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ePortfolio: a user perspective?

In the spirit of a certain type of eportfolio, here are some reflections on day 2 of QUT's 'Australian ePortfolio Symposium'. Day 2 was the only day I was able to attend which is a bit unfortunate as my perspective can only be based on my interpretations of that day in the program. What was really interesting was the panel session where a number of brave 'eportfolio users' were invited to give their thoughts on eportfolios and what is needed for them to be successful. A bit of background first. There seems to be growing agreement from a number of eportfolio system owners and some users (not so sure about vendors as I haven't personally heard any comment on this) that the idea of monolithic eportfolio applications (software offerings that do everything eportfolio that you need) is outdated and we need to consider a service oriented approach. This builds on the ideas being put forwards by projects/groups such as the JISC eportfolio reference model and the e-Framework service oriented approach. This is a notion that I support and its not hard to find a number of scenarios where this would work really well. Back to the symposium, there was quite a bit of discussion over the merits of system provided or learner owned eportfolios. The user panel provided some interesting perspectives on this. Firstly, it was very clear that there are a number of perspectives to consider. A wide range of opinions was provided from what was a very small number of users (five). The users varied in their experiences of eportfolios ranging from very little experience through to very experienced. My personal impressions were that the lesser experienced users saw some value in institutionally provided eportfolios while the most experienced user saw very little value in them and preferred to select her own tools from the Web. Having said that though, she recognised the need for some sort of framework for eportfolios as not all users would be in a position to establish their own Web presence in such an articulate, well formed manner. There was a view that only companies such as Google could afford the investment required to develop and provide rich 'eportfolio' services. To me this reasoning was quite flawed. True, it takes a lot of investment in either time or money to develop new types of services but when we looked at the services being asked for, it seemed to boil down to relatively mundane Web 2.0 style services such as file sharing, blogging, wiki etc. Not much investment at all is required to mash these sort of services together, whether deployed locally or using services that exist elsewhere on the Web. While some organisations do struggle with filespace issues there are alternatives available for those that are willing to think a bit more imaginatively. Clearly though, there is a strong sense of drawing on this service oriented approach to bring in the 'best' services that are available from the Web and apply them in a manner that suits eportfolio functionality and their users. The notion that all 'younger' students are tech savvy and can apply technologies in different ways that enhance learning is also flawed. A view that I have heard expressed before is 'just because I am good at using my thumbs to text and know how to use a phone in many ways, thats only to communicate with my friends - don't expect me to understand how to apply it or any other technology to get better at learning'. I have seen technologists and educators really struggle with how to improve learning through technology so having high expectations of learners to do the same seems a little unfair. Getting back to the forum, it was clear that users wanted and needed more support if they were going to really embrace and exploit the potential in eportfolios. Another really interesting perspective raised by one of the users, who is involved now in recruiting, is to consider the requirements of HR recruiters and employers. I think to some extent this can easily be overlooked. In a number of public forums that I have attended on eportfolios, many of the speakers/contributors, while not quite at the 'lunatic fringe', are very passionate about their views and so we find much of the debate occurring on what eportfolios should be. The use of them for reflective thinking, personal story, or journey telling often occupies more time than assisting in transitions etc. While reflection and goal setting can be very important elements of an eportfolio, there are many other, valid uses too. The notion of learner owned is very important, and strongly supported, identifying the user as learner, not student, or even better, author, really demonstrates where the thinking is around eportfolios. We do need to consider other users as well though. When I think of books, authors are important but they have very little value without readers and readers tend to ultimately determine the value of the books. So, while there are some very important introspective elements of eportfolios such as reflecting and planning, we do need to consider potentially much larger audiences if we start to think about those eportfolios that will be used to support transitions (getting a job, moving from one educational environment to another etc). These audiences will have have quite specific requirements and in the case of HR recruiters, may not even be human (that's not meant to be a slur on recruiters, just that computers can be used to sift through vast amounts of electronic information to do some sort of shortlisting/culling of applications). So, overlaying these basic services of collecting and organising content, which many generic Web 2.0 style services do very well, there needs to be some emphasis applied to presentation of content within specific audience contexts, and this is an area where simply mashing together public generic services falls short at the moment. We have some interesting ways of formatting parts of this content in HR-XML which may satisfy some recruiters or their computers but there is still a way to go. In the symposium we recognised challenges faced around context, language, vocabularies, ontologies etc and efforts made around standardisation and how incredibly difficult that is. Early attempts were too specifc and granular, which made them incredibly hard to implement. Organisations such as IMS are looking at having another go at their eportfolio specification so I look forward to see what happens there. In the meantime, social networking services are combining with recruiters so maybe we can just sit back and continue to debate what an eportfolio is while the rest of the world gets on with it;)

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