e-Portfolios come of age

Sometime in the spring - can’t remember quite when or who said it - there was a flurry of posts as to whether Personal Learning environments were the new e-Portfolio. The discussion has too slants. One strand questioned whether there was any real difference between e-Portfolios and PLEs. The second worried about the hype over PLEs and pointed to lack of evidence that the previous upsurge of interest in e-Portfolios had resulted in much real change.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been noticing a resurgence of interest in e-Portfolios. OK, maybe I’m being a little subjective. Last week I was at the launch of a new European project - site still under construction - on e-Portfolios, tomorrow I am traveling to Austria for a workshop on ELGG. But I think it goes beyond projects and workshops. The real driver of the recent discussions is simply the fast approaching new school and college term. e-Portfolios are moving beyond the first adopters, beyond the pedagogic researchers into mainstream use.
Coming back to the first question regarding the difference between e-Portfolios and PLEs, I am not sure of the answer. I don’t think my idea of an effective e-Portfolio is much different form my take on a PLE. But not everyone in the learning technology community shares my views (probably a good job). What we all seem to have agreed on at the e-Portfolios meet up in Manchester in June was that we needed more grounded and small scale experiments in how we might configure and develop PLEs. (for discussion on ideas from Manhester workshop see PLE wiki pages maintained by Marc van Harmelen). We did not need yet another monolithic system called a PLE ( and anyway some ***tards would only try to patent it).
The good news about e-Portfolios coming of age - if my suspicion is right - is it will provide us with a rich landscape to experiment and develop new pedagogic approaches to learning.

Technorati Tags: Personal Learning Environments, social software

1 comment August 22nd, 2006