[Note: Update added to end of post. Thanks, Kristina!]
This post is a continuation of a discussion that began on Twitter about ePortfolios. As I was leaving work this afternoon I threw out a comment that was fairly critical of university-hosted ePortfolio systems, and it inspired some discussion.
A number of people contributed valuable points to the discussion – some of them agreed with me, some of them didn’t. However due to my ultra-crappy broken mobile I wasn’t able to continue participating – otherwise my tweets WouLD HaVE Looked SOmMEthING like THis. So I thought I’d expand a bit on the topic here in the hopes of continuing the conversation in the comments.
My current position
I am very reluctant to embrace the idea of institutional ePortfolio systems. I’m concerned about an educational institution housing work that is to be used professionally beyond the time students are at university, especially when there are no real free public eportfolio options that the data can be migrated to upon graduation.
Beyond Higher Education
For many people, our time in higher education is a very special one. However almost inevitably at some point we grow beyond our identity of “uni student” and start to evolve into something different. An ePortfolio site must be able to grow as we grow – from aesthetic presence, to content, to customizations. Yet in the age of ultra strict university branding protocols and at times paranoid IT security restrictions, I fail to see how this is possible on a university system.
The integration of ePortfolios in the classroom must take into consideration the needs of students beyond their time in higher education. Some people will be quite happy to remain associated with the institution, but not everyone will. So if ePortfolios are indeed meant to represent an ongoing account of our personal and professional development, they must be able to evolve with us – beyond the university if need be.
Here the lack of public options represents a real issue, because it renders it impossible to move beyond the university – even if you want to.
Blogs as ePortfolios
This is not to say that the notion of student-centred spaces is a bad idea; rather that the choice of a platform that ties students to the institution is a bad idea. In my view we must look beyond specialized ePortfolio software for our answer.
In the case of blogs, there are a number of free options, such as Blogger, WordPress and I would suspect TypePad, that will easily import content produced on another instance of the same software. In the case of Blogger and WordPress.com, some systems will even recognize export files pulled from other blog systems. There are also a number of free blog hosts available, so the risk is relatively low that students will be stuck with no new location for their work.
And ultimately, blogs are not simply personal journals. They are and can be powerful and adaptable content management systems that can be tailored to suit many different needs.
Thus students who contributed to an institutional WordPress server, for example, could take their work with them when they graduated and migrate their content off site without requiring any specialized technical knowledge. The same cannot be said for ePortfolios.
It makes far more sense to me to develop ePortfolios on blog software that to use dedicated ePortfolio software, because the market has no real free public eportfolio sites to speak of.
Sustainability and Motive
One must also question the notions of sustainability and motive.
In a time when university funding is extremely scarce and access to available resources subject to constant debate, institutions are increasingly turning to alumni for donations. The idea that these same institutions might continue to hold the keys to material that former students depend on professionally strikes me as a potential conflict of interest.
On the benign side of the spectrum, student work would need to be maintained for years – perhaps even decades. When you consider the number of students who go through university, and the amount of data they are like to create over the course of their professional lives, the potential storage requirements could be astronomical.
Planning for the exporting of content to services that are specifically designed and resourced to support them is far more sensible.
On the more malignant side, students could eventually find themselves in a paid service model, where access to their own work comes at a price set by the university – whether that price was articulated at first or not. Thus you start to see a hostage situation where the data is held captive for ransom at the mercy of a university monopoly.
A word on Mahara
Having said all this, you really cannot have a conversation about ePortfolios without mentioning Mahara. The significance there is that Mahara is open source; it’s free to download and free to use. Having spent a bit of time tinkering with the software I am impressed by what it can do, and my above concerns aside I think it’s a worthwhile system to use.
And yet use of Mahara alone doesn’t resolve this problem – at least not completely.
Self-hosted systems require technical knowledge to set-up and maintain, and not everyone possesses this technical knowledge, is interested in learning it, or is interested in maintaining their own installations.
In my view this represents an equity issue that just can’t be over looked. Mahara is indeed a fantastic program, but it alone does not resolve the issues that arise from use of a specialised institutional ePortfolio system – it only mitigates it partially.
A Proposal for Mahara
Personally I would like to see Mahara adopt a similar model to the one used by WordPress, and more recently Drupal (in the form of Drupal Gardens), in which free hosted versions of the software are available to those who would like to avoid the backend requirements of maintaining their own installation.
From the individual user’s perspective, it would represent an opportunity to extend and grow beyond the walls of their alma mater (and import the data that originated there), and be looked after by the people who know the software best. For both WordPress and Drupal this has also introduced some business opportunities in the form of premium services like custom domain names and specialized themes for those who are interested in paying for them.
However until services like this are available I just can’t support the idea that specialized eportfolio software is a good idea – adapted blogs are a far safer choice.
Update: Be sure to visit Kristina Hoeppner’s response to this post over at the Curious and Wandering Eye. She includes a number of useful references on existing initiatives using e-portfolios, as well as some information on at least one hosting service for Mahara. In light of the information she’s shared it appears I jumped the gun on a few things and was in fact wrong. Many thanks to Kristina for pointing this out!
Along those lines, if anyone else has projects or services related to ePortfolio’s that they would like to share please be sure to include them in the comments. My hope for this post was to establish a conversation around ePortfolios – both arguments for and against – so it’s great to hear some different perspectives and differing viewpoints.
