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.