a random ramble on e-Portfolios
Working on a report for e-Portfolios at the moment and it is really interesting to hear the passion and conviction in people when they talk about what an e-Portfolio is. From the JISC e-Portfolio Overview page there is a great little text box which simply states
Fundamentally an 'e-portfolio' is the product created by learners, a collection of digital artefacts articulating experiences, achievements and learningI was talking to someone the other day who would probably argue that fundamentally, an e-Portfolio must address the process of learning and is about learning itself. When we bring together any group of people to talk about e-Portfolios it seems that there are at least as many definitions for them as there are people in the room. I like the notion that e-Portfolios are simply an application area in which you will find a range of services/functions that you can integrate to form your own. The Web 2.0 mashup paradigm is one that I am really keen on when it comes to ePortfolios. Simon Grant of CETIS did an interesting post recently on a meeting attended where he and some others are working on portfolio interoperabiity prototyping. From his article:
A very interesting idea bubbled up here: that none of the e-portfolio tools are ideal for all the different purposes of e-portfolios ranging from assessment management to PDP, and that perhaps the way forward would be to use more than one tool. Of course, this lifts portfolio interoperability into the limelight - people seemed to concur on this. Rather than being a nice-to-have optional extra, interoperability will become a vital enabler to reusing the same information across these different systems.This fits in really well with the research that we are doing on creating a roadmap for e-Portfolios here in the VET sector. To me, widely adopted specifications such as RSS, ATOM etc offer many more opportunities for integration and interoperability than some of the more complex specifications that are often touted in relation to e-Portfolios. Some of those specifications really need to be looked at carefully if they are going to remain useful in a service oriented, Web 2.0 and beyond world.
technorati tags: e-portfolio, interoperability,ATOM
