My online class ate my ePortfolio
3 min read
I've come across some posts (particularly from Zack Rosen and Dave Tosh) in the last few days that have helped focus some thoughts on the relationship between class sites and ePortfolios.
Helen Barrett identifies a tension between two views of portfolios: "Some people think the primary purpose of a portfolio is for summative assessment (a culture of compliance or a checklist of skills). Others think the primary purpose of a portfolio is assessment for learning and to tell the learner's story (a culture of lifelong learning/professional development). These two purposes are often in conflict with each other."
Given that people who need to assess student work are the same people with money to spend on technological tools to streamline and organize student assessment, it's not surprising that the development of what came to be considered ePortfolios shifted toward meeting institutional needs, as opposed to student needs.
Ironically, the rise of distance learning has helped cloud the vision of what an ePortfolio could be. A well-organized online course provides students the opportunity to drive the content of the class, and to reflect upon that content over time. Good online course software provide students with the tools for collaborative learning, and, at the end of the class, students will have assembled something that resembles an ePortfolio. Then, of course, the class ends, and this accumulated content faces an uncertain fate.
In the model Jeremy Hiebert lays out in his blog, he emphasizes the role of collecting content into an ePortfolio. Given that an ePortfolio can be used most effectively when it follows the learner through and beyond educational institutions, learners must be able to pull content from class sites into their own ePortfolios, or to put content from their ePortfolio into their class site. Recently, Elgg took a nice step in this direction by allowing users to import rss feeds into their blogs.
Recently, we have been visited by a new acronym, the PLE (Personal Learning Environment). Some people might question whether a personal learning environment is the same as an ePortfolio. Personally, I don't care. The buzzwords can cause us to lose sight of the educational potential: we can use existing open source products to provide students with a way to take control and ownership over their learning. Moreover, these PLE's/ePortfolios can exist alongside the more structured solutions that meet institutional needs.
A student-centered learning environment can only exist if the student controls what gets included. As Helen Barret argues, the needs of a student ePortfolio don't always reconcile with the needs of educational institutions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Learners and educational institutions have different needs. For all the obvious reasons, they co-exist, and in the best learning situations, they are mutually supportive. But, their needs will diverge at a certain point. This becomes a problem only when the needs of one group are met to the detriment of the other. In the case of ePortfolios and class sites, this doesn't need to be the case.
