As mentioned earlier, this ePortfolio was initially produced as part of the ETEC 590 course at UBC, but one of my main reasons for producing was a desire to study the impact of my overall efforts to improve my teaching practice.
When I began teaching in 2001, I was a freshly-minted graduate student with a degree in Cell and Molecular Biology and no formal knowledge of any teaching methods. As a result, my teaching style was very much influenced by my own past instructors and how they did things, and was not informed by any knowledge of pedagogy. My journey into teaching with technology started with frustration over poor student performance on one particular assignment, and has eventually lead me to a much greater understanding of how technology can be used to effectively support teaching.
Using the TPACK framework as a basis for my reflection, I would characterize my initial teaching practice as one dominated by Content Knowledge (CK) and Technological Knowledge (TK), with very little in the way of Pedagogical Knowledge (PK). And, while there is some contact between the TK and CK fields, I see very little evidence that I was actually using technology in a particularly effective manner to truly enhance the presentation of the content.
This has changed slowly over time. I feel like my Pedagogical Knowledge domain grew slightly at first, but has really expanded; initially with the course on Andragogy, and later with the courses in the MET program.
Conversely, I feel like my Technological Knowledge domain became smaller at first – not because I forgot what I knew, but because the technology developed at a very rapid pace and I didn’t keep up with it. More recently, and mostly as a result of my experiences with courses in the MET program, I made more of an effort to experiment with technology that could be used for producing educational content, and thus that domain has expanded once again.
Lastly, I feel like the act of producing this set of pages has been very valuable. It has given me an opportunity to revisit and rediscover some of the materials from past courses, and to reflect on some of the work I have produced as part of my learning as well as teaching. In some cases, my thinking about the educational value of some of my educational resources has changed, and in some cases I’ve been able to see their value from a different perspective (ie. things I did that “felt right” suddenly found a theoretical grounding).
The process of producing this site has been an education in itself, and I am thankful for having been able to use ETEC 590 as a motivator to do this. I would like to thank my peer reviewers for their input and encouragement, and Dr Feng for his numerous comments and suggestions – they have helped make this ePortfolio more complete.
