Forum .LRN Q&A: dotFOLIO Manual

1: dotFOLIO Manual

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 01/04/06 02:17 AM

This is an update on dotFOLIO development. Solution Grove is about to help Education Connection launch a dotFOLIO site for thier program with high school students.

You can preview the student manual here. If you find any errors please let us know. As part of customization we simplified the interface a bit and took out some features. We added a functionality they call resume builder. It is actually based on the "survey reports" package we did for KSG. We have an administrators guide to survey reports but its pretty KSG specific. If you look at both examples you'll see that it is quite flexible. Survey-reports code has been in CVS for a while (there maybe a few updates in a few days after we launch). We will work with Nick to bring this functionality into the dotfolio.org demo site.

The University of Sydney has been running dotFOLIO for a while. Thier student manual is here

2: Re: dotFOLIO Manual (response to 1)

Posted by Christian Fuchs on 04/28/06 11:59 AM

Hi Caroline,

we do plan to provide ePortfolios to higher education students too.
We have tested dotfolio and would be interested in the change you made for higher education.
Can we test this package? Is it under CVS?

Thanks.

3: Re: Re: dotFOLIO Manual (response to 2)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 04/28/06 03:41 PM

The short answer is yes, the code is in CVS and has been for some time. You need complex survey (contrib/packages/survey from HEAD) and survey-reports.

The process of getting it integrated with dotFOLIO is a bit involved and if you already have survey installed you have to upgrade to complex survey and that is a bit involved. Integrating dotLRN and dotFOLIO really isn’t an out of the box process yet. We are currently working through and writing down our internal procedures to document how we do it. Then we'll share that with Nick (the maintainer of dotFOLIO) and discuss with him whether and how we want to bring this functionality into the official install. Then we'll work on automating the install process.

After your post it occurs to me that our internal setup procedures would probably be useful to others and over the next couple days we'll move them from our internal wiki to a publicly readable one and post the url here. These are our draft internal working documents, they aren't finished pieces of documentation intended for the outside world but we are happy to share what we have.

Solution Grove is a commercial vendor for dotLRN/OpenACS providing a range of services from complete hosted solutions to developer training and maintenance for internal systems. We are committed to open source and sharing code we create. If you would like professional services to help you install, extend and customize the latest and greatest dotLRN code quickly and efficiently please contact us. (www.solutiongrove.com)

4: Re: Re: Re: dotFOLIO Manual (response to 3)

Posted by Nick Carroll on 04/28/06 05:19 PM

Hi Caroline,

It has been too long since we last talked about dotfolio. I have been preoccupied with a few things. One of which is a lab report writing tool. I am developing a tool for the School of Physiology here that allows students to write their lab reports online, as well as provides the necessary scaffolding to improve report writing.

This tool will be used to generate a "learning artifact" or learning outcome that can then be archived in dotfolio. This will therefore require a way for dotfolio to install new applications, and to mount an instance of a new application on all existing dotfolio subsites.

Using the clipping tool, a student can then clip a blog entry to a lab report, and reflect on the learning outcomes. If Curriculum Tracker is also installed, then these artifacts can be clipped to the course listed in Currciulum Tracker, thereby providing context for the learning artifacts. Kind of like connecting the dots, and eventually seeing the overall picture of one's personal learning and development.

Cheers,
Nick.