I have found from personal experience that there is a huge difference between being required to create posts on a school-provided platform and being given the freedom and ownership to decide how I want to share my learning through an ePortfolio platform of my choosing. In undergrad, I participated in creating an eFolio but I constantly found myself trying to understand exactly what each professor wanted, rather than creating and sharing due to the excitement of learning and wanting to connect with others.
I also found myself relying on other students and in-class time to discuss how the platform program worked, rather than finding relevant Youtube videos and making the learning my own. In part, this could have been because I had spent years of schooling playing the game of “What does the teacher/ standardized test want?” rather than learning for the sake of learning. Our students have likely been trained that way too.
To this day, I cringe thinking about how hard it was to prove all of the new teacher “benchmarks” we were required to find evidence for. It was especially because we worked on it across classes and occasionally what we did with one professor wasn’t what the next professor wanted or expected. I must not forget to think from the perspective of a student. I think we must reteach our students how to learn for themselves. We have a great opportunity.
Reading through “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure” made me recognize that I was a part of a younger generation that experienced Blogger, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Facebook in its early days (2009). Perhaps that is why when I first was introduced to an ePortfolio, my thinking in college was all about what my professors wanted. All of the assignments and posts reflected exactly what my professors were looking for. It felt like it was hard to be creative with the experience, so it was less fun.
As a teacher, it will be important to keep this in mind while creating lessons. Controlling how students create content does not allow for creativity and true ownership. Ownership is so powerful. I cannot wait to find ways to give my students the opportunity to develop ownership over their work. We must be conscientious about how we teach our students to engage with the web.
Education with Meaning 