Goodbye blog, hello learning portfolio 👋

Participants were welcomed to the second iteration of the online PACT course with a clear statement of its aims:

The aims of the PACT badge are to familiarise you with the PD framework, to encourage you to use the PD framework to develop effective PD strategies, and to develop your PD learning community. We encourage you to be proactive in developing your professional role and a Professional Development Portfolio (PD Portfolio) that documents your PD journey. 

It was an interesting and valuable six weeks that for me, will guide my future lifelong learning journey.

At the outset of the course I quickly figured out that I did not need to develop a new portfolio, I already had the foundations of one in my WordPress blog that I created in 2017 to help track the progress of my PhD learning journey. This came as a nice surprise since the thought of creating a new one from scratch on a new platform, most likely Mahara, was a bit daunting and would have taken more time than the weekly 6 hours I had allocated for the course.

Once the course was over and I had a little more time over the Christmas break, I was able to recategorise my 44 posts to date using the domains and typologies of the framework, evidenced by this image. Looking at the count against each of these categories it appears that ‘The Self’ domain is heavily weighted in my posts and this is for a very good reason since the PD Framework is grounded in ‘The Self’.

Here is an extract from the Framework depicting the domains:

One of the course activities was to reflect on and categorise some of our professional development to date using the PD Typologies and I was able to use all four typologies to categorise my selected experiences. My posts to date were quite heavily weighted towards the Accredited typology and this is to be expected since I have been in engaged in two formal programmes of study since starting this blog.

At this point I considered the formal recategorisation of my blog to be in good shape but I needed to be able to locate posts more easily than scrolling down through the content especially as the content increases. 

My Triad peer Muireann, used the WordPress tag cloud feature for her portfolio so I decided to leverage this with the idea that selecting a word from the tag cloud would easily locate related posts. This was enlightening, not just for the technical feature but also that it showed me, for example, how useful MOOCs have been in my PD journey over the last couple of years, along with my reflective practice. Here’s what it looks like currently with 44 posts tagged with one or more of these keywords.

The final step of this stage was a name to replace ‘blog’. Over the duration of the PACT course it became clear that my efforts to date warranted a more appropriate description. Would it be an eportfolio, a learning portfolio, a learning journal or something else? In my opinion, the “e-” prefix these days really is no longer valid. E-commerce, e-learning, e-books, e-tivities are not terms that I use since the “e-” is part and parcel of daily life for most. The question came up for discussion with our Week 2 webinar guest speaker, Dr. Orna Farrell, whose PhD topic was on eportfolio based learning. Orna advised that she liked the term learning portfolio, as do I, and so the decision was made, job done.

Welcome to my learning portfolio.

Thank you to all involved in this section of my learning journey and I leave you with this quote borrowed from the PACT course materials:

“Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”
 – John Cotton Dana

Until next time,

Sandra

Reference: https://www.teachingandlearning.ie/our-priorities/#!/professional-development

Featured image courtesy of Pixabay