Tech-Ed Collisions

ePortfolios have been around for a long time now and the range and diversity of ePortfolio implementations is, well, staggering. There are a lot of commercial software offerings and most eLearning platforms seem to have a portfolio component. Large numbers of schools, training organisations and higher education organisations have developed their own and some of the larger ones have multiple eportfolio implementations. Some of these are great, particularly while you are engaged with that institution. Some allow you access to your/their portfolio (of you) for a long time after you leave, although who actually owns ‘your’ portfolio could be problematic.

It could be, and is often, argued that many of these ‘formal’ eportfolios do not meet all the requirements of their user base. Take a look at the rich information hundreds of thousands of Internet users are pouring into social networking services daily. Many Internet users would be quite comfortable with the notion that their myspace presence or similar service serves them well as their ePortfolio. Blogs make excellent (components of) eportfolios. Linked to your FLickr account, Facebook and dozens of other Web 2.0 services, you can create a very compelling Eportfolio of yourself. Which of these services should you or could you use? You might be able to find out information about me through Facebook, pageflakes, Windows Live spaces, several personal blogs, flickr, our company blog, Zoominfo, maybe even a myspace account, my EuroPass resume, and any one of dozens of Web 2.0 services I have reviewed over the last 12 months or so. None of these presences have been populated by me to serve as an ePortfolio but it is entirely reasonable that they could have.
Some services, such as ZoomInfo aren’t even maintained by me and are at best, very incomplete, at worst, wildly inaccurate. If I do a ‘vanity’ search on Google, I can find references to me on other services too, along with papers, presentations that I have delivered at conferences and all sorts of other ‘portfolio’ related information. Fortunately (?) for me, I have a relatively uncommon name. However, what if my name were ‘John Smith’, a reasonably common Western name. Trying to sift through Internet content that is ‘me’ would be a nightmare - even coupled with location and time based information it could still be very difficult.
Another problem for me is that I only seem to have existed for a few years - at least on the Internet. For those of us young enough to have grown up in the Internet era this may not be so much of a problem but many of us have done some pretty interesting stuff, that would be valuable for potential employers to know about, a long time before we started publishing it on the Web. I guess that is just another illustration of the radical change we are undergoing as a result of the Web - some of us existed prior to this change as well as existing during it.
For a portfolio service to be valuable to me, I need to be able to store, or refer/link to all sorts of content that may reside locally or on a wide variety of services. I need to be confident that the content will be available and accessible for a long period of time. I would like to present this content, or parts of it, in any number of formats/layouts to different audiences at different periods of time. It is about me so I would like to have some naive notion that I have a semblance of control over what it contains, how it looks, who can see different parts of it and when. Importantly, I would also like to refer to authenticated information about my achievements from time to time. An example would be proof that I completed a degree at a specific University. Of course, this is just one component of an eportfolio. In addition to providing evidence, artefacts, etc, I may also like to use it as a learning tool which means I would like a range of other services to be aggregated, or available at a single place of my convenience using whatever device I feel like at whatever time. I may like to reflect on what I am learning and other experiences or use my portfolio for planning too. This brings to mind a number of tools that I am using at the moment with Google’s increasingly large range of services.
So where does this leave me. To date I have a number of great services that I would like to incorporate into my ePortfolio space but I would also love to be able to link in authenticated, validated content from education/training organisations as proof of some of my achievements.

Cheers.

technorati tags: ePortfolio