ePortfolios and the problem with scaffolded learning

Follow-up to How interoperable ePortfolios can solve your strategic issues, save money, and make you rich (not) from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

This is a reply that I have given as part of an ongoing (national) debate that I sparked off concerning the usefulness of interoperable ePortfolios, which some argue aim to provide degrees of 'scaffolding' to learners.

Scaffolding is a good metaphor. It wraps around (and sometimes within) a building in the process of construction. It gets assembled, dismantled and extended where appropriate as the building grows. And at some point, is no longer required. Then, the more difficult fine detail of the building can be worked upon.

Unfortunately, it seems that students often don't understand that we want them to be concerned with the building and not the scaffolding. This might be a result of the following:

1. understanding and navigating the scaffolding is itself a major achievement;
2. but understanding the scaffolding is still a quicker win than actually creating the building;
3. everyone has the same experience of the scaffolding, but they are all creating different buildings, so there's less of a shared understanding of the building;
4. it's the scaffolding that is provided by the authorities, not the building;
5. consequently, we end up rewarding them for understanding the scaffolding, not for the building or for the process of building, because its the scaffolding that everyone understands;
6. so at some point along the way, the building is forgotten and all we are left with is the scaffolding.

That's rather metaphorical, but perhaps captures an aspect of the current (and maybe eternal) problems of education. Warwick Blogs is initially an experiment in providing a powerful building tool but with very little scaffolding. The conjecture is that to some extent our students will self-organize their own scaffolding from within it. I think we have been little naive, given the wider educational context in which it exists. But we can see it starting to happen occasionally.

My argument is that we need to do a little more work to help a minimal set of scaffolding emerge locally to the many different and diverse regions of building within the university – scaffolding appropriate to each discipline and sub categories of discipline. However, if we are to see that happen, we have to convince the people in these localities that it is their responsibility to create the appropriate scaffolding, and use it wisely (given the argument above). I suspect that at the moment they just don't see that as their job. Or maybe they want to do it, but they feel that the authority belongs elsewhere (this is certainly true of any students who may want to create their own scaffolding). This perhaps is made worse by the appropriation of all scaffolding into a single taxonomic ePortfolio structure, which may be intended as a support to them, but which may have the psycholgical effect of disempowering local actors.

: 06 Jun 2005 08:32 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem