‘An e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items – ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback etc, which “presents” a selected audience with evidence of a person’s learning and/or ability.’
Sutherland, S. and Powell, A. (2007)
The primary aim of an Electronic portfolio (EP) is to collect evidence for summative assessment, to demonstrate achievement, record progress and set targets – as in records of achievement and individual learning plans (ILPs) – or to nurture a continuing process of personal development and reflective learning. It is an important tool that can be used to support and document student learning as well as the development of educational, personal, and professional skills. EPs support portfolio pedagogy by engaging individuals in deep reflection on their learning and provide evidence of professional and intellectual growth as well as documenting the complex processes involved in learning.
Portfolio creation and management is pedagogically a good practice for both teachers and students. Teachers, while doing their teacher training program need to build up work portfolio which some schools expect them to present at the time of interview so that it gives them an insight into the kind of teacher he/she is. Some teachers continue this practice along with helping their students develop theirs. Many educational programs (including IB and Reggio) have made it a mandatory tool of assessment and reflection.
Although paper portfolios have long been in use as valuable sources of evidence that document an individual’s growth and learning processes, the emergence of Web 2.0 tools and the increasing accessibility of digital technology has prompted many educators and professionals to shift from paper to electronic portfolios. EPs allows for multimodal artefacts, e.g. images, videos, audio files, or programming snippets, along with more traditional rich media files such as Word documents, PowerPoints, spreadsheets etc., to be collected, managed and presented to different audiences as evidence of learning and skills development over time. EPs are much more dynamic, interactive and flexible than their physical counterparts.
An EP, like its paper equivalent, is produced at key points in a learning journey – (when demonstrating the outcomes of learning, the next stage of learning, etc). EPs demonstrate what is important about the individual at a particular point in time – their achievements, reflections on learning and, potentially, a rich and rounded picture of their abilities, aspirations and ambitions.
Note: Some excerpts of this blog have been sourced from a report titled Effective Practice with e-Portfolios, published by JISC
The Web 2.0 is a powerful teaching resource as it encompasses the playful, expressive, reflective and exploratory aspects of knowledge building. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for internet applications which support internet-based interaction between and within groups (social networking, wikis, folksonomies, virtual societies, blogging, multiplayer online gaming and ‘mash-ups’). These applications are built around the collaborative creation, acquisition and sharing of content amongst a communities of users. The educational benefits of Web 2.0 are derived from the readability / writeability of the web, where users can easily generate their own content as well as consume content produced by others.
When directed at learning, Web 2.0 impacts on four principal dimensions of learner experience. Two are broadly social in nature (collaboration and publication) and two are more cognitive (literacy and inquiry).
Collaboration: Web 2.0 offers educators a set of tools to support forms of learning that are highly collaborative and more oriented to the building of classroom communities. It allows learners to collaborate and coordinate actions and activities to construct common and shared learning and to source information and expertise from external sources.
Publication: The read-write character of Web 2.0 supports the creation of original material for publication in various formats (oral, written, audio, video) which would otherwise be difficult and expensive to achieve in a conventional classroom setting. The relatively unbounded space and global viewership offers a strong feeling of doing authentic research and contributes to the authors sense of self worth.
Literacy: Learning in conventional classrooms is primarily in written and spoken forms. Digital media stretches the conventional orientation of literacy by offering new forms of representation and expression. In a recent major review of England’s primary school curriculum, the conventional definition of ‘literacy’ has been stretched to include ‘digital literacy’.
Inquiry:Web 2.0 technologies offer new ways for learners to search and source information. It has created new structures for organising, cataloguing and sourcing data, all of which has the potential to empower students as independent learners. It puts potential seekers of information in direct contact with experts and provides an environment for geographically distributed users to take part in structured exchange for mutual benefit.
Web 2.0 offers learners a more participatory experience of learning in which individuals have increased opportunities to interact with other learners and providers of information. As learners become more and more engaged with digital technologies, gain fluency in their application, and with the job market assigning increased weightage to candidates with digital competencies, teaching practices and curriculum must address the challenge of developing these attributes.
Children, right from infants, need to explore and play with different materials in a safe environment. These could be seemingly safe materials like stuffed toys or seemingly unsafe ones like soft moulding wires. In today’s borderless world of contamination and cross-contamination, no material is completely “safe”. Yet adults, who are entrusted with the supervision and safety of infants, work with the illusion that restricting their childs interaction to just a few supposedly safe materials, makes them safe. It is easier for us to manage the environment so that our lapses and neglects do not jeopardise their safety. In our enthusiasm to make the environment safe, we forget that the elimination of certain materials from children’s environment makes learning very one dimensional and caters to development of some senses more than others.
In North America, the safety of kids sometimes borders on paranoia. The litigation culture prevalent there makes them rely so much on one kind of research that supports stringent control over materials, conveniently ignoring the other body of research which supports the contrary. In Canada, my infant son was not allowed to play with little cars by his daycare provider as there was the risk that the wheels might come off and may be swallowed by him or other infants around him. Whereas in Reggio, I witnessed the spectacular engagement of an infant with a metal object, something that would have horrified my son’s Canadian caregiver. The learning and the communication of the learning that emerged from such interaction was a visual delight for me as a mother and an educationist.
This is not to say that infants should be allowed to interact with sharp knifes and rat poison! But we need to broaden our choice of materials for kids, especially the very young ones, to interact with and learn from. Our fears as parents and care providers should not interfere with their sensorial development. Every material that has any educational value has its potential strengths and risks. It is more about vigilant supervision and common sense than about a false culture of safe, sterile environment. Somehow, the preschools in North America seem colourful but dull to the senses after Reggio where aesthetic repackaging and layouts of discards like orange peels gave them a new identity and potential purpose as a multi-sensorial, learning material.
