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Introduction

In this section we will look at a particular example to show how Unit 2 can be tackled and also support Unit 1.

There are two aspects to Unit 2

1. An internet research project targeted on an Open Source project
2. Following instructions to produce an e-portfolio.

We will use the e-portfolio to present our findings from the research project and we will make references to where the work will support the knowledge required in Unit 1. This can be supplemented by using the Silver INGOT unit 1 Moodle course. We will assume this is in a class situation with several participants. If you are doing this exercise individually you will have to imagine you are working with others or maybe invite others to participate using one of the on-line forums.

The First Task

The first task is to find information about the Gutenberg project. What is the Gutenburg project? What can we find out about it?

I can use a search engine to find useful information from the Internet

Here is the first of the SU2 assessment criteria. Here are two search engines, Google and Clusty. Try using each to find out as much as you can in 20 minutes about Gutenberg. Transfer the information you find into a word processor document and be prepared to feedback to the group.

Now you have some information you have to find a way of communicating it. You could just use your word processor, but we will be a bit more ambitious and present it as part of an e-portfolio on the internet.

Task 2

I can set up an account on a community web site

In order to present our information on Gutenburg in an e-portfolio we must first set up an account on the INGOT community site. The procedure for doing this is explained in the "How tos" link from the INGOT site home page. From here go to "How do I create and account on this site?".

By following the instructions here you should be able to make your own account on the INGOT community site. (Please take note of the information about the data that you need to input into your profile fields. It is important.)

Once you have set up your account you can use it to make an e-portfolio to present your work.

If you are an assessor you will probably want to make comments on learner work. This facility is not available to the learners, only to assessors and we need to set a permission on your account to enable you to make comments. You should contact your account manager by e-mail to ask for the permission to be set on your account after you have set it up.

Task 3

I can create a new web page and make it available on the internet
Just go to e-portfolios and click on How do I make an e-portfolio? By following the instructions here you can make a new web page and then use some basic HTML in order to format and present your information. Why do we want learners to do this with HTML rather than just use the "rich text editor" available with the Drupal environment? Editors do have some advantages but they also provide restrictions. If the learner knows a bit about HTML they can see how things work and this provides some understanding of under-lying principles. There are many HTML tutorials freely available on the internet so anyone that wants to learn more, can do so. We are trying to encourage learners to see how to be self-sufficient in their learning and offer opportunities to progress further at their own pace if they want to.

One thing to note is that experience shows that people who have used office software but are new to web publishing will try and simply attach word processor files to links. This is nearly always bad practice. If you are using a web environment to present text and graphics, publish them as web pages. Try to avoid making a link that simply ends in a document file when the same information could be presented as a web page. It is especially bad practice to use proprietary document files because you are forcing the user to buy software when they could simply access the information with their web browser. (Notable culprits are Power Point and Word documents. Why use Power point for slides that are effectively simple pages of text and graphics that display perfectly well in a web browser? If you use Powerpoint make sure it adds some real value to what you are trying to achieve).

So what other assessment criteria will we pick up as we go through the e-portfolio "how to"?

I can make a heading, links to other web pages using URLS and lists in HTML.

I can use the skills above to make an index page organized into sections

I can upload files to my web space and make a link so other people can download the file

I can use the above skills to make an e-portfolio for my work

I can use image editing software to prepare images for use on the web

I can insert an image in HTML

I can use the above skills to insert images into my e-portfolio

So let's take stock of what we have learnt so far and look at how this learning can be recorded in the on-line markbook.

Follow the link to log into the certification site. The Guest 1 account in the markbook is accessed with username Guest 1 and password zepplin2. Now on the first page click on the mark book link. On the markbook page choose Silver Unit 2 from the "units" menu on the left and group 7a from the "groups" menu above it. Now select view for learner Ian Lynch to see the assessment criteria and spaces for marks. Now assuming you were this student and doing a self-assessment (in the real case, of course, the assessor would have to verify any self-assessment before putting marks into the mark book) what marks could you enter?

If you found some useful information about the Gutenberg project without any help you can put a "2" in the first mark box. If you needed some help a "1". If you move down to the magenta background you should be able to mark several statements from what you have done so far but perhaps not all. Learners will need to be given opportunities to show they can match the criteria in later activities if they have not fully met the requirements but we have a lot of scope to do this.

Self-assessment
This is why self-assessment has such potential power in the INGOT methods. In this exercise you are effectively self-assessing against the criteria and there is no reason why learners can not do this too. They can get their peers to check their judgements and finally as the assessor you can confirm this. Your account manager will then sample and check your judgements. With such a wide range of people checking, it becomes very unlikely that a judgement will be made in error and it involves the learner in understanding how to evaluate their own learning.

Task 4

In task 2 you set up your account and in task 3 you should have set up the start of your e-portfolio. In Task 4 we are going to use the information we found out about the Gutenberg project to "populate" our e-portfolio and provide opportunities for you to pick up the rest of the assessment criteria for the unit. We will also see that we can cover some of the unit 1 criteria at the same time.

There is a student called Ivan Ingot who has started his e-portfolio on the community site here.
Ivan has set up an index page using simple HTML tags

I can use the skills above to make an index page organized into sections.

This is what the HTML for the page looks like

<h1>This is my index page providing links to my work</h1>
<p><p><p>
<h4>My projects</h4>
<p>
<ul>
<a href="http://www.theingots.org/community/node/5705"><li>Silver INGOT Open Source Research </li></a>
<a href="http://www.theingots.org/community/node/5706"><li> Science project investigating insects</li></a>
<a href="http://www.theingots.org/community/node/5707"><li> Global warming and environment project</li>
</a>
</ul>
<p>
<p>
The h1 tag makes a heading style, <p> tags put some blank lines in to space out the text links. We then have an unordered list with list items linked to new pages created using the create content link. The only index link that goes anywhere interesting is the first one to the Silver INGOT project. We only have to do enough to demonstrate competence against the assessment criterion but of course you could build an entire e-portfolio if you wanted to.

Ivan has linked "Silver INGOT Open Source Research Project" to a new page where he has listed the questions he has to answer about the project.

Your job is to set up a similar index page and links using your own community site account. In the next task we will look at answering the questions with links to a new page.

Task 5

We can make a new page as a target for the link from each question but this is a bit clumsy. Instead we will use "anchors" in a single page so that clicking on the question takes us to the particular place on the page where the answer is located. The html tag for an anchor is <a name="Q1" title="Q1"> where Q1 is the name of the anchor. The anchor is placed in the target page immediately before the place in the page where we want to be when clicking on the link. The link incorporates the anchor like this:

<li> <a href="/community/node/5708#Q1">What is the name of the project you are researching?</a></li>

List item with the page address /community/node/5708 and the # and the name of the anchor in the page where we want to end up. (Note that we could have used the full http://www.theingots.org/community/node/5708#Q1 but since we are in the community site environment the full path is optional.)

So Ivan has linked his questions to the answers to make his presentation interactive. Here is what the full HTML looks like:

<a href="/community/node/5704">Click to return to the index page</a>
<p><p>
<ol>
<li> <a href="/community/node/5708#Q1">What is the name of the project you are researching?</a></li>
<li><a href="/community/node/5708#Q2">What is the address of its website?</a></li>
<li>What is the main purpose of the project?</li>

Note that the first line provides a link back to his index page. He could copy this to the top of every page in his e-portfolio. It's like the home button for a web site. All he needs to do now is repeat the pattern for the rest of the questions. This is where using the rich text editor will save some time but ensure that the learners understand how the HTML tags work before allowing them to use the quicker method so that they at least meet the assessment criteria and understand something of how things work.

Assessment again

If we refer back to the markbook, we should be able to put in marks now for more of the criteria. Some specific things we need to do are:

I can transfer information from several sources into a document or presentation.

We already have some information from the Gutenberg site but we could get an image or picture from somewhere else to show we have found information from more than one source. Searching Wikipedia for Gutenberg would be one good option. Ivan has clearly stated in his presentation in the general information section that he got his information from the Gutenberg web site and Wikipedia and this provides him with the means to satisfy

When using information from other sources I say where I got it from.

He also comments on the need to declare his use of other people's work and so shows

I know I should not pass off the work of others as my own.

What we need to do now is to upload some files and illustrations to satisfy the following criteria
I can use image editing software to prepare images for use on the web.

I can insert an image in HTML.

I can use the above skills to insert images into my e-portfolio.

Task 6

So for task 6 we are going to find a suitable image or images to illustrate our work edit them to prepare them for our purpose and display them.

Take a look at Ivan's work on his general information page of his e-portfolio. He searched on Wikipedia and for some general things about Gutenberg and printing. His assessor gave him some guidance to help him narrow things down (This is only a level 1 qualification so it is quite likely that the teacher will provide considerable guidance without actually doing the work for the learner. At all times, the bottom line is in meeting the specific assessment criteria and it's quite alright to provide general guidance on structuring the tasks)

In order to include images he first made sure that their copyright allowed him to use them. Then he uploaded the images to his user space by going to his personal files link in "My Account". At the foot of this page he clicked browse and found his files to upload. In doing this he matched two of the criteria in Unit 1.

I know which places my files go to when I save them

I know that the size of files can be a problem in transferring them from place to place

(There may well be opportunities here to match other Unit 1 criteria depending on how the assessor wants to plan the lessons)

Now that the files are uploaded to his user area, Ivan needs to insert them into his general page. To do this he uses the img src tag.

<img src="/community/sites/default/files/uploads/user4/225px-Gutenberg.jpg" alt="Gutenberg portait" title="Gutenberg" hspace="5" width="105" height="135" align="left" />

The path is given in the my account, personal files page below the list of uploaded files. It is always of the form files/uploads/userN/<filename>. hspace just puts some horizontal space in to separate the image from the text and width and height tell the page how big to display the image. Once the candidate shows they can do this they can use the rich text editor. Click on the picture icon in the toolbar and enter the URL. In the "Appearance tab" you can specify the image size, position etc.

So Ivan has found information from several sources and put it into a document. He has said where he got his information from and provided evidence that he is not trying to pass of work of others as his own. He has uploaded and put images into his e-portfolio. The only thing he didn't do was prepare the images. This is because he took images that had already been prepared for web display since they were on web sites. To get all the marks he needs to either scan an image, use a digital camera or perhaps take a screen shot of a relevant illustration. Almost certainly these images will be far too big both in dimensions and data size to be best for his purpose. He should take the image into an image editor eg Gimp and crop it to cut away all but the area of the image required and then save it as a jpeg with as much compression as possible that leaves the image looking reasonably good. That might take a little experimentation. This will also provide a contribution to Unit 1 eg

I can source images from cameras and scanners using appropriate techniques to cope with their size

So you are now in a position to put together your own General information page using the information you found in Task 1.

Again we can take stock against the criteria in the mark book. Which criteria are left to be matched?

I know that E-mail lists are available to provide free support for a range of applications

I have observed a discussion thread on Usenet, a mailing list or forum to gain additional insight into a topic.

I can find a useful product from the Internet that would be good value in supporting work in an office

I can use information from the Internet to support an argument

I can find some information and show that it is incorrect by finding evidence from other information sources

In Task 7 we will see how these can be picked up.

Task 7

There are a few opportunities to meet the first two criteria. The Gutenberg project has mailing lists for volunteers. Check that you are confident that you could subscribe to the list and manage the traffic. One way would be to set up say a gmail account and then all postings would go to it and not get mixed up with your general mail, or you could use a filter on your existing mail client to filter the mail from Gutenberg into a dedicated folder. All we need to do is monitor the list and perhaps discuss the information as a group. If some learners want to join the project that is fine but discourage indiscriminate posting as it will annoy other project members. This satisfies the first two criteria. Another option would be to set up a discussion about the Gutenberg project on the INGOT forums and invite others to join in. Check you can support this using the how to link and the forums section.

Useful product
To find a useful product for use in an office we need to look no further than Wikipedia. The information in Wikipedia is likely to be useful at some time in an office. It might be that some of the Gutenberg texts are useful too and of course the Firefox web browser would be and it is freely downloadable. Candidates could search for any office equipment and use comparisons to work out which they think is best value. We don't have to stick rigidly to our Gutenberg project to satisfy the criteria.

Using information to support an argument
There is always some disagreement about who invented things. Can you find information to support the argument that Gutenberg invented the printing press? Another argument that you might make is that the Gutenberg project is unfair on booksellers. Could this be supported with information from the internet? A simpler argument might be that the Gutenberg project is a benefit because it gives more people access to books. What information would support that view?

Correct and incorrect information
This is quite a demanding task and so it is good enough to find contradictory views. eg Ivan says that Gutenberg used his press to print indulgences so the Church could make money from wealthy people. Can you find independent evidence that either supports this or contradicts it? (Try here)

Alternatively you could use an entirely different focus. For example some people believe that aliens are visiting the planet. Others say there is no clear evidence to support this.

Something as simple as the Viking helmet is often depicted in error. Internet searches will show Viking Warriors going into battle with great horns on their helmets. The link provided shows this is largely a myth.

Note that some of the criteria are more difficult than others. It should be possible to gain a pass without being able to fully meet some of the criteria self-sufficiently but all should be able to cover the work with help. The more demanding criteria enable strong candidates to achieve a distinction that recognises their higher attainment level.

Supporting Unit 1

There are many opportunities in the above example to support unit 1

I know that certain types of files have particular names and purposes

I know that I have to choose the right type of application to open certain types of file

I understand why open standards for file formats are important

The files uploaded to the e-portfolio are jpg. These are compressed graphics so they display quickly and look good. JPG is an open format so it can be used freely by anyone. HTML is the file type for web pages. Again it is an open standards so web browsers from different suppliers can understand the file content and display it correctly. There are probably opportunities to look at other file types too eg discourage .ppt and .doc attachments where a web page can do the same job. Documents like .doc and .pdf are for printing and for situations where the internet is not available. If you have an e-portfolio as much as possible should be available directly from web pages and links without having to but specific additional software to open specific types of file.

I know that some applications can create very big files e.g. video, audio and graphics

I know that the size of files can be a problem in transferring them from place to place

I can make a link to video and audio clips from other applications

They should appreciate that jpg is designed to make files as small as possible and that raw graphics from a scanner or camera will probably need some processing. Ivan made a link to a You Tube video about the impact of Gutenberg and printing on society. Why not upload the video? The file is too big and so linking to it is a better method. Video is already highly compressed so trying to compress it further generally won't work. Audio files are a bit in between. A short audio attached commentary would probably work but anything lengthy might again be better done with a link.

I can source images from cameras and scanners using appropriate techniques to cope with their size

If the learners source some of their own pictures for the e-portfolio they can demonstrate capability here.

I understand that it is bad practice to share my password with someone else and why

I understand that I should not try and get access to other people's areas on the network and why

I know that access to the network is a privilege that can be taken away if it is abused

These issues should come up when creating their accounts on the community site and attention to the acceptable use policy.

So in the space of the 7 tasks, there are opportunities to assess the majority of the criteria in Unit 1 as well as Unit 2.