17.5 Technology-Enabled
If ongoing professional learning and development courses are to be engaging and
responsive, they will need to explore the affordances of new technologies that offer
the potential for different and innovative ways to connect and network practitioners
in interprofessional learning communities (Garrison and Anderson 2003 ). Two of
these new technologies relevant for this discussion and used in the Specialist
Teaching program are e-portfolios and digital badging.
An e-portfolio is a digitized collection of text-based, graphic, or multimedia
artifacts or collections of work that demonstrate competence in various contexts
(Lorenzo and Ittelson 2005 ). Barrett ( 2010 )defines e-portfolios as an electronic
collection of evidence that shows a learning journey over time, and can relate to
specific academicfields or life-long learning. Evidence may include writing sam-
ples, photos, videos, research projects, observations by mentors and peers, and/or
reflective thinking. For Barrett ( 2010 ), the key aspect of an e-portfolio is the
reflection on the evidence. She identifies two“faces”of an e-portfolio: the Working
Portfolio or “workspace”, and the Presentation Portfolio or“showcase”. The
workspace is about process, where the reflection on the chosen artifacts of evidence
occurs, and the showcase is about product, where the story or the narrative of
learning is presented. These two“faces”combine to produce the individualized
narrative of learning.
In the Specialist Teaching program e-portfolios are critical as the learning space
of the course. The resource teachers create their own e-portfolios usingMahara
software to document and reflect on their learning. Teachers’e-portfolios become
their showcase and workspace for their developing professional identity and
learning. They map their professional learning by exploring how their personal and
cultural identity links to their specialist endorsement area. Each teacher’s portfolio
consists of artifacts as evidence of learning, personal reflections, and a professional
philosophy, which combine to form their professional identity. The portfolio is
begun during formal study, but continues into ongoing practice, to document
life-long and life-wide practice. This results in a continuation of learning through
formal coursework on intofieldwork placement after completion of the course and
the ongoing curation of artifacts and evidence of learning, as well as narration by
the teacher of the journey from novice to experience. The e-portfolios are also used
for supervision and mentoring both within the course and for ongoing practice, as
well as used for appraisals, accreditation, documenting ongoing competency
as practitioners and as part of a résuméor curriculum vitae for job applications. As
Wenger ( 1999 ) points out, portfolios are another digital tool to share resources and
network within a community of practice as they act as vehicles for documenting
developing professional identity and capturing the process of“becoming”a pro-
fessional through“belonging”to a community of practice (Wenger 1999 ).
Digital badging is another digital technology that is changing the way we teach
and learn. As Grant ( 2014 ) argues, the value of digital badging is that it offers us the
chance to rethink what counts as learning and provides the potential to change our
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