• Becoming an eportfolio teacher.

      Hughes, Julie (Washington, DC: Stylus Publishing, 2009)
      This book: Higher education institutions of all kinds - across the United States and around the world - have rapidly expanded the use of electronic portfolios in a broad range of applications including general education, the major, personal planning, freshman learning communities, advising, assessing, and career planning. Widespread use creates an urgent need to evaluate the implementation and impact of e-portfolios. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the contributors to this book—all of whom have been engaged with the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research—have undertaken research on how e-portfolios influence learning and the learning environment for students, faculty members, and institutions. This book features emergent results of studies from 20 institutions that have examined effects on student reflection, integrative learning, establishing identity, organizational learning, and designs for learning supported by technology. It also describes how institutions have responded to multiple challenges in e-portfolio development, from engaging faculty to going to scale. These studies exemplify how e-portfolios can spark disciplinary identity, increase retention, address accountability, improve writing, and contribute to accreditation. The chapters demonstrate the applications of e-portfolios at community colleges, small private colleges, comprehensive universities, research universities, and a state system.
    • Blog Searching: The First General-Purpose Source of Retrospective Public Opinion in the Social Sciences?

      Thelwall, Mike (Emerald, 2007)
      Purpose – To demonstrate how blog searching can be used as a retrospective source of public opinion. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper a variety of blog searching techniques are described and illustrated with a case study of the Danish cartoons affair. Findings - A time series analysis of related blog postings suggests that the Danish cartoons issue attracted little attention in the English-speaking world for four months after the initial publication of the cartoons, exploding only after the simultaneous start of diplomatic sanctions and a commercial boycott. Research limitations/implications – Blogs only reveal the opinions of bloggers, and blog analysis is language-specific. Sections of the world and the population of individual countries that do not have access to the internet will not be adequately represented in blogspace. Moreover, bloggers are self-selected and probably not representative of internet users. Originality/value - The existence of blog search engines now allows researchers to search blogspace for posts relating to any given debate, seeking either the opinions of blogging pundits or casual mentions in personal journals. It is possible to use blogs to examine topics before they first attracted mass media attention, as well as to dissect ongoing discussions. This gives a retrospective source of public opinion that is unique to blog search engines.
    • Blogging for beginners? Using blogs and eportfolios in Teacher Education.

      Hughes, Julie; Purnell, Emma (Lancaster: Lancaster University, Department of Educational Research, 2008)
      This paper explores the use of an eportfolio and an educational blog within, and beyond, a professional pre-service teacher education programme, the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) for the post-compulsory sector. Writing within dialogic storytelling practices in an online environment allows student teacher development and identity to be seen “as a gradual ‘coming to know’” (Winter, 2003, p.120) dependent upon connections and interactions with others through both text and non-text formats such as metaphor, music and video. The authors explore their personal experiences as teacher (Julie) and learner (Emma) and eportfolio’s potential for longer term impact on and in their professional teaching lives.
    • Ed-blogs: the use of weblogs in learning, teaching and assessment

      Jones, Mark; Magill, Kevin (University of Wolverhampton, 2003)
    • Exploring ePortfolios and weblogs as learning narratives in a community of new teachers.

      Hughes, Julie (International Society for Teacher Education, 2008)
      Drawing upon student narratives, the author explores the extent to which a Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) teaching community at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom (UK), developed an approach to the process and product of e-portfolio which optimised the concrete outcomes required by external professional bodies, while harnessing the technology's potential for promoting collaboration and discursive reflection.