Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Review of Commercial Tools...and my response

Trent Batson just published an article in Campus Technology entitled, "A Survey of the Electronic Portfolio Market Sector: Analysis and Surprising Trends." He discusses the variety of commercial and open source eportfolio tools; many of the commercial providers are members of AAEEBL. My response:  
You reviewed the commercial and open source market here. However, in my experience, the largest growing category of student-centered ePortfolio tools are so-called Web 2.0 tools: blogs (such as WordPress and Blogger), wikis (such as Wikispaces and Google Sites), and web site authoring tools (such as Weebly and Yola). Next month, Seattle Pacific University will receive one of four 2011 Sloan-C Effective Practice Awards for its use of Wordpress.com as bPortfolios: Blogging for Reflective Practice --http://bit.ly/pamT5d 
Worthy of special mention is the GoogleApps Education ecosystem, providing a variety of tools for authoring, storage and data transferability. When looking at portfolios across the lifespan, it is important that portfolio data not be locked into silos, but exportable into open formats. I have also spoken about how the boundaries are blurring between social networking and ePortfolio development. The new Facebook Timeline is an interesting platform for lifelong and life-wide learning, reflection, storytelling, & meaning-making. As asked in a comment on my blog, "How will those of us using ePortfolios in higher education compete with a social network that already dominates (and in some cases defines) our students' lives?" http://blog.helenbarrett.org/

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