E-Portfolios and Cats

re: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2011/06/eportfolios-all-thats-wrong-with-ed-tech.html

The crux of the above post is that e-portfolios were all the rage, but the fell out of favour because they add unnecessary complications, are de-socialized, have a steep learning curve, and often quickly just became ways to submit student work.

They are still alive at our campus. I don't use them and don't know anyone that uses them, but I occasionally see campus-wide-list-emails about them. Development of e-portfolios is managed by our 'Center for Advanced Technologies Training', along with many other systems, like BlackBoard, Blogs, and Wikis. Most of our faculty doesn't have their Faculty Profile webpage set up though, so I suspect that these resources are under-utilized. I know the people at our CATT and they are great, extremely helpful, so I have to think that what the above post suggests is true about a lot of electronic systems.

One comment on the above blog is interesting:

So e-portfolios are problematic if you're talking about education and learning, but in the context of schooling - the real world in which most people live, they work just fine (or as well as anything does...).

This highlights the difference between Actual Learning and Scholasticism. On the one hand our students, and this seems to be true everywhere regardless of what people say, are expected to basically jump through a set of hoops. And they approach it as such, tasks to check off in order to move up.

I was at a graduation ceremony this weekend at a high level private high school. The Valedictorian actually said just that, that they learned nothing in their school other than to use things like cliff and spark notes, and that putting work off until the night before was actually better than doing it ahead of time, not merely acceptable or sufficient but preferable because they can focus on other things to learn that are important (and he did not mean academic matters).

So it sounds like e-portfolios are great, as long as you want the same-old-same-old, or as long as you want 'top performing students' who are doing nothing.

I'll have to actually try to verify that though, maybe I need to talk to the guys over at our CATT.