Chan Sook - The story of an ePortfolio (scenario)

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There is a mindmap showing the ePortfolio design that accompanies this scenario - the original is accessible in Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com/25663129/chan-sooklearner-eportfolio). Chan Sook lives in Auckland, New Zealand, is twenty-years-old, and is enrolled on the The Bachelor of Business (Accountancy) at Unitec New Zealand. She would like to pursue a career in accountancy, initially with a large company either in New Zealand or Australia, and later she has the ambition of setting up her own accountancy firm. She is finding some of the course at Unitec NZ a little challenging at times, but is enjoying opportunities where she is able to develop technical accounting skills that help her analyse and evaluate accounting and business problems. Chan Sook enjoys working in groups some of the time and often takes on a leadership role, but as a self-directed individual she also enjoys work where she can concentrate on things by herself. A second year student, Chan Sook has been building a Web 2.0 ePortfolio for over a year, after being encouraged to start one in her first year. She was already familiar with using Facebook, Flickr, You Tube, Twitter and Diigo with her friends. However, she felt that her these spaces were part of her personal social community and she did not want to use them for what would become her professional profile. As such, she made the decision to set up new accounts specifically for use while studying, during internships, and for any other relevant experience, feedback, reflections and comments. When first starting to build and design her ePortfolio, Chan Sook was introduced to the ideas of collecting, selecting and reflecting, giving her some guidelines around what to include in the 'public' face of her ePortfolio. Through this work, Chan Sook became aware that 'less is more' and is not a repository for everything she has ever done and thought. Rather, her ePortfolio is an organic tool that will change as she does, and will need frequent revisiting to remove or replace resources that are no longer relevant - for instance, examples of competencies that she has since improved. Continuing to work in consultation with her tutors, Chan Sook is constructing an ePortfolio that captures her learning journey and development as both a self-directed learner and an accountancy student. By updating and adding resources regularly from the activities she undertakes, Chan Sook considers that she is building a body of evidence and reflection for use during the course she is studying, as well as being easy to adapt to a showcase graduate portfolio once she has left Unitec NZ. As such, at the moment her ePortfolio is designed around the key competencies and learning outcomes required by the course she is studying even though she believes her ePortfolio will be something that is going to accompany throughout her working life.

Chan Sook enjoys the fact that she can plan, set milestones, and really unpack thoughts and ideas in her ePortfolio. Some aspects, such as her reflections, she keeps in a private wiki where she regularly writes, posts images from places she has been and of people she has met. Where relevant, she edits and blogs these reflections in a slightly less 'raw' format, and enjoys the comments that are frequently left from people from all around the world, as well as other students participating in her course. Her blog, she feels, is her 'testing ground' for initial thinking around some of the key concepts of accounting, and associated assignments. Chan Sook now feels comfortable contacting (via email or Skype) some of the leading lights of accountancy in New Zealand and beyond, and has been delighted with the supportive, informative responses that she has received. All of these responses she keeps in her ePortfolio, partly for later acknowledgement purposes, but also to illustrate her research and networking abilities. Some of the content she has included in her ePortfolio to date includes:

Chan Sook has been working as a intern at a large accounting company in Auckland during the semester breaks and the summer and has written about some large projects she has been involved in. She has included reflections on the process and her part in it, to work out how she could improve her performance. Much to her delight, a couple of her observations of making the process more effective have been taken on board by the team with whom she was working. The manager mentoring her internship and the team have been happy to provide feedback and comments on her contributions - mainly typed up, but one person recorded their thoughts to audio. Her ePortfolio offered her a formal forum to reflect on this feedback, as well somewhere to share a description of her time at the company, her experiences, some examples of her work, images and a short of video she recorded during her internship. She recently wrote a short article for the USU student magazine, and makes regular blog postings on her own blog site. These she hosts online and has links to from her ePortfolio. Chan Sook keeps up with thinking around accounting concepts and principles, partly by adding the RSS feeds from some key podcasts and blogs to her Google Reader. She also contributes to discussion forums in accountancy communities, and poses her own questions and uses the answers to help her with assignments and in the workplace. In her spare time, Chan Sook volunteers at a local Community Centre helping with their books. As part of this work she helped other volunteers with the migration across to computerised accounts and has encouraged people to meet regularly to discuss problems, celebrate successes, and to help each other with technical issues. Through mentoring from her tutor she was quick to identify that these experiences illustrated, not only her accounting and technical competency, but also her innovation and leadership potential - things she captured and recorded in her ePortfolio through blog entries. While browsing and catching up with news Chan Sook often locates resources that look useful and adds them to her shared social bookmarking site, carefully describing, categorising and tagging them so that she can find and use them later. Having set her Twines as public, she was pleased when other people joined and starting adding resources. The Twines she includes in her ePortfolio as she feels it demonstrates several features, in particular being an active member of communities of practice.

Tools Chan Sook uses to build her Web 2.0 ePortfolio

Some of the tools, sites and spaces Chan Sook uses to create and host content for her ePortfolio are listed below. Please note that although she has a large amount of content online, she is critical of this content and selective of what she chooses to show in the public view(s) of her ePortfolio. She also tailors views of her ePortfolio for specific people and events:

Netvibes - uses this application to organise her resources and to choose what she shares with whom. She particularly likes the 'private' and 'public' interfaces Blogger and Vox - uses her blogs for refining her understanding of discipline ideas / theories, seeking global feedback, and making the intial step to becoming a name in her field A programme Ning - regularly contributes to forums, adds blog posts, comments on other students' posts, links to interesting resources, and embeds useful videos Google Reader (an aggregator) - follows experts' blogs and comments regularly, contributing to discussions around current theories and practice Google Docs - collaborates with peers on projects and papers Google Calendar - plans for the future, records her major milestones, and adds upcoming tasks Scribd - publishes articles she has written Slideshare - shares PowerPoint presentations (along with audio of the presentations which she records during a session) and adds to Slideshare as a Slidecast Gliffy - creates, shares and collaborates on diagrams and flowcharts PB works - types up and keeps her private reflections in this wiki (tagged) Elluminate - attends webinars and keeps a record of the links to recordings Twitter - creating and maintaining a social network; collaborating with peers; sharing resources / ideas Mindomo and Mindmeister - creates mindmaps for planning, collating resources, brainstorming assignments, and collaborating with peers Xignite - accesses, downloads and interprets discipline specific raw data; uses Gapminder to represent own data longitudinally in dynamic diagrams Accounting Nation - accountancy specific online community Podfeed/accounting - subscribes to discussions around finance with experts, students, postgrads Podomatic - uploads her ideas in audio, and audio feedback Diigo - uses a social bookmarking tool when researching subjects. Shares the Diigo with peers at Unitec NZ as well as with other learners and researchers around the world Flickr - images / diagrams of theories Blip TV, You Tubeand Vimeo - uploads videos that she records, especially those that demonstrate her competences and/or her involvement in communities

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If you have any questions, please contact: Hazel Owen (info@ethosconsultancynz.com).

Chan Sook: A learner ePortfolio scenario/design by Hazel Owen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

Based on a work at www.mindmeister.com.