A portfolio is a collection of artifacts.

An e-portfolio is a digitized collection of artifacts including demonstrations,

resources, and accomplishments that represent an individual, group, or
institution.

E-portfolios encourage personal reflection and often involve the exchange of
ideas and feedback.
Types - E-portfolios for showcase.
Types - E-portfolios for assessment.
Types – E-portfolios for learning.
According to a 2008 study by the Campus Computing Project, across all
higher education sectors, the use of e-portfolios has tripled since 2003.

The Four Major Drivers of E-Portfolio Use – a growing interest in student-
centered active learning, the dynamism of digital communication
technologies, spurred by the pressure for increased accountability in higher
education, and responds to increasing fluidity in employment and education.

J. Elizabeth Clark and Bret Eynon
E-portfolios at 2.0—Surveying the Field
peer Review – Emerging Trends and Key Debates in Undergraduate
EducationVol. 11, No. 1 | Winter 2009
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi09/pr-wi09_index.cfm
What's driving eportfolio - interest in student-centered active learning

Photo from Games, Learning and Society 6.0 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin

students would study the design and function of their digital environments,
share their findings, and develop the tools for even richer and more effective
metacognition, all within a medium that provides the most flexible and
extensible environment for creativity and expression that human beings have
ever built.
Gardner Campbell
A Personal Cyberinfrastructure
EDUCAUSE Review Magazine, Volume 44, Number 5, September/October
2009
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/
EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/APersonalCyberinfrastructure/178431

What's driving eportfolio - forces of dynamic digital communication

Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It s about enabling and encouraging
participation through open applications and services. By open I mean
technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially
open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.
Ian Davis, 2005
Talis, Web 2.0 and All That | Internet Alchemy
http://blog.iandavis.com/2005/07/04/talis-web-2-0-and-all-that
What's driving eportfolio – increasing fluidity in employment and education.

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place? The answer is:
Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments,
lots and lots of experiments...

Clay Shirky, 2009
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable
What's driving eportfolio - pressures for increased accountability in higher
education.

In the future it will be more widely recognized that the learning comes not
from the design of learning content but in how it is used. Learning and living,
it could be said, will eventually merge. The challenge will not be in how to
learn, but in how to use learning to create something more, to communicate.
Stephen Downes, 2005
E-learning 2.0
eLearn: Feature Article
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1
Distinction

Excellent e-portfolios align evidence with context and with audience, and
there is a match between the content of the evidence and the way it is
framed in the reflective narrative of the e-portfolio.
Kathleen Blake Yancey
Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-first Century:What We Know,
What We Need to Know
peer Review – Emerging Trends and Key Debates in Undergraduate
EducationVol. 11, No. 1 | Winter 2009
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi09/pr-wi09_index.cfm


The process of reading online, engaging a community, and reflecting it online
is a process of bringing life into learning. As Richardson comments, "This [the
blogging process] just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside
of school, and I don t see those things happening anywhere in traditional
education."
Stephen Downes
Educational Blogging
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 14–26.
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/
EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume39/EducationalBlogging/157920

Distinction

From the students perspective the ability to personalize their e-portfolio
contributes to their motivation to work on it throughout the year as well as
their engagement in the process (Ring, Weaver, and Jones 2008). In other
words, when the e-portfolio is designed by the student as much as by the
institution, implementation efforts are more likely to succeed.
Kathleen Blake Yancey
Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-first Century:What We Know,
What We Need to Know
peer Review – Emerging Trends and Key Debates in Undergraduate
EducationVol. 11, No. 1 | Winter 2009
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi09/pr-wi09_index.cfm


They would install scripts with one-click installers such as SimpleScripts.
They would play with wikis and blogs; they would tinker and begin to
assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their
importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections.
They would become, in myriad small but important ways, system
administrators for their own digital lives. In short, students would build a
personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend
throughout their college career — and beyond.
Distiction

Such metrics that speak to those that use eportfolio vs. those that do not –
include higher rates of student engagement on a local measure of
engagement (Kirkpatrick et al 2009) as well as on the nationally normed
Community College Survey of Student Engagement; higher rates of course
completion; and higher rates of retention (Eynon 2009).


Kathleen Blake Yancey
Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-first Century:What We Know,
What We Need to Know
peer Review – Emerging Trends and Key Debates in Undergraduate
EducationVol. 11, No. 1 | Winter 2009
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi09/pr-wi09_index.cfm
Discordance – Assessment vs. Student Learning

...the field has to some significant degree been divided between those who
see e-portfolios as tools for enriched student learning and those who focus
on their utility as a vehicle for assessment. In a 2007 Inside Higher Ed article,
Trent Batson lamented the ways that e-portfolio s potential for enhancing
students metacognitive skills had been hijacked by the need for
accountability.

J. Elizabeth Clark and Bret Eynon
E-portfolios at 2.0—Surveying the Field
peer Review – Emerging Trends and Key Debates in Undergraduate
EducationVol. 11, No. 1 | Winter 2009
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi09/pr-wi09_index.cfm
Discordance – Private vs. Public

Even as numerous studies and commonsense experience point to social
interaction in online courses as a key success factor, we find far too many
faculty eliminating opportunities for conversation by asking students to turn
in work privately.
Patrick R. Lowenthal and David Thomas
Death to the Digital Dropbox: Rethinking Student Privacy and Public
Performance
EDUCAUSE Quarterly Magazine, Volume 33, Number 3, 2010
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/
EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/DeathtotheDigitalDropboxRethin/
213672


When students are assigned to post information to public social media
platforms outside of the university LMS, they should be informed that their
material may be viewed by others.
John Orlando, 2011
FERPA and Social Media | Faculty Focus
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/
ferpa-and-social-media/?c=FF&t=F110207-FF

 Discordance – “Creepy Treehouse”

“…efforts to build educational spaces within popular social-networking
platforms risk undesirable interactions between personal and professional
lives.”
Matthew K. Gold
Beyond Friending: BuddyPress and the Social, Networked, Open-Source
Classroom
Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogyas
part of MobilityShifts: an International Future of Learning Summit
http://learningthroughdigitalmedia.net/beyond-friending-buddypress-and-
the-social-networked-open-source-classroom


Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which
participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally
formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or
rewards.A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power
forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.
Jared Stein 2008
Flexknowlogy - Jared Stein's ARCHIVED blog - update to jaredstein.org »
Defining "Creepy Treehouse”
http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2008/04/09/defining-creepy-tree-
Final Thoughts–

Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to
give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to
discover and craft their own desires and dreams...To get there, students must
be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own
digital lives.

Gardner Campbell
A Personal Cyberinfrastructure (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/
EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/APersonalCyberinfrastructure/178431


the ease of the . . . portfolio template, for him, made the portfolio creation
process feel more list-like and that it removed a good deal of the freedom he
associated with creativity. He also reported a loss of multiple contexts in the
templated approach.Josh noted, as well, that for him the value of e-portfolios
was creating connections from classes to larger contexts.A space for learning
to occur in three areas: (1) curricular situations, which are largely course-
based; (2) cocurricular situations,which are often linked to the curriculum
(e.g., service learning opportunities, internships, peer tutoring, and
leadership experiences); and (3) extracurricular situations (e.g., jobs, sports