Others have called for faculty to render explicit in the classroom the typically hidden ways of thinking and doing by disciplinary experts–not simply to model expertise but to shift students from recipients of others’ meaning-making to agents of their own meaning-making

Not-yetness emerged as a response to a dominant discourse of technology in education—including technologies of openness—that has been characterised by rhetoric of control, efficiency, and enhancement. Not-yetness invites a rethinking of online learning and digital education in terms of risk, uncertainty, and messiness and brings our attention to the variability of open education contexts and learners. Using examples of a ‘federated wiki’ and ‘agents beyond the course’, the article shows how higher education pedagogies can and should engage with boundary-crossings between openness and closure, and demonstrates the value of the perspectives that such engagements bring to the fore.

“Education on all levels has to move from packaging to probing, from the mere convey-ing of data to the experimental discovering of new dimensions of experience. The search will have to be for patterns of experience and discovery of principles of organization which have universal application, not for facts. ... It is the orientation of the society that matters, and our whole world, in shifting from the old mechanical forms to the new electronic feed-back forms, has already shifted from data packaging to probing of patterns.” (McLu-han, 1966, 38)

ePortfolios enable social pedagogies, providing an intermediate space between public and private. ePortfoliosareparticularlywell-suitedforsociallearninginteractionsbecausetheycanbesituatedasintermediatespaces,somewherebetweenentirelyprivateandtotallypublic.GuidedbyfacultystudentsrehearsewhatitmeanstoconnectwithanaudienceandconsiderwhattheirePortfoliolooksliketoothers.InventingwaysinwhichePortfolioscanserveassitesforcommunication,collaboration,andexchangeisasignificanttaskfortheePortfoliofieldasawhole.

The electronic Personal Development Plan (ePDP) is a tool for helping students engage in a process that facilitates greater understanding of who they are and enables them to set meaningful goals

We need to create learner-centered learning environments to help our students develop agency. That means we are helping them engage with what interests them and apply it in their life. We need to help our students build learning networks. These begin in the classroom with social pedagogies and build outward beyond the course and campus to connect locally and globally. We need to help our students develop the ability to integrate their own education, to connect their disparate learning experiences and apply it in their daily lives. This is all the more important in the context of the new majority of students who are non-traditional and learn both from formal institutions and from many informal sources online. We cannot rely on the traditional four-year college experience to promote integration and, frankly, we can’t do it for our students—integration is something students must do for themselves.  Instead we can provide the conditions. Finally, we need to be adaptive—keeping up with new learning data and applying it to improve our learning environments, whether the new innovation is automated adaptive learning modules for basic knowledge or eportfolios for evidence of integrative and applied learning.

In terms of promotion the problem is the people trying to explain it [the eportfolio] have probably never used it so in a way they have no clue what they are talking about, basically. To put it frankly – after listening to them you would be like, Okay so you as an outsider who never even used it is telling us we should do this because it is the best thing since sliced bread but you have never used it – you can’t find someone who did use it – you don’t have enough information to tell us how to use it – and now you’re telling us use it and we’ll grade you on it – this kind of makes it hard for students to accept or appreciate it.

students and faculty need a domain of their own, an online space they control to curate and present their work in ways that are consistent with the values and commitments of their research

we can’t leave something as important as teaching and learning on the web to institutions—no less the archiving and preservation of those resources. That has to be managed by faculty and students themselves as part of a broader sense of awareness of owning and managing their digital education.