A Commentary on the ePortfolio

The Purpose

The ePortfolio represents the requirements for a graduating project, or capstone project, for UBC's Master of Educational Technology program. It also fulfills the requirements for attaining the next level of qualification as per B.C.'s Teacher Qualification Services.

The Objectives

​My objectives in creating this ePortfolio are four-fold:
To demonstrate the ongoing development of a deep and ongoing reflective practice

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To create an artifact to demonstrate my competencies to MET professors, students, and current and potential employers
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To create a personally usable working document with which to track my teaching and learning development.

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To showcase my knowledge and skills with educational technology, teaching and learning pedagogy, and current best practices

The Metaphor

In order to encourage myself to reflect deeply on the program as a whole, rather than on individual courses, I have selected the overarching metaphor of "The expanding neural network".  This metaphor allows me to portray the complex, back-and-forth, interplay of ideas and concepts and reveal the usually-hidden development and transformation of cognition through making my own declarative, procedural, and conditional metacognitive processes explicit. 

The Themes

The following themes and questions will be utilized to frame my reflections and in helping me to weave connections across all elements of the program.  For each artifact, reflections are categorized into these themes and color coded as such.  

Teaching and Learning

  • What major theories impacted my understanding of teaching and learning?
  • How has this altered my perceptions, beliefs, and/ or values?  
  • How is this reflected in my practice or experience?  
  • How has this (or might this) alter my practice in the future?

Technology

  • How can specific technologies support learning?
  • What are the challenges and benefits associated with implementing a particular technology? 
  • What potential for transformation of learning does it carry?
  • How is this reflected in my practice or experience? 
  • How has this (or might this) alter my practice in the future?

Personal Growth

  • How have my knowledge, skills, and attitudes changed as a result of my learning?
  • How have my philosophies, strategies, tools, and behaviors changed or stayed the same?
  • How have my perceptions of groups, relationships, and society been challenged or reinforced?
  • How is this reflected in my practice or experience? 
  • How has this (or might this) alter my practice in the future?

Metacognition

How has my metacognition developed in terms of:
  • cognitive knowledge-- declarative, procedural, and conditional
  • cognitive regulation-- monitoring and evaluating (Lai, 2011)

Artifact Rubric

Part of the process was also to create a rubric to help assess how well each artifact upheld the purpose of the ePortfolio.  My rubric is directly aligned with my interwoven themes.
You will see the following legend, color coding each theme, as a focus guide to remind you of this framework, throughout the ePortfolio. On each page, this image is linked back here for easy reference to the framing questions for each theme.
References:

Lai, E. (2011). Metacognition: A literature review. Pearson Research. Retrieved from http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/metacognition_literature_review_final.pdf