Last week I had the pleasure of spending most of my working week at CIT, which is SUNY’s instructional technology conference and also the largest SUNY-wide conference of the year. It was really exciting to see so many folks from all across the system engaged in thinking about how to “teach different” (to steal a phrase from Apple Computer).
Anyway, one of the talks in which I participated was a panel discussion about e-portfolios at SUNY. And I must say, I think that the e-portfolio system designs I have seen so far go about solving the problem in the wrong way. Because the right solution would turn a conventional LMS inside-out.Today’s LMS’s are still very class-centric. Everything is created in, organized by, and revolves around the class. Most e-portfolios are conceived of as the virtual equivalent of mom’s refridgerator–the place where you hang stuff after you take it out of the classroom. Or perhaps a better metaphor would be a taxidermist’s case. Having hunted elsewhere and elsewhen, you stuff and mount your trophies for display. Everything in the case is, by definition, dead. It doesn’t matter whether the e-portfolio is optimized for personal reflection on growth, for evaluation, or for job hunting; these differences all amount to rearranging the carcasses.
That’s not what a portfolio should be. A portfolio should be a living collection of a student’s personal progress, to be arranged and presented dynamically based on the needs of the moment. It should be simply one possible product of a richer personal content management system. Rather than taking finished work out of the (virtual) class and putting it into the e-portfolio, a properly designed personal content management system would let the student create a document (a blog post, an essay, a multimedia report…whatever) and pull it from his/her content space into the appropriate public space–a course, a workgroup, a portfolio…whatever. Edits, comments, and other changes that happen to it within the public space would all ultimately live with the document in the student’s personal content management space. The student would control all of his/her documents (along with edits, comments, grades, and other metadata) and determine if, when, and how they are displayed to other people.
Think of the personal content management system as the curricular equivalent to iTunes. Students would store all of their documents in a personal library. Sharing a document with the class would be akin to streaming a song over AirPort Express; everyone in the room can hear it and respond to it, but it would still live in the student’s personal iTunes-like repository. An e-portfolio would simply be a playlist, assembled out of the iTunes library to convey a specific mood for a specific occasion. Documents could be imported into the system, incorporated into new playlists, and exported as coherent collections (“rip, mix, burn”) at the student’s whim.
From what I’ve been seeing of eportfolios, many of them are so thoroughly connected to the class model and the LMS architecture that they often just go ahead and use Blackboard itself. I agree that this is not a structure that really works for encouraging the kind of reflection and interaction which can also be a part of the most successful portfolios.
Recently I’ve been looking at Johns Hopkins EP project http://cte.jhu.edu/epweb/ and just from my preliminary testing, it seems very promising.
It’s especially difficult to find a system that will be flexible and adjustable enough–and allow enough student control–without a huge investment in programming on the part of the campus (which, in my case, is really not able or ready to make that kind of investment).
Michael, I like your iTunes analogy.
I ran a focus group about two weeks ago with dotFOLIO, and found that the students have too much control. As a result I’ve been working on simplifying usability and permissions. I like how flickr manage permissions, and will try to incorporate this into dotFOLIO.
A student can store all their learning artifacts within their ePortfolio as private or shared amongst friends and advisers. Or if they choose to showcase items, then they have to set them as public. Kind of like what you have to do in flickr when you integrate pictures into your blog from your flickr collection.
Joe, thanks for the tip on the Johns Hopkins project. It does look like something along the lines of what I was thinking. Ideally, though, it would provide services that can be pulled into an LMS environment. This how the Blackboard content system works, although it currently appears to be much more geared toward personal content management for faculty than for students.
Nick, I had dotLRN in mind when I posted. As you point out, though, the workflow is tricky. This is true with any type of content management system. Striking the right balance between ease of customization and ease of use is hard.