I'm double-dipping. This is an email I sent a student who is interested in doing some work on e-portfolios. 600 words in, I figured it was just the kind of thing that I'm trying to get us to think about in IT695 this semester. So, here it is, edited a bit.

I just reviewed an article about e-portfolios for a teacher education journal. I wasn't convinced that the e-portfolio system was doing anyone any good and one of the solutions was better training. (I like to point to the extensive training that the millions of people who use blogs and Facebook require in order to use those tools effectively.)

The most telling thing to me was that the first year there were X comments per artifact (or student or whatever it was) and by the 5th year there were X/3.

The take-home messages that I got from the article (these were likely no the author's intended messages) were that professors didn't care about, or resented (quotes from professors made that clear), the e-portfolio (this was pre-service teachers in a college of education) and that university supervisors sort-of liked it, but did most of their real work of evaluating student work via email.

Here's part of the exchange. I am not crediting the student because I do not have permission to use his or her words.

> good practice in assessment requires multiple assessments, over
> time;

True, but most people don't really care about assessment. Professors don't care because doing it well is really hard; students don't care because they're trying to get grades, not honest assessments of their work.

> well-planned electronic portfolios provide opportunities to collect
> data from multiple assessments across a broad range of learning
> outcomes while guiding student learning and building self-assessment
> capabilities;

So if it wasn't already hard enough to convince people that they cared about good assessments, now you're trying to convince them to make "well-planned electronic portfolios."

> e-portfolios and assessment of work in them can inform programs and
> institutions on progress in achieving expected goals.

I doubt it. In universities as good as or better than UTK, the goals are to publish and bring in grant money, even for those who care about students and their learning.

I think is vitally important for students to get feedback on what they do and create. I do not think that professors always best people to give that feedback because (a) kids care more about what their peers think than what professors think, (b) professors don't have time to give students the quantity of feedback that they need and deserve, (c) students have tons of time to give feedback; witness Facebook and Wikipedia (which isn't students), (d) students who will be teachers need to practice giving feedback.

But, if you want an e-portfolio system that does something interesting, harness the power of Web 2.0 (I hate the term, but it's stuck) to see that students have a reason to post stuff and that they get good feedback.

Read Here Comes Everybody (People with netIDs can get the first chapter
from DMS
for a while).

Envision a portfolio system that (1) encourages students to evaluate each other's work and (2) gives people credit for giving good evaluations.

Maybe envision a portfolio system that looks like Wikipedia where people don't even own the stuff in their e-portfolio. In IT521 I argue (I like to think convincingly) that students aren't going to ask a teacher whether they posted stuff on the web themselves. It may be that people don't need to create stuff themselves, they just need to get the stuff they need. If they can convince someone else to do it, or find it, or work together to get it, then that's cool.

When I hear professors say "If I post my notes on the web, then there's no reason for kids to come to class," all I hear is the phrase after "then." When I hear professors (or teachers) lament that students download papers and turn them in verbatim to satisfy their assignments, I am inclined to think that maybe the assignments were somehow flawed. When I hear a student say "I don't understand why I should have to learn anything" and a teacher respond "what's what's wrong with these kids? How am I supposed to teach them?" I think "If you don't have an answer for that student's question, then you shouldn't be teaching."

So, maybe there's a way to make e-portfolios solve these problems.

746 words!