Ready to Record our Thoughts?

Ok, here we go... it's time to begin recording our processes in this UofOfolio Research and Development Project. Following a discussion yesterday with Lori Hager, our fearless UofOfolio Director, I've decided to implement a blog as a data gathering tool for each of the program leaders in our Design-based Research project. This will be used for each one of us to document our thinking, our challenges, our goals, and - yes - our reflections of the ePortfolio learning process here at the University of Oregon.

We will, of course, continue to use the wiki that we've been developing for some time. The wiki will be our collaborative space - the place to document our collective vision, our collection of resources, our collective progress and such. The blogs get to be our own - our thinking as it evolves. Helen Chen and Stanford did a great study on this mixed use of blogs for personal and wikis for collective thinking working with mechanical engineers some years back - and I've been doing it with my students for sometime (though we use a Facebook-like social network called Ning for our personal dialogue). I think this may be really helpful for us to track our progress-over-time... which is a very good thing to do for an ePortfolio initiative, as that's what ePortfolios are supposed to be about!... progress.... over..... time.