Reflection 2.2

This week was our first collaborative group exercise, in which we had identify the drivers of eportfolio developments.

To be honest, when I first looked through the group exercise I wondered what relevance it would have to me and my development to know why UK, USA, Europe and beyond are driving eportfolios. As I journey towards becoming an elearning professional, what I found more relevant was understanding what eportfolios are and their benefits and limitations. This is the focus I tend to, and need to take on a daily basis, as it allows me to reflect what the impact will be of eportfolios in my workplace. I feel after all the core reading, I am in a better position to do so.  


The skills needed to work together in an online group are quite different to a face to face class, where you have a class at specfic times in the week. What is difficult about distant learning is by nature, it is flexible. For example I knew that the week was going to be particularly busy time for me, with limited time to log on, so most of my time was spent offline, reading and making notes. That’s why at the start of the task, I posted on the forum suggested groups of who could take on particular regions, so that I knew where to focus my reading,

Apart from that example, I don’t feel I was particularly proactive in leading, informing, or motivating the group, as the limited time I had online was mainly spent making sure I had uploaded all I had to, understanding how to set up a wiki  and having a look through the posts. I suppose I was also still “finding my feet” and getting used to this new way of studying. This is something I want to change in the future, as I know I can lead, inform and motivate “offline”, which I am comfortable with, so want to transfer these skills to “online”.
On my part, there was very limited additional discussion in the forum. My focus was more on getting though the core reading to update the drivers template. I suppose the fact that we came up with a template that everyone agreed on meant that we were all on the same wavelength to some extent? There was discussion in the forum of which I tended to agree and that's what I voiced.


Overall I feel the completion of this task is most relevant to my research competency due to the vast amount of core reading that has definitely increasde my knowledge of eportfolios by 600%! There was also a touch of technical skills in terms of wiki set up of how to set up wikis (as mentioned in my previous blog).