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.

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