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An ePortfolio is a purposeful collection of selected artefacts for an
identified audience. In a better product that might enable the concurrent
presentation of different 'personas' to different audiences. You cannot say
to an employer or the admin officer in an educational institution "Oh, just
Google my name!" As much as a traditional letter of application and CV, the
ePortfolio is an artform, crafted for a particular audience, succinct and
yet simply linking to further evidences if the reader is so inclined to
follow up certain aspects. If the reader is then in any doubt then perhaps
they *might* choose to Google further.
As I discovered some five years ago, there are very different reasons for
using ePortfolios. Even within the mainstream schools sector people have
very different ideas about how an ePortfolio might be used. But certainly,
adding an adult mindset to the schools scenario can only confuse the issue.
By the time the young student is getting towards adulthood (or at least 18+)
we can start helping them to understand how their personally owned
ePortfolio can 'evolve' into a more mature product. But perhaps we should
be limiting our considerations to the K-12 scenarios?
Ray Tolley FEIDCT, NAACE Fellow, ACQI, MBILD
ICT Education Consultant
Maximise ICT Ltd
P: http://raytolley.v2efolioworld.mnscu.edu/
B: http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/
W: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm
S: http://www.slideshare.net/maximise
T: http://twitter.com/efolio
Winner of the IMS 'Leadership Regional Award 2009'
A
So for
eportfolio_convers...@googlegroups.com.
I believe ePortfolios are CONCEPT, PROCESS, and PRODUCT.
I have lately been presenting about the CONCEPT of "Balancing the Two Faces of ePortfolios": http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/ (process vs. product, workspace vs. showcase, learning/improvement vs. accountability). The international community is recognizing this perspective, since my concept map/diagram has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Japanese and Mandarin! Unless we recognize the importance of both approaches to ePortfolios, I believe it will be more difficult to realize the practical contribution of ePortfolios for supporting reflection and lifelong learning. As an ePortfolio community of practice, we need to be clear about the multiple purposes for developing portfolios, and the multiple strategies that can be used... and not constrain our thinking by specific tools or products or narrow purposes. The development of ePortfolios can help build lifelong habits of reflective practice, but I fear that the process is in danger of being hijacked for accountability purposes (see The Accountability/Improvement Paradox: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/04/30/borden --a higher education perspective, but there are comparable viewpoints in K-12).
I agree with Bronwyn and Alexander: my working portfolio, that documents the PROCESS of my learning/growth over time, is my digital footprint through my website, my blog (http://blog.helenbarrett.org/ ), my Facebook account (mostly "friending" my family members), my Twitter posts (@eportfolios), etc.: my personal learning environment (PLE) that I contribute to and learn from on a regular basis. This "portfolio-as-PROCESS" is a powerful environment for lifelong learning and reflection, with digital media adding a contemporary boost to an ages-old process. I also agree that smart phones and other mobile technologies (i.e., iPad, tablets) are going to be an important direction for more widespread adoption. This aggregation of my online presence is how I construct my digital identity, using tools across the Internet, where I store videos in YouTube or blip.tv, images in Picasa or Flickr, presentations in slideshare.com, documents in scribd.com or googledocs, etc. (What I am missing is some type of database or tool where I can keep a record of links to all of these resources with meta-tags -- right now, I use a googledocs spreadsheet.) It is this process paradigm that constitutes the "everyday-ness" of ePortfolios in a highly interactive environment.
Every once in a while, I add an entry to one of my presentation portfolios (organized in one of many tools that I have explored) which represents a significant accomplishment in my professional life. This "portfolio-as-PRODUCT" is the type of document that Ray keeps referring to, with a specific purpose and audience, organized thematically using a specific authoring tool, such as Mahara, Google Sites, eFolio, or any one of the commercial tools. I spent years studying many of these tools for creating presentation portfolios, and I came to the conclusion that many of these systems are often institution-based, created within a finite time frame (i.e., a school or university program). Once a learner leaves the institution, with a few exceptions, the presentation portfolio remains behind or unchanged in an HTML archive: frozen in time as an artifact of that institutional experience (much like my tenure portfolio in PDF on a CD-ROM from 2002). I wish I could find data on the percentage of students who continue to pay subscription fees on commercial systems; my assumption is that it is fairly low. That is why I am an advocate for learners to own their own online spaces to publish their own presentation portfolios (i.e., Google Sites, WordPress, Weebly), or for the commercial providers to adhere to one of the standards, such as LEAP2A to allow portfolio content to be migrated between compatible systems... another argument for open Web 2.0 systems.
I am trying to finish my book over the next two months, so these ideas are front and center in my consciousness. I am looking for more stories of using Web 2.0 tools to create ePortfolios across the lifespan, in and out of formal education.
Thanks for including me in this conversation, Carole. I also maintain a couple of Google Groups that focus on Researching Web2.0 Portfolios and Using Google Apps for ePortfolios in K-12 Education.
Sincerely,
Helen
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Dr. Helen Barrett, Researcher and Consultant
Electronic Portfolios and Digital Storytelling
to Support Lifelong and Life Wide Learning
253-229-5235 (cell phone) * Skype & Twitter ID: eportfolios
Home page: http://electronicportfolios.org
Calendar: http://ical.me.com/hbarrett/Work-Travel
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Over the years I have come to appreciate your presence in the
portfolio space, your cross-community dialogues and your own active
participation as a web wide citizen.
I am currently engaged in consultation with a training organization
here in Sydney who are introducing the use of Mahoodle as it appears
as a compliance measure. Over the last few days our animated
conversations reveal that someone sold them the product however failed
to engage them deeply in the concept of EPs
My job I see is to lead the INTEROPERABLE discussions where by stealth
an organization can honor an individuals existing web presence ,
providing an opt-in range of applications that pipe nominated content
in for recognized prior and review possible accreditation.
The dichotomy of the learning experience which posits learner
generated and learner oriented creation as opposable is in my mind
something that learning institutions are yet to solve.
I totally agree that standards would help.......provided that they
don't also filter. How amazing to think that my three year old prefers
to interact online building his own ABC space rather than digesting
Mickey Mouse in front of the LED like a vegetable.
I wonder as a parent if my process of interaction mirrors that of
others where the Internet is treated as a personable cultural memory
rather than a plethora of loosely connected copyright protected
digital repositories.
Thank you for sparking a few reflections for me to ponder on.
Sent from my iPhone
I'm taken with the fact that there is still an academic perspective
that an ePortfolio "is supposed to be" this or that.
Likewise it astounds me how many product providers create silos and
manage to persuade organizations to bury the learner experience in
them.
On reading back I am positing that as Helen suggests, an eportfolio as
a function of living - a wholistic collective of digital economy and
creation, using multiple points of interaction...... yes well and
truly beyond a K-12 paradigm.
Google itself has a lot to answer to in this space and hence my
limited succinct use of it's services. Perhaps we could be speaking
more to portfolio services that provide audience access filters, in
essence negating where things are created rather where they can
repeatedly be accessed with ease rendering currency as king.
It's, as I well know, as much a matter of purism, a space in which we
wish to explore what's possible, where we want to define, inform and
build the best quality measures to get the best outcomes for our
learners.
All well and good I think provided our should's and assumptions
osmotically embrace that EPs are eclectically engendered across
multitudes of systems and sectors - beyond the thinking mind of
educators alone.
More importantly, do eportfolios in an academic paradigm signal a well
welcomed shift to where the LMS serves for it was intended to do - to
sit in the background and let learning and teaching spider through the
multitudes of learner controlled EPs whilst maintaing some semblance
of order in a dynamic VLE?
Much like looking at light for years forgetting that it's made up of a
multitude of hues. So many portfolio discussions are filled with
telling.....not conscious to their own breathing.
In the bowels of industry it feels good to know that this discourse
here is cutting across sectors, so important for EPs as a whole.
Sent from my iPhone
Hi, Carole,
Apologies about some of the links. eFolio has just gone through a major upgrade moving to shorter urls. And that has caused some problems for internal links. I’ll try and get them sorted this next week. Meanwhile, many of my .pdfs can be found by using the search facility (bottom of the contents list) at:
BW
Ray Tolley FEIDCT, NAACE Fellow, ACQI, MBILD
ICT Education Consultant
Maximise ICT Ltd
P: http://raytolley.v2efolioworld.mnscu.edu/
B: http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/
W: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm
S: http://www.slideshare.net/maximise
Winner of the IMS 'Leadership Regional Award 2009'
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Yes, you are right about " the distinction between our personal selves and
our professional selves" - and this applies equally to our 'educational
selves' where younger students are involved.
In the UK ICT and English syllabuses (and I suppose the same in other
countries) we teach about writing for a particular audience. As children in
school steadily mature (one hopes!) writing styles within an ePortfolio will
increasingly vary according to audience. The patois of peer-review would be
so very different to that of applying for a job for instance. The beauty of
the ePortfolio in school is that teaching about audience can include
references not only to 'writing' but also to the appropriateness of
graphical images, FaceBook accounts etc, etc.
I am sure that many of these issues are equally in need of address within
VET.
But, as I have argued elsewhere, the presentation of sometimes very
differing 'personas' CAN be handled within an ePortfolio.
BW
Ray Tolley FEIDCT, NAACE Fellow, ACQI, MBILD
ICT Education Consultant
Maximise ICT Ltd
P: http://raytolley.v2efolioworld.mnscu.edu/
B: http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/
W: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm
S: http://www.slideshare.net/maximise
T: http://twitter.com/efolio
Winner of the IMS 'Leadership Regional Award 2009'
-----Original Message-----
From: eportfolio_c...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:eportfolio_c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of mrschippy
Sent: 30 August 2010 12:51
To: Eportfolio_conversations
Subject: Re: {Eportfolio_conversations} EpCoP: are you sitting comfortably;
let us begin our stories
Hi Andree,
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