Electronic portfoilios for design and technology

This paper concentrates on the work of students studying design and technology education (DTE) in initial teacher education (ITE) at Sheffield Hallam University. As an early part of their course they study a module that develops their ability to design and manufacture products using a range of skills and processes. This involves the origination, collation and presentation of a portfolio of evidence to support a number of physical product outcomes design and manufactured during the semester. The submission requirements associated with this course component raise a number of teaching and learning issues relating to the generation and use of portfolios of evidence, commonly associated with the assessment of design and technology activity. These issues include: • the use of reflective processes by students in the evaluation of their own outcomes and learning is underdeveloped both specifically within DTE • submissions do not necessarily encourage active student reflection or the articulation of thought processes • the contents tend to be entirely two dimensional and do not encourage recording of three dimensional development work undertaken • they are bulky and do not easily lend themselves to display, storage and handling • maintaining the order of contents is difficult and liable to change when accessed • for security reasons, general availability and access to their contents is restricted to a few (usually only tutors) and does not easily facilitate peer scrutiny • presentation can often incur unnecessary cost for students. Electronic portfolios are becoming common in the commercial world and in some areas of education. This project examines the potential enhancement of the teaching and learning opportunities brought about by the use of elearning in ITE as an instrument for developing student capability. This small-scale study attempts to evaluate the experiences of a group of 41 students in their first year of a two year route into teaching. They were required to submit for assessment an electronic record of their design work. This made use of commonly available software uploaded to their Blackboard e-learning ‘site’. Minimum support was given to students in the use of the technology for e-portfolio production. Subsequently the project seeks to examine the contribution to the learning process of students completing this module. The methodology used by the researcher to collect data includes the use of observation, semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire. Evidence is examined to identify occurrence and use of the following: • simple annotation of media to improve clarity and emphasis thus enabling reflection • generation of critical dialogue recording the iterative process between thinking and doing associated with designing and making • distillation of thinking and its affect on refining decision making • inclusion of animation techniques • opportunity taken by students to view the work of others made available through the associated Blackboard course • streamlining of submissions alleviating the need for the generation and storage of paper based portfolios.