The idea of collecting drawings, pictures and essays of students and artists has been around for a long time. The purpose was to present one`s achievements to other people. With the advent of modern communication technologies, people start to implement this idea in the digital environment. The new practice emerged in the early 1990s. From that time on the e-portfolios have become paperless, that is to say, digital. They employ a combination of technologies to create and publish collections of student work, stored in digital formats, either online or on other electronic media like a CD or DVD. Digital collections or archives are made of audio, video, graphics, and textual "artifacts". They are usually digital records of personal and professional profiles and achievements.
In the beginnings, e-portfolios were designed by the tools commonly used for building websites. People should have had a solid knowledge of HTML or Flash to design e-portfolios. It caused great problems as web mastering was and still is a time-consuming and complicated activity. People want to have a very simple and practical tool by which they can produce their own e-portfolios in short time, just by clicking here and there, without any funding. An average user of an e-portfolio does not have time to be committed to any technologies that require a lot of technical knowledge and expert support. Moreover, maintaining an e-portfolio is a never ending process.
Today, we fortunately have lots of software packages by which people can easily compile their e-portfolios. Unfortunately, the standards are not yet firmly set, so people face a problem of interoperability. They cannot always contrive data with an ease from e-portfolios made on different platforms. This is a serious shortcoming as simplicity is regarded essential to the efficacy of the modern technology. There are some promising examples of overcoming this problem, but deeper you go; more problems emerge to the surface.
E-portfolios are still in the nascent stage of development. According to a white paper from the Electronic Portfolio Consortium: "There is not yet a coherent understanding of functional requirements, design specifications, or how and to what extent an electronic portfolio might benefit teaching and learning”.
To use an e-portfolio in an efficient, effective and economic way (3 E`s recommended by the EU), it is not only a question of having some basic equipment like computers, digital cameras, scanners etc. However, theoretically cool this technology might be, it is a worthless piece of the machinery if the users do have clear ideas what they want to achieve with this machinery. Therefore, the philosophy, epistemology, education, psychology and brain biology in many ways should precede the technology.
If a school wants to introduce the e-portfolio as part of educational work, the school management first must to put on the agenda the questions of purpose, assessment, goals and educational standards. Without clear outlines of learning standards, teachers and students might easily go astray. The e-portfolio provides a unique way to use educational standards for the benefit of students and teachers, while validating the individual work done in classrooms. The school management also has to design the school's digital portfolio with the precise architecture. Novice teachers and students find the created portfolio templates useful and helpful while more advanced users find them too narrow and simplistic.
If a school wants to use successfully the e-portfolio, the school management should plan well in advance and give explicitly clear outline structures and learning standards before students and teachers start to populate their portfolios with artifacts. Teachers can individually define these learning standards, but they can also use public standards sets if the school decides to adopt them. In either case, creating a set of standards precedes any e-portfolio project. Standards should be used as organizational guides for student work and as the organizational structure for the e-portfolios themselves. With explicit learning expectations mapped out in the e-portfolios, students can work in collaborative, constructive and connective way to complete assignments and tasks that meet those requirements, while teachers will also have a clearer way how to assess and provide feedback for student work.
In the eyes of the many educators the-portfolio is an effective, efficient and economic assessment tool. The e-portfolio is designed to better organize student work, and provide ease of access to teachers, students and other stakeholders. The e-portfolios also can be designed for more intimate interaction between students, teachers and other stakeholders, as they have opportunities to view individual student work, personal reflections and detailed feedback. Moreover, the e-portfolio can efficiently organize and index personalized data which show educational progress of every student and that of the whole school.
The reflection and feedback are an integral part of the e-portfolio. Each student provides personal critiques for every item of work they included in their e-portfolio. Students are encouraged to write about how they feel regarding the assignment, their understanding of the learning standards, and how they feel if they have met or not the expected standards in their work. Teachers are expected to write feedback for each student's portfolio.
Displaying a student's reflection with teacher feedback allows both students and teachers to reflect on their understandings of the learning standards. Students may also see how their understandings match or do not match with their teachers' understandings, and vice versa. This allows for a continual process of reflection, understanding and learning.
If more teachers are involved to attach feedback to a portfolio artifact, it creates a deeper dialogue between teachers and students. Teachers could easily compare their assessments with each other. Students could also view a diverse array of critiques from different teachers, which assist them as they continue to reflect and improve upon their work. The e-portfolio utilizes the strength of an entire learning community.
The level of reflection and assessment is richer with the e-portfolio because student work is displayed with their reflections, data about the learning standard, and teacher feedback. This connection of elements allows all stakeholders to continually reflect on the learning process.
Today, we witness different practices of using the e-portfolio around the globe. Here are some practices.
Some people maintain a presentation e-portfolio to show an individual's achievements in relation to particular work or developmental goals to others: their skills, competencies and attitudes when applying for a job, or a college course.
The others prefer to maintain an assessment e-portfolio which includes personal reflections on the content and what it means for the individual's development. It also shows the evidence of achieving certain outcomes of some academic programs. It is a kind of summative assessment which can be easily verified, accredited or certified by external institutions for recognition of a certain formal qualification or diploma.
Some people, especially students, prefer to use e-portfolios just for recording all steps in learning which they can easily look again and again from different angle. This enables them for a quick search, recognition and reflection on what they have learned to certain point. Students should know how to plan, validate and assess. This formative assessment can be a self-assessment, peer-assessment, tutor assessment, critical friend assessment etc.
The main purpose of the formative assessment is to enhance deeper learning by applying new epistemology of learning which is exponential, networked, quick, and based on constructivism, knowledge connectivism and post-modernist eclecticism. The students should master core, traditional competencies (mother tongue, foreign languages, basic competencies in math & science and digital competencies) and also transversal, creative competencies which are decisive for a successful life in the knowledge based society (learning to learn, social & civic competencies, initiative taking & entrepreneurship and cultural awareness & expression).
They signify more than just knowledge and skills. They are characterized by flexibility, entrepreneurship and taking one`s own responsibility. Not only is flexibility expected by individuals, but innovation, creativity, self-regulation and internal motivation. Social maturity is also expected: it helps in preventing social pressure, taking different attitudes, making independent judgments and taking responsibility for one`s own behavior. However, it is of the utmost importance to know how to develop reflection, using meta-cognitive skills, creative skills, and taking a critical stand. It is also important for an individual to know how one formulates his experiences, including thinking, feelings and social relationships).
This is the real terrain for using social media which is tightly connected with e-portfolios. I will tackle this issue later in the text.
Some sharp critics warn that e-portfolios are full of vivid images which do not convey any serious messages. This is the Old School view which is not taken into a consideration by serious scholars. The New School advocates aesthetic embellishment of e-portfolios because it shows that the brains of the digital Homo Zippiness function using both hemispheres simultaneously: from the one in charge for abstract-scientific to the other in charge for language-artistic processes. This is the way that opens creativity: combining science and arts into one creative whole which has been recently named cross-pollination or cross-fertilization on which create cultural industries are based. This also shows that users of e-portfolios are heading into a good direction which leads them to science and arts applied in the new digital environment.
Some users provide a record of things that a person has done over a period of time, and may be directly tied to learner outcomes use e-portfolios for personal development planning (PDP.) They can easily follow the course of executing the plans of their personal or/and professional development.
Many students and workers use personal learning e-portfolios to combine all formal and informal ways of lifelong learning. Recent studies show that 85% of time that an average person spends in informal learning, and only 15% of his life in the formal learning. Informal learning motivates and encourages students and workers to search for new bits and pieces of knowledge which they combine together all their life. Using e-portfolios in this way really promotes lifelong learning and galvanizes creative forces in people. It establishes the school as a community of learners. In the broader global context it is the place of free flow of information, where different forms of collaboration exist, and where the sharing of knowledge and work – in real time – without regard to geography, distance and language take place.
The e-portfolio allows people to archive a wide variety of materials, and then to disseminate those materials to a larger community. Those materials can be of great valuable. The e-portfolios allow them to reuse them. They are able to delve into a portfolio and draw out examples of previous work so that they become part of their instructional content, rather than just being archived on a shelf somewhere under the label, 'Last Year's Work.' When students see other students' work, it accelerates the learning curve enormously making it more authentic.
Although most people still think of e-portfolios logistically, as just a better way to collect and organize student work. The e-portfolios really provide good storage, but they can be used for many other educational purposes (reflection, self-assessment etc.). Moreover, they are a good resource for student and teacher collaboration, and as a powerful motivator for the students who can publish their work on the Internet.
It is incredibly motivating for students to be able to publish their work on the Internet and to see that what they do matters to somebody other than teachers. Suddenly, their parents, grandparents, and friends can see it. They can see what other students are doing, compare their work, and get peer feedback. They can even display their work for potential colleges. This is an overlooked aspect of the e-portfolio that makes it just as powerful as a teaching tool.
It is important to understand that e-portfolios differ from other similar digital systems. They are not merely an account of one's own history, like an electronic scrapbook, or a personal space for expression, like a blog. E-portfolios are designed specifically to highlight skills, represent work, and organize information. Teachers and students use e-portfolios to collect use, reuse in creative manner audio, video, graphics, and textual "artifacts," such as work samples, assessments, resumes, lesson plans, and personal reflections.
The new paradigm of learning which stresses creative, lateral, non-linear thinking, which can be practiced only by reflection in a collaborative learning way, where a dialogue is of the upmost importance between and among teachers and students, among students themselves, between the school and the community: the school as a community of lifelong learners. This approach demands a great flexibility in the learning methods and flexible and open learning systems. Students do not have only one teacher for a course or subject, but many teachers, mentors, advisors, critical fiends, including numerous peer-students outside the walls of the schools, as today`s students spend more time in the online environment and learning than in the brick classroom or the library. Multiple teachers and multiple contents cannot comfortably fit into a rigid box, called a content management system (CMS), which is a closed system, like Moodle.
Many software packages of the e-portfolio with the rigid templates designed and managed by schools or software firms seem to be a kind of a closed system which is in contradiction with the new epistemology of learning, teaching and understanding.
If students interact more and more online with multiple contents, teachers and peers, it means that there is not only one place (the school building) where they learn, but they learn from the whole globe. The center of their learning is becoming a personal learning environment (PLE) which is supported by WEB 2.0 software and applications capable of interacting even among themselves (RSS, FOAM, Atom). The parallelism with the student interaction is obvious. Today the learning processes are distributed over the whole Internet in multiple locations. Today students collaboratively learn from multiple sources using multiple software and multiple digital identities. The aggregation and integration of interaction processes occur in the center of the Web2.0 space, usually called a personal learning environment (PLE). Scott Wilson called this space a virtual learning environment (VLE) in 2005. His diagram (shown here) has been modified by many since then. It is interesting to note that the e-portfolios are seen in five different capacities, each contributing with different data. This makes the e-portfolio highly interactive, not static, technology suitable for educational purposes.
What are my plans?
Firstly, I plan to introduce the e-portfolio in my school as part of e-learning program with ten year old students on account of it enormous educational potential. I will not only use the e-Portfolio alone, but together other currently widely used Web 2.0 applications to order to create a personal learning environment (PLV) for each student which is vital for deep, personalized learning.
Secondly, I will try to persuade the highly motivated teachers to start using the e-portfolio in their personal development planning (PDP). The-portfolio will help them to visualize what they usually do and try to achieve.
Thirdly, I will also try to persuade both teachers and their students to use the e-portfolio for formative assessment of student work which is free of stress activity liked both by students and teachers.
Lirerature:
Barrett H. (2005, 1): Conflicting Paradigms and Competing Purposes in Electronic Portfolio Development URL: http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/LEAJournal-BarrettCarney.pdf
JISC, (2008) Effective Practice with e-Portfolios – Supporting 21st century learning , JISC
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/effectivepracticeeportfolios.pdf
Lambert, J., Mullen, N., Paull, C., Paulos, E., Soundararajan, T., Spagat, A., and Weinshenker, D. (2007) Digital Storytelling Cookbook Digital Diner Press URL: http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.pdf
R J Tolley2008, A new approach to e-Portfolios, URL: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm
Helen Barrett, E-Portfolios for Learning, URL: http://electronicportfolios.org/blog/2005_07_01_eportfolios_archive.html
Helen C. Barrett (2006), Authentic Assessment with Electronic Portfolios using Common Software and Web 2.0 Tools, URL: http://electronicportfolios.org/web20.html#web2
EIFEL Conferences, Welcome to ePortfolio & Digital Identity 2008, URL: http://events.eife-l.org/ep2008/
Electronic Portfolios in Education, URL: http://www.uni-salzburg.ac.at/zfl/eTeaching_Skills/eTeaching_ePortfolio/index.html
MOSEP: E-Portfoio i Europe, URL: http://www.mosep.org/
Effective Practice with e-Portfolios' publication, URL: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/effectivepracticeeportfolios
Stephen Downes˙Blog: Stephen˙s Web, URL: http://www.downes.ca/
Tim O'Reilly: What Is Web 2.0, URL: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/, URL: http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/
