What are ePortfolios for?

Writing about web page http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050523083528

What is an ePortfolio? Is it necessarily tied up with questions of interoperability and automation of content?

At Warwick we have been experimenting with providing for our students, initially at the PhD level, a structured set of personal web pages within which they can represent their academic activities. This is constructed using our Sitebuilder CMS, along with other tools such as Warwick Blogs. We have been calling this an "ePortfolio", that is, an online portflio of work and recordings of experience and achievements. The aim has been for these to exist within the student's home department web site.

Several seperate interests have motivated this:

1. for the student themselves – that the reflective process of building the ePortfolio is useful for the student. It also provides a useful way for the student to distribute their work within and beyond the university;
2. for the department and the university – representing what PhD students are doing demonstrated the wealth of research at Warwick;
3. for research councils and other funders to see what their students are doing.

As a result of these interests, our interpretation of 'ePortflio' is of something that exists within the context of the university, and as close as possible to the context in which the student is working. It is also a selective portfolio, presenting to the various specific audiences a carefully defined narrative – a story tied closely to the departmental context.

In his presentation on ePortfolios, Scott Wilson of Cetis (the UK body most concerned with interoperability), does a good job of outlining some of the usefulness of ePortfolios. However, he makes the increasingly common claim that a:

key requirement is the ability to export across transitions

Certainly in our case, I don't agree with that. I would argue that a key outcome of an education at the level of Warwick is the ability of a graduate to communicate effectively a selected overview of their work to each specific audience as required. If a detailed breakdown of skills and knowledge is required, the graduate should be capable of presenting that themselves, in their own way or within the bounds specified by the relevant professional body. This may be accompanied where necessary by references to authoratitive proof. The amount of data that would ever need to be exported out of the Warwick context is extremely small, if anything at all. The ePortfolio therefore just needs to exist within the context in which it was created.

And furthermore, I suspect that in almost all cases there is no need for us to be able to import data from a student's ePortfolio on the point of joining the University. For undergraduates, they have completed their A levels, and have now moved on to a very different kind of education. In fact it is probably the case that most people want to leave behind their past educational experience and start afresh. It certainly seems that the case for a fully integrated fully interoperable ePortfolio is not convincing enough for us to spend time and money on it.

Note that I'm not saying that it would be a bad thing for students to be able to easily aggregate information from various sources in which their academic work appears. In fact we are already doing this in several ways, for example by providing the ability to embed a list of blog entries from a category in the student's blog into their ePortfolio. We are also interested in exposing the student constructed ePortfolio to other services (such as a FOAF profile). What I am saying is that there is probably not a sufficiently strong argument for us to put time and money into full interoperability.

You can see an example ePortfolio (mine) at http://go.warwick.ac.uk/ep-pyrvae

: 26 May 2005 09:52 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem