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.
Lucinda left me a helpful comment on the first post to this blog – and raised a really interesting question. I’m beginning to feel like ‘portfolio’ is one of those words like ‘culture’ – it means so many things to so many different people, across so many different contexts. I had a vague element of recall that suggested it was derived from the convergence of two Latin words meaning ‘to carry’ and ‘leaves’ (as in paper)… then I found a page on the web that suggested the word comes from the Italian word ‘portfiglio’ – I tested it out in Google using the helpful search facility – define: portfolio. It’s an interesting one… at it’s most basic, it’s a collection… of things… could be objects, could be skills, responsibilities, etc. I was reading something the other day that suggested that people who maintained online social networking tools and, in particular, the sharing of digital artefacts, were in fact activating some sort of digital curatorship… over images, narratives, moments in time… that’s also something interesting to think on in terms of the ePortfolio and notions of ownership, accountability, accessibility, audience and purpose.
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:
Well, that’s really interesting, still browsing away, I found this interesting attempt at creating an ePortfolio system based on tagging (as opposed to folders) using the web 2.0 tool del.icio.us. Another element of the find that particularly interested me, actually, was the realisation that you can create sub-directories in your del.icio.us account.
[5 minutes later...]
Now laughing merrily at my naivety as I realise that, in fact, it wasn’t a sub-directory as such, but a tag… which just goes to prove that tags, in effect, work like sub-directories, just as Dr Barrett surmised. Hmm. Interesting.
I was hoping to see the actual ePortfolio. It is, apparently, OpenSource, but whenever I try to go to the OU site for the application, I keep being asked to login, so not quite sure what’s going on there. I like Guy’s early iterations/brainstorms of ePortfolio design… they’re good visualisations to get you thinking. I also like his commentary on the use of Web 2.0 apps to enhance the ePortfolio experience… it’s good to see that I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.
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.
Posted by foliosineducation 
Posted by foliosineducation 
Posted by foliosineducation 
