The good and the bad of ePortfolio experimentation

Blackboard is driving me nuts at the moment. It doesn’t seem able to do any of the things I would like it to do. It offers portfolio functionality but it is hardly what you might call seamless. It’s like a bag owned by a student that only the student ever puts things in. Sure, the student can let other people peep into the bag, and might even let people take things out of the bag… but those other people can’t then put the object back in the bag, the student has to do it. *sigh* So, you can share but you can’t co-create. You can comment but you can’t dictate where those comments go. You can give feedback but you’ll pretty much have to do that orally, if at all.

Then again, maybe it’s just me and I’m not really there yet. Perhaps Bb can do all the things I and others would like it to do… like offer a shared collaborative workspace between tutor and student that is private, accessible, flexible, able to accommodate commentary and tracking and so on.

On the other hand, I found this interesting clip about Mahara today…

I do like many of the aspects of Mahara, although I’m not entirely convinced by the widgets – they’re great and easy to use if you have little technical knowledge but you can’t then code your page layout too flexibly if you want to. On the other hand it does have some useful sharing features and it’s certainly a lot easier to discover functionalities with this than it is to do so within Bb, at least at present.

Not to worry. I will keep on plugging away. Seeing what works, what doesn’t, what’s good, what’s bad and whether, in the endgame it’s worth the effort.

Folios in Education

I will be using this blog to explore the potential of eportfolios in education. I think blogs are potentially useful as personal mini portfolios… in the sense that they can act as a one-stop shop for things that interest you around a particular topic. So, for instance, I’m currently interested in learning more about eportfolios in education, so I hope that setting up this blog will help me to keep all my information together in one place.

Keeping it as a public blog also means that if there are other folks out there who are interested in learning about eportfolios… this blog could act as an additional resource for them as well as for me. It also means that I can share the URL of the blog with my colleagues, so that they can follow up on what I’m doing if they wish to do so.