What is a Portfolio?
Long before the ePortfolio was the portfolio, a document used by artists to present their best work, compiled by learners to demonstrate their achievements as well as professionals to gain recognition of their experience. Today, in the UK alone, almost 500,000 people get a qualification by creating a portfolio compiling evidence of their professional experience. To understand the power of ePortfolios it is important to understand what could be done with paper-based or mix-media portfolios as well as the unique value of the digital portfolio, beyond the transformation of paper-based into paper-less portfolios.
"The portfolio is a laboratory where students construct meaning from their accumulated experience. [...] A portfolio tells a story. It is the story of knowing. Knowing about things... Knowing oneself... Knowing an audience... Portfolios are students' own stories of what they know, why they believe they know it, and why others should be of the same opinion. A portfolio is opinion backed by fact... Students prove what they know with samples of their work.” Paulson & Paulson, quoted by Helen Barrett in Electronic Portfolios as Digital Stories of Deep Learning
What is a portfolio?
A portfolio is a purposeful collection of artifacts produced by a person or an organisation. It is a document telling a story, produced as the result of a number of activities supporting the construction of meaning:
- collect evidence of learning and/or work
- select tand edit he most significant elements that are worth presenting or sharing
- connect what has been learned/produced to what has been learned/produced before by oneself, peers or a community at large
- reflect on what has been learned, how it could be used and/or improved
Of course these activities do not happen in sequence (e.g. I collect, then I reflect), but can be run concurrently: when connecting new and old ideas, a reflective process can be triggered as well as the collection of new artifacts can be the result of a reflective process. The most important element of the portfolio is the demonstration that the person (or organisation) is a reflective learner or practitioner (or organisation). And depending on its purpose, the portfolio can take many different shapes.
Who is it for?
While the literature on portfolios is almost exclusively related to individual learners, it should be relevant to discuss portfolios for communities, organisations as well as cities and regions. If a portfolio is useful to earning, then it should be also useful to learning communities, learning organisations, learning cities and regions. And this is probably where you will find this site most relevant as a tool to explore the portfolio beyond its traditional educational boundaries and join us in the journey to connect individual, community, organisational and territorial learning. What does the portfolio of a learning organisation look like, and that of a learning city are probably very challenging questions and we would like you to help us find the responses.
What is it for?
A portfolio can be used for different purposes:
- learning - support the learning process, for example by keeping a learning journal, collecting and selecting artifacts demonstrating deep learning
- assessment - organise evidence collected to demonstrate competencies or learning; promote authentic assessment; move from assessment of learning to assessment for learning or even assessment as learning
- employment - help finding a job, changing assignment
- continuing professional development - demonstrate to one's professional community their ability to maintain and develop their competencies
- personal development planning - reflect on one's career path and plan future learning, job or activities
Who is the author the portfolio?
What one should keep in mind is that if the portfolio is an enabler to a particular process it should never become an obstacle. When one's get married, it is usually a third party who is in charge of taking the pictures and producing the wedding book. The "wedding portfolio" is not generally authored by the spouses!
For example, if a person needs to have her competencies recognised, let's say in French, does she need to create a portfolio? The construction of a portfolio requires a different set of competencies than those required to utter a gramatically correct and socially apt sentence. This means, that if a portfolio is required to assess and validate language competencies, the author of the portfolio might be shared between the person being assessed and the assessor as long as the evidence produced genuinely reflect the learner's linguistic performance.
What is important in a portfolio is authenticity: the contents of a portfolio must genuinely reflect what a person has done or learned. Nevertheless, it can be the result of a collaborative work — e.g. using the talents a graphic designer — as long as what it contains and expresses is authentic. Of course, when a portfolio is used for external assessment, the use of a third party might interfere with the quality of the evidence produced. But even in this case, one could imagine a situation where a tutor or an assessor records the evidence as well as the reflections of a learner and edit the contents of the portfolio that will be archived by the institution awarding a certificate.
The use of ePortfolio management systems, with their templates and workflows reduces the need for a third party to support a learner in the construction and editing of his/her portfolio.
