Last week I had the pleasure of moderating a conference on ePortfolios at SUNY Brockport. Unfortunately, the audio on WebEX apparently died early on, so there is no online archive available. It’s too bad. It was a great conference.
Anyway, I’ve said on a number of occasions that ePortfolios are a lot like artificial intelligence in that they will be only a year away for the next ten years. But the conversation at the conference made me realize that I haven’t got it quite right. The real problem is that, for all the many different definitions of ePortfolios out there, we have a bizillion different sets of application requirements which are not being looked at holistically. We’re trying to solve the wrong problems.
I heard four basic variations on the definitions of ePortfolios at the conference. The first one was the box of papers in the basement. You know, the one with all your notebooks, your tests, your essays…maybe your thesis…? This analogy was introduced by the very first speaker and repeated throughout the day. But the thing is, does anybody ever really think of that box as a portfolio? Personally, I think of it as my “stuff.” If I want to put together a portfolio, I’ll go through my stuff and pull out the best stuff. A portfolio is, roughly, a portable folio. Emphasis on portable. My box of stuff isn’t terribly portable, nor would I have any reason to port it around with me except on those rare and exceptionally distasteful times when I’m moving all of my stuff. I need my box of stuff to put together my portfolio, but the box of stuff is not a portfolio in itself.
The other three definitions of ePortfolios are closer to the mark:
- A periodic browse through the box of stuff: Every once and a while I go down to the basement, pull out my box of stuff, and look through it to remind myself of just how dumb I used to be and how I’ve grown to be slightly less dumb. During those times, I pull out maybe 10% of the stuff in my box. I might pull out slightly different items depending on what I’m thinking about at the time, but it’s always the same process. I pick a few things to read closely and shove the rest back in the box. Reflective ePortfolios should work roughly the same way.
- Pulling stuff out to impress somebody: This is the classic portfolio application. When a graphic artist or an architect brings a portfolio to a prospective client or employer, she usually picks a few items from her box of stuff that she thinks will resonate her audience. The collection will be tailored to the particular prospect, just as a cover letter and CV might be customized for each job application. An ePortfolio for potential employers should work the same way.
- Pulling stuff out to prove you did the work: Professional eportfolios for certification do this. They collect specific items so that evaluators can easily review the work.
So to support ePortfolio applications of all types, we need two things: A big box for stuff and some smaller…um…folios that are easy to fill with carefully selected subsets of the stuff. In other words, we need to give students a personal file storage system that’s linked to a personal publishing system. In the former case, the box should automatically store the stuff that students produce or submit online for their coursework. Why let student contributions be “owned” by a course instance which gets archived at the end of the semester, never to be seen again? Why not have it be “owned” by the student and published to the course? Why not have the instructor comments/grades get attached to the document and put in the student’s box, the way comments and grades get attached to physical papers that we return to our students? This isn’t an issue of building an ePortfolio; it’s an issue of correcting a fundamental design flaw in the LMS’s themselves.
Once every student has a box of stuff, then we can talk about making it easy for them to create portfolios that happen to be “e”. We need a simple publishing system that allows flexible templating and guest access control. Add to the mix a handful of pre-created templates to start the students off, and you’re basically done. You can add bells and whistles–maybe a commenting capability for guests, maybe a simple workflow for reviewers (including the students themselves, in a reflective portfolio application), etc.–but these are all nice-to-have add-ons. They are also, by the way, standard fare for even basic content management systems (like blogs, for example). Let’s keep it simple. An ePortfolio is a lightweight personal publishing system that should sit on top of an LMS’s personal file management system.
Thanks for this wonderful piece, Michael- it is about the most sensible description and overview of eports I have read in the last 10 years!
But now what?
Thanks for the compliment, Alan. I particularly appreciate it coming from you.
I think the first step is to work with LMS providers (vendors and OSS projects) on building in standards-compliant (using the OKI content OSID, JSR-170, or something else) repositories where student content lives by default. Getting that re-architecture done is the hard part. Once the content is in a repository that has easy hooks for calling it out, adding the portfolio part will be a lot easier.
At the same, I think we should be spending more energy doing lightweight portfolio prototyping using tools like Dreamweaver, Nvu, Drupal, Xoops, Jotspot–pick your favorite easy web site construction tool–and less time futzing around with heavy portfolio applications that over-specify the portfolio output based on under-specified application development requirements. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
None of this is going to happen quickly.
Micheal,
Iam both an educator and artist and can see what a great tool this would be! I am a fan of Portfolio based Assessment and can relate to that big box of stuff as my closets are filled with years worth of CAD drawings and Playbills from my days as a lighting designer and technical director. After that the years worth of educational materials ah.. and as a current student, yes back to school and a special education educator an eportfolio would make things easier in collecting and gathering all that work! I have used Dreamweaver but I’m not familar with the others you mentioned. Interested in learning more about this topic..
Anne
Great stuff! Another thought – what happens when students leave an institution and want to access their folios? These days most of them are on lock-down in an LMS such as Blackboard, etc… Even Moodle has a simply portfolio plugin – but how will the student access and use after college? Maybe the portfolios should exist on a totally external site managed by the student – so they can access them whenever – then have simple ways for instructors to collect, comment on and work with the folios in an LMS – through plugins or RSS? Even a blog with enclosures (PDF, images, audio/video, etc.) could work quite nicely for that – coupled with some sort of collection and presentation plugin that would create a way to share it with prospective employers?
I agree 100%, Clark. We should be able to take our box o’ stuff and go when we want to. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be hosted off-site from the get-go. That’s one possibility. The other would be a really good, easy, standards-compliant export capability from the college’s ePortfolio system. Once you have the collection and metadata, then it should be possible to put it into some other presentation system.
That said, there are reasons for colleges to consider maintaining ePortfolio systems for alumni that want it in perpetuity. To begin with, it helps maintain a connection. Beyond that, there is certain metadata around student content (such as grades and teacher comments) that really should be validated by a trusted source (in cases where the student cares to share that metadata). It’s analogous to providing an official transcript.