Elizabeth Hartnell-Young is concerned with how we value and assess the products that students create, and other emerging issues impacting on curriculum. Elizabeth has conducted research using mobile phones and Nokia's Lifeblog software, and recently completed research for Becta on eportfolios and their impact on learning.

Mobile devices provide ways of creating digital products and capturing evidence of learning that can be stored in eportfolio systems. Eportfolios are impacting upon learning in a variety of ways.

Purposes:

• Celebrating learning
• Personal Planning
• Transition/entry to courses
• Employment and professional registration

Processes:

• Capturing and Storing evidence
• Reflecting
• Giving feedback
• Collaborating
• Presenting to an audience

Nokia Lifeblog itself is a free download available from Softpedia  that comprises a chronological, seamless repository of images accompanied by reflections/comments either texted in or written up later at a PC – forms a powerful, multimodal narrative.

e.g. with indigenous Australian children

 “ My grandfather is dead, I know the stories and it is my responsibility to keep them strong”

How does teacher build on this in school, or into school work? How do they judge it?

Another example showed young children working with audio and reflecting on how well they’d achieved a set task – sophisticated level of collaboration and self assessment.

Process versus Product

Mobile technologies allow children and their teachers to engage with and assess the process and not just the product of learning.

But how to make best use of the extra evidence?

As ever, what about the time it will take?

Not all fair weather – one child was found to be recording their teacher. In another study college students in the food industry were not allowed to use mobile phone cameras because of concerns over the company’s intellectual property. The reification of reflective comments can raise concerns – what if the site is hacked?  Doctors in particular are afraid to document reflection in case of litigation.

Rowntree (1977) raises useful questions such as

How to interpret?

•  people read representations in different media differently

How to respond?

•  teachers were concerned that images weren’t sufficient quality but, for the children the emotion or memory evoked by the image was plenty

Final discussions concerned the use of images to record projects in development – were they evidence? Traces of evidence? As good as the real thing ( a cake or a resistant materials project)?

See Elizabeth's Becta report.