Does your e-portfolio get in the way or support what you do?
Whoever you are?
Whoever has a stake in it.
I recommend the use of e-portfolios, whether or not they are packaged as such.
Often the affordances are there either way. An assemblage of tools and services to store, collate, elaborate upon, develop, select and share all that can be digitised. Text for the most part, but images too, still and moving. And numbers, as stats or formulae. Assets in polite society, ‘stuff’; for a Saxon word and something in Latin for anyone trying to pull rank.
Whatever definition we come up with for ‘e-portfolios’, someone else has another one.
And why not, this is but functional flotsam-and-jetsam on the Digital Ocean?
Forget ‘clouds’, for me this is a ‘digital ocean’; an ocean that is nothing more than binary code, but forms into ‘bits’ that do things and ‘bits and bites’ that have things done to them. My first blog in September 1999 covered this.
Perhaps I should shift my thinking and take in ideas of both oceans and clouds, the binary code the water molecules that form the water cycle? (Google this for a trillion images)
Now there’s an idea. Fluid, changing, responsive … predictable to a degree … other times chaotic anre not so.
All e-portfolios are squirts of ink into this ocean. All content is drips, drops and an occasional multi-coloured deluge.
Though pre-empting bespoke consultative decision making on behalf of a client, real or imaginary, my simple advice regarding e-portfolios is – do it all.
1) Your own – that does the business and ought to be the final repository for e-materials that are being shared or assessed, that is easy-peasy to link or upload for those who are expert in these things or have a system that they play well and with which they can ‘sing.’
2) A smorgasbord of off the shelf e-portfolios that people may get free, or as part of their trade or other association, or be happy to subscribe for (after all, there’s a good deal that can be done with them that is personal, off-campus and away from work).
3) Their own. The end result, the content and where and how it is finally presented is all that matters. In any case, there is every chance that your students are more e-literate than you are, speak the code like their Mother Tongue and will do what so many students have done before them and re-invent the digital wheel. The content is its own subject matter expert – it is out there being freely exchanged and wikified to the ‘nth’ degree of finality.
4) With institutional, administrative, management and support from academics and tutors that alsos encourages peer support and so enables 1, 2 & 3.
And miraculously for me … under 500 words.
Though the first edit pushed this to 800. And if I care to reference and quote the dozen shoulders I’ve stood on to get here …
I’ll ruin it.
Perhaps I will. (Perhaps I have?)
I keep dipping my toe in and changing stuff. Then losing the sense of it. Give me a real-time conversation in a tutor group any day.
As I child I was taught to draw; my mother gave us all kinds of advice, a key moment being knowing when to stop. I can do this with a drawing or painting, with words, they just keep spilling into consciousness. You over draw or paint and you end up with mud and no way back. We were not allowed to use a rubber. We had to commit, make a linear journey (literally) and know went to stop.
Wherein lies the skill of the editor, the skill and advice of the agent and the commercial nose of a publisher.
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