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

    • This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under toolkit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    2 Responses to “ePortfolios and the user experience”

    1. missbrodie Says:
      May 2, 2008 at 7:15 pm

      This list of tools looks great… I’m just not sure what kind of portfolio you are envisaging. Is it: a professional portfolio for job seeking; a portfolio for assessment, or authentication of assessed work;or is it more a tool for professional development or maybe a combination of these things?

      By the way, I know trainee GPs have to be assessed, monitored and managed by an eportfolio system now… this is a specific current educational use of the eportfolio that might be worth following up.

    2. Ruth Linton Says:
      May 7, 2008 at 8:27 am

      Replying in a somewhat general way to several of your posts on portfoilio etc – are social networking sits a modern form of scrapbooking and blogs an evolution of the memoir – ie a journla that is intened to be read by others one day , it’s just we can publish instantaneously now.
      Re what I want to use my site for: I’ve found a useful list of the top 50 tools to use with web 2.0 I stuck it on the blogroll in my blog. http://mrslinton.wordpress.com/

      Ruth

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