An Exercise in Absence . . .

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An Exercise in Absence . . .

1/12/2006

But as portfolio systems are created (with an emphasis on systems) and as digital technologies accelerate (with an emphasis on technologies), I have to ask: when it's all said and done, will digital portfolios have enhanced learning? This question, this concern, it seems to me, is absolutely at the heart of this application of technology, and in that, in expressing this value, I fear that I'm in the minority. More and more, I see calls for portfolio systems; more and more institutions talk in terms of gathering and reviewing student work; more and more career centers see portfolios as a perfect vehicle to facilitate a transition to employment. None of these is a bad thing, you understand, but to me, they seem to compose a perfect storm of non-learning-related portfolio activity.

In this context, what I don't hear is deafening. I don't hear questions about student learning. I don't hear questions about what Alan Luke calls the new socio-cognitive ways that students learn and represent their learning, about the new processes we need to develop to articulate what we value in such learning. I don't hear questions about reflection.

Perhaps most telling, I don't hear students--at all.

So what I see is, in part, a function of a doubled absence: the silence of students echoing my own silence, and inside of this doubled absence, I'd like to suggest three fundamental questions related to digital portfolios.

As we go forward, will we engage students in the new processes that accompany digital portfolios? I'm not totally persuaded that we faculty are Mark Prensky's digital immigrants and the students are the digital natives, but I am persuaded that with portfolios, especially those that take advantage of social software for new collaborative knowledge-making occasions and sites, we are developing a new educational model, something akin to the convergence model of information. In other words, there are new ways of producing knowledge, new sites for distributing it, and new ways of circulating it. How can the portfolio assist in this? And how can we engage students in answering this question?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record-and there's an interesting technology (!)--where is reflection in this mix? What are the reflective questions we are asking? Why are those the appropriate questions? Where are student questions? How is learning represented? Is reflection principally the act of an individual, or is it collaborative as well? What do we value in reflection? If reflection is a defining feature of portfolios of all kinds (and it is), then we need to get at least as serious about reflection as we are about systems, about technologies, and about data mining.

Where's the quiet? I referred earlier to a kind of busyness, one that we often associate with ICT. In the midst of that, we need to find another space, one that isn't connected 24/7, one that isn't always on, one that is located in what I've called pause time, an occasion for contemplation that is ever more difficult to obtain given the speed and invasiveness of digital technologies and networks. In other words, digital portfolios are about the social, yes, but also about the individual; about the connection, but also about an intentional disconnection. It's within the interplay of plugging, pushing, pulling, and resting that sustained learning occurs.

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