Online Portfolios

I’m not yet super informed on elec­tronic port­fo­lios, but I had a few thoughts that I wanted to throw out and hope­fully get some feed­back. If you’re at all new to port­fo­lios you may be ask­ing your­self, “So how exactly is an online port­fo­lio dif­fer­ent from a reg­u­lar old web­site?” My impres­sion is that in some ways they are not dif­fer­ent at all– but there are (or at least can be) some key dif­fer­ences. A good primer is this arti­cle titled The Elec­tronic Port­fo­lio Boom: What’s it All About?

Briefly, my under­stand­ing is that a web­site is gen­er­ally more flex­i­ble and gives the port­fo­lio devel­oper more con­trol over lay­out (not always a good thing in the hands of an ama­teur). Online port­fo­lios gen­er­ally have a set frame­work for con­tent, occa­sion­ally a cou­ple of tem­plates to choose from and some even allow stu­dents to cor­re­late work they’ve done with a set of learn­ing standards.

One way of set­ting up an online port­fo­lio that has been dis­cussed is to use an open source blog or other CMS piece of soft­ware. Here is an exam­ple of a ePort­fo­lio about port­fo­lios done using Word­Press, a great arti­cle from Stopde­sign and some inter­est­ing thoughts from the ERADC, ePort­fo­lios and weblogs: one vision for ePort­fo­lio devel­op­ment.

As far as using a spe­cific port­fo­lio soft­ware, I’d love to hear what options peo­ple know of. One to check out is the Open Source Port­fo­lio Ini­tia­tive a well devel­oped effort of a lot of uni­ver­si­ties that seems to be fairly full featured.

All of those resources noted, I think there are big ques­tions to con­sider about sus­tain­abil­ity and effec­tive­ness of port­fo­lios for any group before too much time is invested in devel­op­ing any kind of com­pre­hen­sive long-term system.