The E-portfolio Learning Commons reflects a specifically constructivist approach, and the assumption is that teachers will integrate constructivist principles in their application of the tools and concepts described in the Commons.
As project-based documents advanced by student interest in a context of cooperative learning, e-portfolios reflect a wide variety of concerns central to theories of learning and instructional design. Constructivist approaches, in particular, are ideally suited to inform an exploration of e-portfolios in theory and practice. The choice of a constructivist approach in the Commons reflects both the strengths of e-portfolios in general and, more specifically, the particular strength of the hybrid portfolio.
Especially in its hybrid form, an e-portfolio almost by definition involves meta-cognitive reflection (Klenowski, Askew, and Carnell, 2006, p. 282; Butler, 2006, p. 11) and reflexive engagement with a potentially wide array of representational and analytical tools. Implemented not as a static document but as an event unfolding over the duration of a student’s semester, program, academic career, or even post-academic life, an e-portfolio creates significant opportunities for progressive feedback and formative assessment. Moreover, if these activities include the participation of students’ peers (as editors, reviewers, co-designers, and co-participants), then these opportunities will also extend to constructivist critical dialogue and the fostering of communities of inquiry.
The conceptual link between e-portfolios and constructivist thought emerges as well in its approach to technology. The teachers who are the target group of the E-portfolio Learning Commons will themselves become cognitive apprentices (Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989, p. 32) in the capacity of an e-portfolio to externalize a student’s reconstructed epistemological framework as it emerges from a process of progressive composition, reflection, dialogue, and revision. As a provisional representation mirroring a dynamic process of cognitive evolution, an e-portfolio uses technological tools and processes to vividly dramatize a moving cognitive equilibrium that is central to constructivist epistemology. The hybrid e-portfolio, in other words, both facilitates and demonstrates a student’s cognitive and epistemic restructuring.
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