Thursday, September 20, 2007

E-Portfolio Questions

David Emmett, (2003, November). E-Portfolios at QUT: Providing the potential for competitive advantage and a motivating learner-centred environment. Proceedings of the OLT 2003 Excellence: Making the Connections Conference, Australia. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000079/01/DavidEmmett.PDF

Paul Treuer & Jill Jenson. (2003, June).
Electronic Portfolios Need Standards to Thrive, Educause Quarterly, Volume 26, Number 2. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0324.pdf


While I thought the two articles about e-portfolios made some good points to support the adoption of e-portfolios, they raised a lot of questions for me.


Starting with the piece by Emmett, he states that "interaction will best occur when the learning tasks are designed on constructivist principles." However, in his article about the neomillennials, Dede (2005) indicates that situated learning is the future, particularly in virtual educational environments. So, who is right? Is a constructivist approach more conducive to learning or is the situated learning model? Or, does it matter?


Emmett goes on to say that "the main issue is that relatively few teachers have ever been asked to reflect." How are students supposed to learn how to be reflective thinkers if their teachers do not know how to be reflective? Is this just expected to be an innate quality, and thus, it isn't necessary to teach someone how to do it?


Moving to the article by Treuer and Jenson, they provide several different definitions of e-portfolios, which serves to frame their argument that standards are needed in this area. While I agree that the ability to easily store and retrieve your educational information is appealing, the outline for standardization that Treuer and Jenson present seems too simplistic. What about students who transfer after one semester at an institution? Will they access the information through that institution, or will they have to move it do another institution or employer? Will all institutions (including those in non-U.S. locations) and employers have to use the same e-portfolio system, and how will the selection of that system be made? If the information has to be moved, how will privacy issues be handled? Institutions are having enough problems these days with the release of private information into unintended spaces. The e-portfolio concept sounds like a even larger and more daunting task that merely keeping student and faculty records secure and private.

1 comment:

Chanitra said...

I think it is best to use more than one model. Different students will learn in different ways and every student won't fit into one model. Using a combination of models (constructivism, situated learning) along with assess how students are doing in the class will help a broader group of students learn various tasks.