Are "e-portfolios" too ambitious?
The faculty and students have been "doing" portfolios in the Inclusive Elementary Special Education program since before I came here in 2000. They used to have a catered dinner at "Drumlins" and sit at round tables while 3 or 4 students would show their binder-based portfolio to a host teacher and a faculty member while nibbling on hors d'oevres and ham sandwiches at the end of the semester. The event was mostly celebratory. Even if some advice was dispensed during one of these sessions, it seemed like it was too late to me, a newcomer to all of this.
Several years later, as the school began experimenting with "e" portfolios in the form of Dreamweaver and Netscape Composer authored web sites, more time was spent teaching technical skills to the future elementary teachers so that they could showcase the highlights of the semester to their peers and teachers. As a member of a tech group that created and maintained a home made course management system called "Dialogue", which was designed around the idea that EVERY opportunity for assessment/review was also an opportunity to begin a thread of formative discussion, I thought the portfolio idea had a lot of potential to be a great learning opportunity.
The technical barrier to authoring one of these portfolios was substantial, even when we shifted gears and began starting students with a PowerPoint template, with stubbed out pages suggesting that the students address our emerging "School of Education Proficiencies" in their portfolios. How to resize images, scan documents that proved that they were "proficient" and embed video snippets that played on multiple platforms remained issues that were dealt with during the last few weeks at the tail end of the semester. The rest of the semester was spent doing the real work of the school, training students to be excellent teachers.
For the past two years we have been using the web based Open Source Portfolio software. While OSP has improved markedly in that short time, the other barriers remain. As such, our student's portfolios are usually not worked on (or read) by most of the teachers in the school until the end of the semester. In that regard, nothing has changed. It seems that coursework is coursework and the portfolio remains this "other" thing that gets tacked on the end of the semester.
I have this vision of faculty sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and reading their students' daily musings (just like I check a pile of blogs on a regular basis), writing back a few thoughts and using that information to inform the next week's lessons.
I wonder if e-portfolios are way too ambitious. A blog with a tagging feature, an few rss feeds and a class blog "aggregator" might be all we need to embed "portfolio thinking" into classes.