourselves that is was a writing activity, not a computer lesson!

While we struggled with the technology (or lack thereof) as well as the wide variation in students' technology skills, we explored a variety of strategies to be able to accomplish this task with the resources at hand. Several students brought in their own computers, usually at the wrong time. After all of the student stories were written, recorded, and pictures collected, we were in the school until midnight last night, putting them all together using iMovie5, which worked for us flawlessly! We will duplicate a CD of the movies for all of the students next week. It's been an eye-opening experience for me: how to do 22 digital stories with 8th graders using two Mac G4 Powerbooks, two scanners, two digital cameras and a few other internet-connected computers for finding pictures.

We are both planning digital stories about the process. I was reminded that the project we did with these students in 6 hours of class time (plus a lot of pull-out time for individual work) is what we normally do with adults in 16-24 hours. These are not CDS-quality stories, and we ran out of time to select music to go along with any of them, but most of the students were very pleased when they privately reviewed their stories with me this morning. But I also realize that it would have been impossible for my daughter to do this project alone, with the constraints she has, both in block scheduling (we didn't see the students every day) and with the technology constraints. And she only had 13 students in each class! I have a greater appreciation for my fellow Apple Distinguished Educators who support these types of activities in schools every day! I also know why many, if not most, teachers would not take on such an ambitious project without a good support system, which is lacking in many financially strapped educational systems today. Nor is there time in the curriculum because of accountability demands....but that is another story!

10 Years Ago

Last Friday, I filled out the paperwork to officially retire from the University of Alaska. I am presently cleaning out a few boxes that were still here in storage, going through old files since 1992! One folder held an especially poignant document: the purchase order for the first web server in the School of Education, dated May of 1995! Ten years ago this month. It was from that web server that I published my first pages on electronic portfolios, using the transition.alaska.edu URL. That Mac web server had a 1 GB hard drive, and ran steadily for about 4 years before it was retired. I now have a flash drive in my purse with that much storage! My how technology changed over the last ten years! I just read an online article about the new standards for HD DVDs being debated by the tech companies: up to 30 GB per side!

Podcasting with Audacity

I'm up in Anchorage, working with a variety of people on Digital Storytelling. Last week, I met with my daughter's 8th Grade Language Arts classes, and gave them a brief introduction to Digital Family Stories. Tomorrow, we start constructing their own digital stories. Yesterday, I worked with a colleague and a young mother, to help them both begin the process of recording their stories. One had been working on her story for several months; the other for just a day. By the end of the day, they both had recorded their stories, adding a music track, and were ready to add images to the timeline of their video editors.

I was a little out of my comfort zone, mostly because I was helping them use software that I don't normally use (Audacity and MovieMaker2) on a platform I normally don't use (Windows XP). So, we plunged in together, learning as we went along, making the usual mistakes, and referring to the online reference manual only when we were desperate. By the end of the day, we produced what I suppose is called a "Podcast" file...a digital audio clip suitable for use in a variety of formats, including a digital story, a website, or an iPod or MP3 player.

I had seen Audacity before, but normally use Sound Studio on my Mac to record audio. We normally record each paragraph of a story as a separate file, and then place them in order on one audio track of the movie editor's timeline. On the second audio track, we place the music, and adjust the volume so that it doesn't overpower the voice. But since we were working in MovieMaker2, the free software that comes with Windows XP, we only had one sound track available. So we had to construct the sound track outside of the movie editor. That's why I plunged into learning Audacity.

Audacity is free, open source software, available for Mac OS X, Windows or even Linux. Once I experimented a few times, I determined how to work around the limitations of the software to meet our needs. For example, after recording a track, when you record a second track, it places it in the same file, at the beginning, so that both tracks play simultaneously. Maybe there is a setting I don't know how to change, but we figured out that if you open a new file, record the second clip, select all of it and copy it, you can paste it at the end of the timeline of the first clip (a process we repeated until the story was complete). Within about an hour, both women had their 3 minute stories recorded, paragraph by paragraph. Adding the music was another challenge, but I was able to import a second track in Audacity, and lower the volume under the voice-over track, and produce a final audio file that included both narration and music.

Why am I struggling with free software for this task? Why not purchase software that will do the job more effectively (and also, why not just use iMovie on a Mac???)? For the simple reason that I am working with novices who already have Windows XP computers, and they just want to get started learning the digital storytelling process. Rather than making an investment in new software, which has a higher learning curve (and level of frustration), we chose to use what they had, or could download for free. I warned them about the limitations of the tools, and that they might outgrow the software very soon, but I wanted them to have a successful first experience. Of course, I may grumble later about the difficulty of publishing these movies to more accessible formats, like DVD, but that will be all part of the learning process.

I have been having a debate with other digital storytellers about the pros and cons of using the more high end tools (Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Pinnacle Studio, etc.). Those are all what I would call "pro-sumer" tools: lots of capability, but with complexity comes confusion and frustration at the beginning of the learning process. And since I began my career studying how people teach themselves how to use personal computers, I know that a positive first experience is important, and the ability to intuitively explore a tool contributes to the process of self-directed learning. One of my mantras (from my dissertation) is, "When learning new tools, use familiar tasks, and when learning new tasks, use familiar tools." When we make it too hard, we turn off the beginners. My goal is to get them excited about what they have achieved, and to understand the process, so that they can transfer that enthusiasm and awareness to more advanced tools when they are ready.

I am convinced that philosophy works with adult learners. This week, I will have an opportunity to test it out with 8th graders. Stay tuned (and wish me luck!)!