Reimagining Teaching Portfolios Through Personal Knowledge Management with Digital Tools for Thought

Stefan T. Siegel; David Lohner; Maik Arnold

doi:10.21240/zfhe/20-3/11

In higher education, teaching portfolios are instruments for faculty professionalization and academic development. Many lecturers struggle to systematically document, evaluate and further develop their teaching practices. We argue that teaching is knowledge work requiring intentional knowledge management. We explore how digital Tools for Thought (TfTs) support personal knowledge management (PKM), enabling lecturers to externalize, link, and reflect on teaching-related knowledge and materials. Using TfTs, teaching portfolios transform from static repositories into dynamic systems fostering critical reflection and evidence-informed professional development. Drawing on educational psychology research, we demonstrate how PKM practices can boost teaching competence.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Not only society, but also the higher education landscape is undergoing fundamental change. This poses major challenges for the quality of higher education teaching at universities and colleges in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: Digitalisation of all areas, educational expansion and mass universities, demands for higher labour market relevance of studies, promotion of future skills, questions about economically sustainable education funding and socio-political challenges of our time call for new skills for contemporary teaching. These developments are contributing to a reflection and readjustment of the goals of academic education and are gradually bringing university teaching more into the focus of politics and society. The increased attention paid to teaching is accompanied by the question of the (further) development of university didactic professionalisation, which is increasingly moving away from traditional forms of knowledge transfer and further towards project-based and more open teaching and learning environments.

Authors

Stefan T. Siegel WWW
Universtität St.Gallen
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7065-1306
David Lohner WWW
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hochschuldidaktik
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2715-1119
Maik Arnold WWW
Hochschule Nordhausen
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9609-8521

How to Cite

Siegel, S. T., Lohner , D., & Arnold, M. (2025). Reimagining Teaching Portfolios Through Personal Knowledge Management with Digital Tools for Thought. Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung (Journal for Higher Education Development), 20(3), 231–258. https://doi.org/10.21240/zfhe/20-3/11

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