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What is an ePortfolio?
In its short and dynamic history, the ePortfolio has rapidly moved from the status of simple paperless portfolio to sophisticated ePortfolio Management Systems and now social software. Today, the explosion of new social practices emerging from the use of new media, such as social networks and what is commonly referred as Web 2.0, tends to blur the frontiers of ePortfolios.
May be, one of the most interesting feature of ePortfolios is their ability to transform current practice:
"Perhaps the most surprising side effects to occur as the college shifted to a portfolio culture were the changes in the program. When the e-portfolio project was implemented, not only did students make their work public, but also as a result of students posting their work to the Internet, the course assignments and syllabi of our faculty were made public as well. Initially, the professors were concerned that they were being evaluated based on their students’ choices. Soon, however, professors began to evaluate their course assignments based on the work their students were posting to their portfolios. More than one professor commented that they were changing their syllabus based on what they learned from reviewing their students’ portfolios. Not only were the students affected by the development of an e-portfolio, but change began to occur at the assignment, course, and program levels." Davis et al. 2004
The paperless portfolios
The ePortfolio started life as an unsophisticated object, amounting in effect to the paperless version of portfolios that had been used over decades for person and professional development and assessment. The order of magnitude of change was mainly additive: electronic media publishing facilities allowed the creation of "enriched" multimedia portfolios, while hypertext made it easier to connect ideas during the reflective process. The Internet brought in a multiplicative order of magnitude, with the ability to connect everything with everything, and above all the possibility to make the content accessible to the whole world. It became an online paperless portfolio. Having one's ePortfolio online in turn led to another level of magnitude change, not just additive or multiplicative, but exponential: ePortfolios can now be mined by search engines and one can use many different services available on the World Wide Web to create one's own repository, publishing and social environment.
The managed portfolios
The first main breakthrough of technology in the field of ePortfolios was the emergence of ePortfolio Management Systems (ePMS). They were designed to help institutions in the management of assessment and learning support. Learners were provided a personal space where they could upload, manage and edit learning outcomes to publish ePortfolios. This led to considerable improvement in the management of worflows and quality control. For example, in the field of accredication of work experience, the upload and cross-referencing with standards were facilitated as well as the interaction with assessors and external verifiers in charge of controlling the quality of the assessment process. Sampling ePortfolios can be done at a distance and technology can provide additional checks like plagiarism.
One of the drawbacks of ePMS was the standardisation of the interface and contents as well as the process of form-filling for some of them. Some of the creativity of 'paperless portfolios' was sometimes lost, while the use of predefined templates made it easier for many to engage with technology. This loss in creativity should not be a problem with a proper architecture where organisational ePMS are used to support certain kinds of processes while individuals can have their own space(s) where they can express all their creativity. The problem does not rest with ePMS but with the global ePortfolio architecture and the vision of ePortfolios.
The social portfolios
The next breakthrough was certainly the emergence of social networks. If learning is the social construction of meaning, then ePortfolios should also be social objects. Social software, technical standards such as FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) led to initiatives such as Elgg and more recently Mahara.
There has been some animated debates within the ePortfolio community to decide whether or not 43 Things, MySpace or Facebook could be considered as ePortfolio platforms or not. The question might seem strange when one think that the power of expression of any of these tools is infinitely superior to the combination of the tools used to create 'paperless portfolios' put together. What is certain is that they are not the best tools for an institution to manage a group ePortfolios, but nevertheless they are great tools to develop and manage one's digital identity as a social construction.
One interesting example of professional community ePortfolio is the system implemented by the Royal College of Nursing
The knowledge portfolios
While the concept of learning organisation has been discussed for a long time, the translation of this concept into technology has been rather sketchy and leading to mixed results. For human resource managers, the technology of choice wasoverwhelmy learning management systems (LMS) that were in fact designed to manage training and trainees rather than individual learning, nor organisational learning — which is rather different from training groups of people with pre-digested instructional material.
Invidual ePortfolio systems can be seen as individual knowledge management systems, facilitating the accumulation of explicit and tacit knowledge shared within a social networks or peers, colleagues, contractors and clients. And rather that asking individual to disown the knowledge produced by putting it in some kind of organisational portal (which is one of the shorcomings of current KM systems!) it is possible to imagine an architecture where ePortfolios would be used as elementary bricks of organisational or community knowledge and organiational learning management systems. Through the aggregation of individual ePortfolios as individual KM systems, we would create the conditions for the recognition of individual contributions while making it availble to the community.
The territorial portfolios
One of the more interesting developments in the field of ePortfolios is the emergence of ePortfolio initiatives at regional or national level like in Wales and Minnesota. In providing an ePortfolio infrastructure on a territory a regional government has an opportunity to create a continuing lifelong learning space where a series of services can be provided to its citizens such as orientation, employment public services and job boards, career counselling, etc. ePortfolios are powerful tool for following up the impact of policies as well as designing future ones, just like the anonymous data mining of hundred of tousands of personal health records could provide a mean for healthcare education and policies.
The choice of Wales to develop such infrastructure was the result of the vision of Wales The Learning Country published in 2001. This vision of a learning country or region is, is essential to understand the power of developing an ePortfolio infrastructure as part of an eStrategy for learning -- which is rather different from an eLearning strategy and the implementation of online training portals. To the statement of Richard Florida that "in fact, despite continued predictions of the end of geography, regions are becoming more important modes of economic and technological organization on a global scale" one could add that a regional ePortfolio infrastructure could contribute to its technological, economic, cultural and social organisation.
