Fluid and free form portfolio

[Darren Cambridge]

Portfolio authors need the opportunity to invite collaboration in the 
space in which portfolios are composed, and it would be terrific if the 
Portfolio tool supported this. I think this would be a fabulous 
addition. However, there is an important distinction between a 
portfolio, which is a text of a particular genre, a kind of 
self-representation, and a portfolio tool or space that aids in the 
production and dissemination of that text and attendant educational 
activities.

It is a fundamental principle of several decades of portfolio pedagogy 
in higher education that portfolio authors have ownership of their 
portfolios (texts, not spaces). This was also a fundamental principle 
accepted by the (original) OSP functional team. Ownership by the 
portfolio author doesn't preclude them inviting collaboration, but it 
does suggest that we need to be very careful not to make it possible to 
coerce that openness.

I think there are really three components: the repository, which ought 
to be student owned, the collaboration services/spaces (which include 
tools like Matrix and Portfolio), and the products of activity in those 
spaces, which also have to be student owned if they are to be portfolios 
in any meaningful sense. The freeform portfolio functionality in Sakai 
has important implication for the ownership of this third component, and 
I think it's very important to keep that in mind as we envision it future.

The BECTA report needs to be read critically. First, because the focus 
was on schools, the findings do not always translate well to higher 
education. Expectations about students' degree of autonomy and privacy 
look very different, for example. Second, there are real problems with 
the sample they analyzed. The researchers, who are terrific, didn't pick 
the eight (I think) schools that were offered as examples of ePortfolio 
practice. BECTA did, and they offered the researchers no explanation of 
why the schools were chosen. Few of the schools were doing anything that 
looked like ePortfolios as generally defined. Many of the subjects they 
interviewed at these supposed examplar school weren't even familiar with 
the term.

Darren



Michael Feldstein wrote:
> 
>> Part of the issue is that I think that the original uses of portfolios 
>> were
>> very focused on one student "owning" a portfolio, which REALLY limits it
>> use. After 3 years of using collaborative tools like wikis and Google 
>> Docs,
>> I believe that folks come to an authoring environment expecting to be 
>> able
>> to work together, if they want to. This would really change the 
>> educational
>> appeal of the tools for folks that are not into the other dimensions 
>> of the
>> tools.
>>   
> Part of the problem was a failure to make a distinction between the 
> student's repository, which absolutely should be owned by the student, 
> and the portfolio space, which usually needs to be collaborative. I'm 
> attaching a picture from BECTA's ePortfolio analysis here, although I'm 
> not sure whether it will come through the listserv intact:
> 
> 
> If you think of the bottom space as a (JCR-compatible) repository where 
> individuals own content that the provision into the environment, the top 
> rectangles as collaborative spaces (regardless of whether those spaces 
> are thought of as "eportfolios"), and the "tool" arrows as collaboration 
> services that get provisioned into the spaces for specific purposes, I 
> think you have a flexible learning and collaboration environment that 
> looks roughly like what Sean and John are talking about. From 30,000 
> feet, it's not so different from what Sakai offers today, but 
> implementation is everything.
> 
> - m
> 

-- 
Darren Cambridge
Assistant Professor of Internet Studies and Information Literacy
New Century College
Affiliate Faculty, Higher Education Program
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
+1 (202) 270-5224 (mobile)
+1 (703) 993-1439 (fax)
AIM: darcalablo