I just returned from a NITLE sponsored workshop on e-portfolios (or, if it has reached the point of dehyphenation, eportfolios.) The workshop was facilitated by Wende Morgaine, the moving force behind Portland State University's (ultimately failed) attempt to move to an entirely digital eportfolio system.
Wende was a wonderful facilitator, focusing the group on the practicalities of the institutional process of portfolio adoption and use. As a pioneer, of course, she has gotten her share of arrows in the anatomy.
One of the questions some of us where talking about afterwards is: how is a portfolio different from a resume? What makes it more than just a collection of
artefacts, more than the sum of its parts?
The answer seems to be passion.
Wende's experience with her students was that, though they are reluctant at first to engage with the formal mechanisms of portfolio assessment (usually a rubric of some sort), once they do become engaged, things change.
First, a portfolio becomes an extension of a person, a virtual persona, or rather another part of their virtual persona.
As in most analog modes of our world: dress, appearance, cars, houses, hobbies, etc., we invest and care about them as expressions of our self. And if there is one thing we are passionate about, it is the way we project our persona to the world, how we are perceived and judged.
Taking ownership of an eportfolio should help us to learn to take ownership of all the data about us. And that is an increasingly important skill in the digital world.
Secondly, self evaluation against sets of external criteria is more engaging, challenging, and rewarding than non-directed reflection. To paraphrase Frost, an eportfolio without rubrics is like tennis without a net. Rubrics have a pedagogical origin for assessment, but -- when well chosen -- can be a valuable directive for persona construction and growth.
Most portfolio software, as Wende emphasized to our workshop, are little more than clever file managers, with no or few tools for reflection on the process of the portfolio.
Instead of focusing on the self-evaluative process, such portfolios - or even worse, the archaic process of having students make web pages - only get in the way of good engaged portfolios, by focusing attention on learning the tool (usually pretty badly too.)
And that kills the passion that makes good portfolios.
To learn how to create a passionate portfolio, just look where students are already passionate about presenting themselves, and how well they do it.
Eportfolios could learn a lot from Facebook about designing for passion.
And Facebook could learn a lot from them about designing for reflection.
