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ePortfolios >> Hi-Octane Assessment
8/16/2005
“The technology is something our students can learn to use here and apply consistently to their careers, once they leave,” says Treuer, who notes that 38,000 individuals have logged in to their ePortfolio accounts since 2000. “It represents a huge shift not only in how we teach, but in how people live, too.”
Different Strokes
While here in the US, the primary focus of ePortfolios is on assessment and accountability, most academic technologists overseas see the technology as a key tool for facilitating lifelong learning and career development. In Europe and Canada, for instance, the mantra is “A Portfolio for Every Citizen by 2010.” According to Dr. Helen Barrett, a researcher for the International Society for Technology in Education, this approach might not be such a bad idea.
“In the US, we are fixated on accountability and high-stakes assessment,” she says.“Internationally, the focus is [much broader].”
On her blog, E-Portfolios for Learning, Barrett hails the eFolio Minnesota project (www.efoliominnesota.com), a cooperative endeavor by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU), designed to provide all residents of the state with 3MB to create their own online portfolios. Barrett describes the project as “lifelong and lifewide,” a paraphrase from project coordinator Darren Cambridge. She says that portfolio learning is “lifelong” because it covers life as a whole, not just during schooling, and that it is “lifewide” because it tries to facilitate learning that happens everywhere, not just in class.
Elsewhere, ePortfolio advocates are following suit in unique ways. In the UK, for instance, ePortfolios are becoming as commonplace as cellular phones. In New Zealand, they are gaining in popularity as well. In Canada, the national organization Learning Innovations FORUM launched an initiative in April 2005 to provide ePortfolios to all of its members. The organization will partner with the Web solutions provider Avenet (www.avenet.net) to provide the technology. Not surprisingly, Avenet is the same vendor behind the MNSCU project.
“[Having] one ePortfolio for life means being able to start your digital folio in school, utilize it through your training and education, and then continue to use it regardless of the work or business site to which you migrate,” says Dr. Kathryn Chang Barker, chairperson of the Canadian group.
Barrett, for one, will be spending a lot more of her time focusing on bringing ePortfolios to the masses. The former University of Alaska researcher recently began a research project for TaskStream, focusing on high-school ePortfolios. After that,who knows?
The Diversifier
Farther south, technologists at the University of Iowa are honing their own homegrown ePortfolio systems. Via an overarching electronic portfolio project, students in the school’s College of Education are treated to four different flavors of ePortfolios. The flagship initiative at Iowa—Digital BackPack—is a system that, much like UMD’s, provides a series of individual repositories into which every student can store files.
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