Assignment+5

Article reviewed: Kim, P., Kee Ng, C., & Lim, G. (2010). When cloud computing meets with Semantic Web: A new design for e-portfolio systems in the social media era. //British Journal of Educational Technology, 41//(6), 1018-1028.

Elements: What are the 3 most interesting or surprising things you learned?
 * 1) Than an e-portfolio is more than a collection of artefacts, that it is a “learning place where a student matures learning through self-reflection” (p1018). I always assumed an e-portfolio was just a collection of artefacts that demonstrated work ability. I had not considered that reflection was a key component.
 * 2) The range of e-portfolio activities – the teaching and learning possibilities is greater than I have considered. I like the idea that the platform can be a teaching tool as well as a learning tool. Once again, I had not considered it a platform capable of teaching.
 * 3) That it is possible to ‘aggregate’ “all the data repositories and cloud computing services of the user, thereby providing the user with one-stop access to all his or her data in the cloud” (Kim, Kee Ng & Lim, 2010, p.1022)

Application: How what you read can be applied to the design or implementation of educational environments or tools?
 * A tool capable of employing various teaching and learning strategies
 * A tool that encourages users to reflect on practice
 * Open source verse commercial
 * Scalability and Sustainability – how much space per users is necessary? How much do users of a digital age need? How long will they use it for? (just until graduation or beyond?) Can more be offered is the platform was commercially available rather than open source software?
 * Data transportability – how to take it away from the platform? Downloadable? Copyright?
 * Barriers – what barriers exist to the uptake of the system? Do we get students to duplicate their resources – on the web and in an e-portfolio system or like system?
 * Is a new educational tool following the same trend as existing web 2.0 tools? “Web 2.0 tools tend to be relatively unstructured and are characterised by an ease of publishing, a high level of interaction, self-assigned semantics (tagging) and are often media rich” (Cotterill,White & Currant, 2007 as stated in Kim, Kee Ng & Lim, 2010). Is this what we create, or do we take it a step forward into the semantic web era?
 * Does cloud computing offer solutions to challenges like sustainability and data portability.
 * Is having more than one place to store digital artefacts a problem? Privacy? Data ownership?