In her recent article Maricopa ePortfolio Tool- A Solution? Lisa Williams offered us a brief overview of what we've found out so far about this interesting initiative. In this article I offer an overview of some of the ePortfolio commentary and resources available. I also highlight some of the people and organizations who seem to have recognized that existing solutions could have something to contribute. Read on if you want to know more. A useful starting point is David Tosh's ERADC site which has:
“been set up to provide a reference point for interested parties to contribute and learn more about ePortfolios and developements that may impact on the ePortfolio”
ERADC has a relatively new but still highly useful weblog which offers a couple of interesting PDF format papers ePortfolios and weblogs: one vision for ePortfolio development and Weblogs: a contributory element to the research dissemination process. Just to provide some balance, Tom Hoffman offers us a critique of the first paper.
ERADC's resources link is also well worth a browse; it was from here that I found my way to Conneticut's ePortfolio.org which enables portfolio owners to offer guest access to say friends, employers and faculty. I like this because it leaves the portfolio owner in charge, whilst also recognizing that the ePortfolio is valuable collateral; collateral which can only be realized if others can view it. That doesn't necessarily mean having to create printed copies. There may actually be times when printed copies, in fact, degrade some aspects of a student's work.
A number of people seem to have recognized the potential synergies between the weblog model and the ePortfolio. For example, UNC Charlotte are:
“… talking about a hybrid system of weblogs and an ePortfolio tool…”
UNC Charlotte recognize that management of the public/private issues relating to weblogs is key. Their preferred ePortfolio solution is produced by the Open Source Portfolio Initiative which describes itself as:
“… a community of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of the leading non-proprietary, open source electronic portfolio software available.”
I'm becoming quite a fan of Maricopa Community College. They deserve an Oscar for innovative thinking and implementation. On the learning object repository front Maricopa's Learning eXchange should be well known and now their interests include ePortfolios. A couple of articles in Maricopa's Alan Levine's Cogdogblog outline this work. The first Cogdogblog article ePortfolio Beta Opens outlines how their prototype ePortfolio incorporates a simple weblog tool. The article also provides some links to examples. The second Cogdogblog article Two Rivers Mix: RSS and ePortfolios is excited by the synergies of separately developed, but complementary, technologies, in this case ePortfolios, weblogs and RSS. As an important, but simple to implement, technology RSS enables Maricopa to automatically publish updates from two different areas of an ePortfolio, i.e. weblog entries but also documents/links held in a student's 'collection' page. Again, the second article provides links to examples. Read both these articles, they are highly recommended.
Finally, Weblogg-Ed also offers useful commentary on the Maricopa ePortfolio initiative and led me to the equally useful EPortfolios: What's behind the hype?, a University of California, Berkeley publication.
