e-portfolios for real
I was in a session about e-portfolios and standards the other day run by Allison Miller & Owen O’Neill. While listening I kept wondering how much e-portfolios will materialise in education and was experiencing considerable difficulties understanding what they are. I’d heard they were a solution in search of a problem and am also aware they are re-emerging as a training issue. Allison was articulate (and smart) in her talking about e-portfolios as a concept rather than a particular application – however I wonder if something keeps being reduced to a concept if it will become tangible. And can you apply standards to a concept?
Going back to the old days – what did people do before they had a Resume? Presumably people got jobs because of their relatedness to people and or places – with skills being only part of the consideration. Sometimes we can still get a job this way but the Resume has stepped in to cross the gap of modern disconnectedness, and to convey a description of our skills. E-portfolios look like being a modern extension of this. In emphasising e-portfolios do we unwittingly further direct attention away from the social connectedness that used to be so important for underpinning our working life?
To help clear my thinking I decided to attempt a definition:
e-portfolios are the education about and the adoption of online (or mobile) tools that enable skill awareness, skill promotion, institutional transferability and employment mobility.
Perhaps e-portfolios will never then be a “thing” or an application. Rather they are a set of activities and behaviour; but that’s the psychologist in me speaking again – wanting (or have been unhelpfully trained) to understand everything as behaviour.
Thanks to Allison Miller for stimulating the conversation.
