ePortfolio and community

Thinking some more about the user experience with ePortfolios. I’m not particularly bothered about sharing personal information or keeping detailed CVs, although I wouldn’t mind tracking my PD in an ePortfolio. I’m much more interested in being able to manage my data, information and deadlines effectively.

That said, I was experimenting with the Bb Expo portfolios yesterday and I must admit I did like the ‘link to friend’ element – in the organisational sense more so than ‘collecting friends’ sense… in that I see that as functioning a bit like a Blogroll so that you can link to interest groups and course groups and such like. I guess, in that, I can begin to see the attraction of Web 2.0 sites like Facebook.

I howled with laughter at this… says a lot for a desirable difference to be made between ePortfolios for education and social networking a la Facebook!

Therein lies another interesting aspect for me – in the sense that for a community to work, it needs to be small enough and particular enough for me to want to take an interest in it. In this sense, the idea of a closed ePortfolio, linked to the Institution is a good one. However, at the same time, I would need the freedom and reassurance that I can easily take my ePortfolio with me when I no longer belong to that community or, really, at any point in time… so that export facility is really important. And, thinking about that video clip, there’s a lot to be said for ’sense and sensibility’ in ePortfolio toolkit construction and the ultimate user experience!

ePortfolios and the user experience

I was thinking the other day about the kinds of things, as a research student within a large institution, I might want from an ePortfolio and these are some of the things I came up with:

Tools

Blog tool: for reflective writing

Calendar: to track deadlines

Planner: to make ‘to do’ lists

Sticky Notes tool: for one-off notes

Cites Manager: to track bibliographic references

Folder tool: to store/organise/share docs

Wiki tool: for collaboration

Forum tool: for discussion

Media tool: to store/share/display visual media

Podcast tools: to store/share/play audio media

I would want something that works a bit like a real-world portfolio but with a little more flexibility… taking the benefits of the digital… enabling sharing and use of artefacts that, for whatever reason, just don’t fit into a ‘physical’ file structure. I’m also thinking that I’d like the software tool to be readable on a portable device like an iPod Touch.

Interestingly, many of the tools I want already exist in a Web 2.0 world and it would be feasible for me to cobble together an ePortfolio of all these things using existing free or open source software but that’s not an ideal solution… and that made me think of some other things around the user experience.

Tool features

As well as having the tools, you need to have the ability to save, store, backup, transfer and export your data, so there needs to be some way to collate all the data that is visible in your ePortfolio and compress it into a standalone file on a regular basis.  And then there are the other issues:

Issues around usability

The toolkit needs to be:

easy to use

well supported

portable

accessible

reliable

functional

integrated

networked

flexible

Then there are issues around the kinds of interaction that might be expected to go on with and through the ePortfolio:

Contexts

open/closed

specific/general

personal/social

formal/informal

audience/purpose

aims/objectives

ownership