ePortfolios and blogging

Interesting post on greg.glidden.info, where he dives into the debate about using blog software for E-Portfolios.

David Tosh has written quite about this as well…

greg.glidden teases out some good points, and I’m of several minds on this.

Weblogs are awesome for the public social/community side of e-portfolios (commenting), but the robust database backend for handling artifacts is not a standard part of a blogging system.

I know, one can do anything if you are a CSS expert… but not all of us are.

The ideal software would complement the whole folio cycle – –

Collect – Reflect – Evaluate – Select – Present

A robust CMS does do many of these things, but one needs the social software side as well — community interactions support reflection and evaluation…

That’s what I like about Plone – the ability to have content management and use the various products community interactions in the same space (adding discussions to a page, mini-polls – alls sorts of products can be added in)

The learning cliff on Plone is pretty steep for the common human, however and therein is the issue.

–> Innovators and Early Adopters adapt, explore, tinker
–> mainstream users are less and less tolerant of software that does not work. They just do not have time.

I think the big struggle is that the functionality we are looking for is complex…
people have different definitions of an e-portfolio…
everyone’s context and purpose are not the same…

The combination of:
Collect – Reflect – Evaluate – Select – Present

has elements of:
[repository – social software – (course management+social software) – content management – web site]

Finding one technology/product is elusive.

That’s why there is so much activity in this space! There is no MATURE application that does all these things well, and fits into institutional infrastructure… at least for high ed applications at this point.

I think all the exploration is healthy — no one should be discouraging particularly pathways of exploration… we learn something from each of these forays…

Kudos to Helen Barrett and David Tosh for pushing the envelope and exploring possibilities….

Just some thoughts…