Only recently I started my quest into the area of ePortfolios. That topic seems to be very hot and lots of different religions emerged in a short period of time. The day after my initial post on that topic I received Serge Ravet’s, from EifEL, position paper: For an ePortfolio enabled architecture. Aside from the architectural aspects his credo is: “[...] providing a pathway for innovation and standardization, keeping the power of free personalized expression and interoperability.”
Serge Ravet is raising a lot of relevant topics that are densely coupled with the notion of ePortfolios. Those are:
- identy
- innovation
- data-mining for (as an example) automatic extraction of CVs
And above all he starts out to sketch an architecture for an ePortfolio enable environment that consists of three components:
- the ePortfolio
- the ePortfolio Management System (organisational)
- the ePortfolio System (individual)
What I like especially is that he brings in the notion of social capital (comp. Francis Fukuyama’s notion of sociability) as something you could create and showcase with the help of ePortfolios. Haven’t read anything about that networking aspect before.
Further the question is raised if we should use special tools (ePortfolio authoring systems) or just tools that provide the proper import/export mechanisms. I cut a chart out of his paper that represents that ecosystem
This debate somehow reminds me of the lively discussions about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Tools and whether you as a knowledge worker should own them or if it is even thinkable that an organization provides them. If we look how modern tools that support more innovative approaches to sharing knowledge and supporting innovation are implemented in firms then I’d say it is a long way for the vision of personal ePortfolios. Although we might be in a different situation that might better make it reasonable for institutions to support the personal approach.
Deeply connected to that strategic debate is the question of what standards should be supported by ePortfolio systems. The broad perspective that is presented here refers to open standards (OpenID (t d f), HR-XML (t d f), FOAF (t d f), ATOM (t d f), SIOC (t d f), … ) that are successfully implemented on the greater web. If you are in favor of more institutionalized closed shops (ePortfolio ecosystems) you might vote for IMS.
Every post that deals with ePortfolio (t d f)s will start/close with such a ceterum censeo, at least as long as I don’t change my mind:
“ePortfolios are digital representations of a person and thus need to be an integral part of a person’s digital life. Thus ePortfolios need to be either aggregators of data or citizens in bigger digital environments”
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Tags: ePortfolio, Research, standards
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