Some thoughts about eportfolios

I always think about eportfolios, but recently I’ve been thinking about them more than normal as I’ve been contributing some ideas to other peoples’ publications, working on some of my own and preparing some presentations. I guess the fact that I've also just visited 12 universities in 9 Australian cities provided great thinking and reflecting time - especially whilst being ferried about on the 10 aircraft, 4 hire cars, 1 train and innumerable taxis I used.

Anyway, I found myself looking back at some ideas first posited at AAEEBL 2013 where I identified two broad categories of portfolios in education - those that were about the author, and those that were about something the author had done. In the first category the author was the centre of the story and I called those Me-Portfolios. The 2nd type were more likely to surface a process of learning and were typically about an activity or experience. These were dubbed T- or Task-portfolios and they appeared as a result of innovative teachers subverting, in a good way, portfolio tools to support learning or assessment designs that couldn’t be addressed with prevailing institutional technologies.

There’s a bit of a myth which holds that portfolios must be highly personal and that they’re the result of a student's discretionary activity. In reality they are almost always directed by a teacher/instructor and often have ‘rules’ around how they should look, what they should contain - and when they should be shared for assessment. That’s not to say some portfolios aren’t highly personal, and deeply reflective. Recently Kate Coleman, Kelly Chambers and Melissa Pirie Cross have all reminded me how important personal accounts of learning, becoming and being are. That said I think the e- in e-portfolio really ought to stand for educational because it’s really only in educational (or developmental) settings that we tend see them in use. Outside of education we are more likely to see LinkedIn profiles or Wordpress sites, and I would contend that these are different.

An educational portfolio, whether a Me- or T-portfolio ought to be DAPPER. That is, it should be possible to discern:

• Development (over time), 
• Authenticity, 
• Purposefulness, 
• Personality, 
• Evidence (of claims made) and
• Reflection. 

Clearly these are not exhaustive attributes, nor are they necessarily peculiar to portfolios, but evidence of them, especially in concert, indicates that the narrative, collection or presentation is 'more portfolio-like'.

I originally organised Me- and T-portfolios into 8 sub-categories which I’ll list, but not expand on here:

• Personal, Professional and Promotional, and
• Process, Production, Pedagogical, Placement and Project

Discussing this with some colleagues recently we wondered whether a simpler categorisation is one which would answer three key questions:

• Who am I
• What can I do
• What have I done

Thought having now written these three questions down I think they actually form a complementary categorisation which can work alongside the others - including those not listed here like: structured, competency or mapping (often vs) narrative, freeform or expressive. 

There’s a categorisation I don’t subscribe to which talks of learning, assessment, course or showcase portfolios. I’m sure there are sound arguments for listing portfolios thus but I’ve rarely seen an assessed portfolio, that doesn’t showcase learning, probably from a course, and which has been developmental - so I find these categories a little redundant.

To conclude a loosely rambling recap (primarily for myself)... a portfolio is most likely found in an educational setting. If created as part of an assessed activity it could well be a task-portfolio - perhaps a portfolio about a project. It might be a narrative expression of what I have done, and what I can do as a result, and which in turn may reflect on who I am. In this educational context it will likely showcase what I have done and learned for the purposes of assessment - and that assessment will consider my work against portfolio-like criteria determining how well I demonstrate development, authenticity, purposefulness, personality, evidence (of claims made) and my overall reflection. 

Or maybe it’s a completely different kind of portfolio which you may be able to describe using any combination of the descriptors offered above. Have fun.