Assessment meets WorldWare
Mike Caulfield writes a nice reality check on vendor ePortfolio packages:
So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the environment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?
Put it up against The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies Top 100 list of tools favored by e-learning professionals. Looks like a list of Worldware to me, which is as it should be.
I’ve been thinking that my blog is an ePortfolio (I collect, select, reflect and project in this space). My categories filter for different audiences. But this is also a working space, I’m not always good at telling a single story to one audience, so I can see a case for a more formal presentation. But ideally, such a presentation would be built with open tools, and using the identity I chose, not a drop-box closed tool branded with the identity of an institution.
As for what I’d want to put into my portfolio, it would look more like the products and activities that Stephen Downes suggests in Open Source Assessment than a resume or the product of a typical university course.