YouTube Gone

Interesting, given my earlier comments about shared external hosting and the need for reliability when storing artefacts in your ePortfolio across a number of disparate systems. You expect small servers to experience the occasional outage but you don’t (really) expect that of established hosting services the size of YouTube! Imagine my surprise, then, to find the fun video from my last posting suddenly invisible today.

And no joy on a direct search either.

 

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!