Why an ePortfolio?

Ed Psy 490i

Leonard Fretzin

Write a persuasive essay of about 1200 words: Should teachers consider creating their professional portfolios in digital format? Why? What advantages/disadvantages do you see to this?

I would like to discuss the topic in terms of FIVE C's. These are convenience, currentness, conciseness, correctness, and criticism.

Convenience

An eportfolio is a convenient way of presenting information that reflects upon one's professional experience and competence. It can be quickly updated and revised, should any deficiencies be discovered or an improved format be instigated. Making changes in an electronic document is virtually as simple as adding or changing a sentence in this word processor document.

If published to a net server, an electronic file is convenient for anyone who has the necessary technology and knowledge to peruse it. If copied to a CD-ROM disc for distribution, it is easy to send or give a copy to anyone who needs to see it. It is also possible to send electronic files via FTP or e-mail to any distant receiver on earth, although careful consideration has to be given to the size of transmission by these modalities and files may need to be zipped prior to transmission.

The other aspect of convenience lies in the freedom the recipient has in viewing and attending to the content of an eportfolio. The reviewer is not burdened with the thankless task of sorting through countless reams of paper, Xeroxes, and forms that would typically constitute a hard copy portfolio. There is little desk space necessary for the examination of an electronic presentation.

A well organized eportfolio will give the reviewer an easy way to selectively read through the mass of submissions included in a typical portfolio; and the convenience of quickly focusing on those papers of particular interest to the reviewer.

Currentness

By currentness I mean the contemporaneous nature of the eportfolio as a tool and format. With the unimaginable expansion and popularity of the internet over the past five plus years, its use has become the ‘in thing’ today, despite the failure of its much ballyhooed commercial exploitation.

In the field of education and as a resource of information of all sorts, it remains the single most relied upon vehicle for the hoped for educational renaissance. Schools all over the nation are rushing to wire as many classes as possible with internet high speed T1 lines, and the like.

To me, being heavier in years and skeptical in nature, I find parallels to the much toted advocacy of television back in the 50’s as an educational godsend. Most people will readily admit that this opinion is archaic and the subject of either laughter, taunts, or easy academic critical analysis. But it wasn’t too long ago that a brave soul by the name on Newton Minnow pronounced a prophetic denunciation renouncing television as a vast wasteland. He was promptly tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, only to find succor at the hands of some good Samaritans from PBS.

Conciseness

To properly prepare an eportfolio, it is helpful to follow the guidelines of many of the writers we have been assigned to read. They recommend that the portfolio be organized from the top down in a logically clear and concise manner, so that the reader is immediately presented with its organizational index, which may be looked at in a subject by subject and step by step manner which internal linking provides. Browsing our eportfolio whether as a web site or a CD must be easy, open, and relevant. Here is only one example of the benefits of this new technology.

Although a simple book also provides a similar convenience, imagine the cost and difficulty of converting our various papers and documents that are the subject matter in a teacher portfolio into the format of a book. Electronic technology allows this conversion to be done quickly and yet leaves open the convenience of rapid updating. We can produce a new edition often overnight.

Whether it is a matter of scanning in hard documents to an electronic forum, or using simple programs such as MSWord to create electronic documents, the ease of achieving a convenient and concise format has never been easier. In many ways the technology revolution has been nothing less that miraculous for me to behold.

Correctness

Here I have to cautiously modify the famous adage of Mohammed Ali from “float like a butterfly…sting like a bee” to “float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly, and alight like a butterfly”. The eportfolio and technology as a whole is the PC way to go; and I don’t mean politically correct, but rather philosophically correct. It is what everyone is talking about. It is where billions of dollars are being spent. It is considered the great bulwark and castle keep which will be the salvation of a troubled educational enterprise. It allows of little skepticism and little criticism, hence the phrase PC; and in this sense is consistent with a prevailing faith in a monocular intellectual correctness observable throughout most of our culture.

And yet the NCLB (no child left behind) Act provides funding of studies to evaluate the efficacy of technology in education.

Criticism

When published on a net server, your eportfolio becomes open for all to see and copy unless you take the pains to add a password protection to your index page. Unlike a hardbound copy of your work which you can control and carry with you, a set of files published to a server computer can be opened to unwanted, prying eyes. You can control hardbound copies of your work and may give it to whoever you want to see it and also ask for it to be returned. And although it is possible for someone to Xerox copies of your hard copies, it is certainly a more difficult and time consuming task than copying a disc with a CD burner or floppy drive. With an unbound hard copy you have the additional control of selecting parts of your portfolio for an individual person to see, but otherwise, keeping other parts out of their hands. With an eportfolio that is published on the net, it is pretty much an all or nothing proposition unless you find the need to redo many of your documents and links in the electronic document.

Another danger in developing a portfolio in electronic format, is to take the mistaken approach of showing off what you can do with the medium, rather than constantly asking yourself, ‘what is best to do to clarify the meaning of my work’. The use of streaming video or audio just to show people that you know how to do it rather than to enrich the content of the presentation is an example of the ‘medium’ becoming greater than the message. These types of seductions are easily succumbed to by many of us.