Dear colleagues, I experienced first-hand how a properly designed e-portfolio assignment lets one reflect on your learning experience.  As Mariane suggests, it is advisable to provide criteria against which the portfolio will be evaluated.  There indeed may be some degree of self-enhancement involved, but of course, if one can provide some evidence for the self-enhancement, it may be regarded as a realistic self-evaluation! Please see one of the rubrics that I found for evaluating an e-portfolio.

https://www2.uwstout.edu/content/profdev/rubrics/eportfoliorubric.html

Dear Alexandros, I used Weebly during my own online studies and was surprised at how easy it is to use. It has a drag-and-drop function and once one figures this out, it really is easy to use. It is possible to customise the 'look' of one's portfolio (by selecting a theme that determines its appearance).  One can embed various files, for instance, YouTube clips. I did not make use of the free version because I wanted to be able to upload documents (as part of a portfolio of evidence). I have not used other applications yet.

Our learning management system, which is based on Sakai, apparently also has an e-portfolio tool but we do not use it widely.  A benefit of using an e-portfolio tool that is not embedded in one's LMS is the trend that students can 'keep' this information after they finished their studies (as digital artefacts). On the other hand, the portfolios are then beyond the 'boundaries' of the institution. 

https://education.weebly.com/

Dear Alexandros, you will probably notice that I am quite enthusiastic about the use of e-portfolios. I include a link that provides some ideas about the use of this tool in education.

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2014/07/great-eportfolio-resources-for-teachers.html

Thanks for this interesting topic.

We've been using Mahara (https://mahara.org) for two years, to complement the paper portfolio which is still mandatory in my university when you deliver a diploma or a certificate (a paper copy of each final work has to be available in the library).

The students (they are teachers in continuing education) were asked to collect, then select and comment videos of their performances, testimonies, texts and other elements in order to demonstrate their development of the three competences of the program.

Mahara is open source, and fully interoperable with Moodle (LMS, open source also), although the students can keep access to their portfolio for their whole life. It also offers social networking but our students did not really use it, as they could meet monthly. The sharing options are quite developed, with different levels of sharing. We still have many options to discover and we will certainly better customize it for our group of students next year, as we were not fully satisfied with our own mastery of the tool, even though we think it has a very good potential.

I believe it would be worthwhile to know what quantitative data support the theory that reflection supports or improves academic performance.  In the States, reflection has been linked to portfolios at least since 1992, but I have yet to see any meaningful effort to address the problems associated with self-enhancing bias.  

Right, James, but we didn't ask our students for any "open reflections". They were asked to collect evidences, usually supported by videos and real productions of their own students. Their comments explained in what sense the collected elements were to be considered as building an evidence, and linked it to our criteria. They also had to document their comments using the literature (from the field of education). It could be called "reflection", but in a very restricted sense, and strictly related to the academic performance we are assessing.

Dear colleagues, I experienced first-hand how a properly designed e-portfolio assignment lets one reflect on your learning experience.  As Mariane suggests, it is advisable to provide criteria against which the portfolio will be evaluated.  There indeed may be some degree of self-enhancement involved, but of course, if one can provide some evidence for the self-enhancement, it may be regarded as a realistic self-evaluation! Please see one of the rubrics that I found for evaluating an e-portfolio.

https://www2.uwstout.edu/content/profdev/rubrics/eportfoliorubric.html

Greetings, Alexandros,

Attached is what I share with my students. The document explains the purpose of an eportfolio and steps for setting up the eportfolio using a platform of their choice. As for research, I recommend the work of Dr. Helen Barrett (http://electronicportfolios.org/). Below are the list of platforms included in the attached document, though I know there are others.

• Blog with capabilities to add pages (e.g., WordPress, Blogger)

• Carbonmade

• Digication

• Elgg

• FolioForMe

• FolioSpaces

• Google Drive

• iWebFolio

• LiveBinders

• Mahara

• Open Source Portfolio

• P-nelope

• PathBrite

• PortfolioVillage

• Seelio

• VisualCV

• Weebly

• Wiki (see the WikiMatrix to compare features of different wikis)

• Yola

Best wishes,

Barb

http://electronicportfolios.org

Barbara, thanks for providing the link to Helen Barrett.  Unfortunately, the link is connected to Dr. Barrett's webpage, which does not list any research on portfolios.  Instead, it provides connections to discussions of the value of using Web2 and e-portfollios.  Thus, the material available there appears to beg the question.

Dear Research Fellows,

We used PebblePad, for the Undergraduates -  to track their performance, career development, progression pathways, and reflective accounts.  It is a commercial package; however, very HCI friendly, user interactive with supportive guidance. The software also support community gateways also (collaborative community-paradigms).   From a academic point of view, the software covers the specification of what the University of Hull wanted, and also the needs of the Individuals through Personalisation of Interfaces.  It is a web-based platform to support mobile tablets, etc..   Hope that helps. It is only a suggestion!

http://pebbleweb.co.uk

Dear colleagues, I was wondering about Alexandros' suggestion for ranking e-portfolio applications and found the attached link in a Google search. Interestingly enough, this investigation does not really cover social media, which probably is essential in a current teaching and learning environment (this trend may be explained by the fact that the paper was published some time ago). Some of the applications that came up in our discussion up till now, including Mahara and PebblePad are, however, mentioned.

http://www.icl-conference.org/dl/proceedings/2008/finalpaper/Contribution352_a.pdf

Leona, I agree that the list of software reviewed in the article is outdated, though I did appreciate the discussion of characteristics. Thanks for sharing.

Leona, the psychological research on reflection and self-enhancing bias does not support the idea that the outcomes are realistic.  One of the theoretical claims associated with portfolios is that they result in "authentic" assessment.  The essentialist subject is posited as an object of knowledge in its own right, allowing for critical examination.  It should be clear, however, that the proposed subject/object duality is constrained by the fact that our cognitive processes are essentially opaque and thus inaccessible, rendering efforts at revelatory self-reflection and introspection futile.  Consider Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) conclusion that "we have no direct conscious access to its [the mind's] operation and therefore to most of our thought" (p. 5).  Dunning, Heath, and Suls (2004) reported that "people's views of other intelligence tend to correlated roughly .2 to .3 with their actual performance on intelligence tests and other academic tasks" (p. 71).  When Epley and Dunning (2004) asked a group of college students who were involved in romantic relationships to estimate whether their individual relationships would be intact six months later, the researchers found that "complete strangers" who received minimal information about the subjects were "just as accurate" as the couples themselves at "predicting whether their relationship would still be intact" (p. 72).  Then there is Cross' (1977) finding that, among a group of college professors, 94% stated that their work was above-average compared to their peers--which is a statistical impossibility.  Such studies offer strong evidence that reflection does not result in any authentic or realistic self-assessment but just the opposite.

Dear James, thank you for your well-substantiated theoretical argument that e-portfolios may be flawed, for instance, because they do not measure the outcomes that some experts claim they do. I wonder what a synopsis of recent research in this field would reveal.  Do students at your institution submit e-portfolios, for instance, as part of their postgraduate studies?

There is a considerable degree of practical application involved in e-portfolios and typically academic staff who use this tool would have to provide some type of scaffolding to guide students in using them.  Do you believe there is any place at all for e-portfolios in the current higher education environment?

Dear colleagues, I searched around briefly for information about self-enhancement, reflection and e-porftolios (since the current discussion centres around e-porfolios). Although the attached link provides a somewhat cursory overview of some of the elements, it may guide one's thoughts. If focuses on the implications of identity negotiation (what a fascinating term) research for the design of the TRAILER e-Portfolio.  Please click on the link to the PDF document if necessary.

http://lnx-hrl-075v.web.pwo.ou.nl/handle/1820/4597

Leona, as far as I know, no one at my school uses e-portfolios.  However, a few years ago, a program administrator implemented portfolios in writing assessment.  Because the administrator and those tasked with conducting the assessment knew nothing about assessment and portfolios, the effort failed miserably.  The failure was not unusual, for many other efforts throughout the States have likewise failed owing to: (1) a lack of reliability; (2) problems with validity; (3) a tendency to ignore established protocols; and (4) the huge amount of time required to implement the assessment in keeping with established protocols.

The paper you referred to in your last post does not address these issues, but it does consider the question of self-enhancement that I raised previously.  Indeed, the authors reference the Dunning, Heath, and Suls (2004) study that I mentioned, noting that the face validity of e-portfolios suffers from reliance on self-assessment and "selection of appropriate evidence to showcase a particular competence."

Although the paper's focus is on informal learning, e-portfolios are far more commonly used in assessing formal learning, and their use faces the same challenges as traditional portfolios.  Owing to limited time and space, I will mention only the two that I believe are most serious.  The first is validity.  Because a teacher has little to no control over the content the student includes in the portfolio, there is no way to know whether the student actually produced that content.  Consider this common scenario: A teacher gives students a writing assignment, works with them as they develop several drafts, and then asks students to include a final draft as part of an end-of-term portfolio.  The last draft the teacher saw most likely had several problems that he or she did not have time to address, but the final portfolio draft is flawless.  Did the student produce it, or did the student have someone else edit and revise?  The second challenge is the issue of reflection, a concept that appears in just about every discussion of portfolios that I've seen.  The idea is that by reflecting on the work in the portfolio, the student gains a better understanding of him- or herself and the work.  That is, the student becomes more "self-aware."  This concept is inherent in the notion of "identity negotiation."  The problem, as the research I referenced previously makes clear, is that any such negotiation is self-serving and inherently flawed.

The DSpace article fails to recognize the self-serving nature of reflection.  The authors note, for example, that "Considering identity as multiple yet coherent fosters self-knowledge."  A coherent identity does not mean that it is an authentic or "true" identity--indeed, it is most likely an identity that may not be recognized by others.  I have a colleague, for example, whose language and demeanor communicate to others that he thinks of himself as being an intelligent, knowledgeable professor--yet none of his colleagues accept that identity, referring to him in private conversations as "the village idiot."

The DSpace article also fails in other respects.  The authors claim that e-portfolios allow students to start from "self-knowledge and real life experience, [sic] and present them online in ways that support processes of self-negotiation and self-verification."  But if the self-knowledge is erroneous to begin with owing to self-enhancing bias--as in the case of the 94% of professors who viewed their work to be better than that of their peers--any following processes necessarily results in false self-verification.

Dear Alexandros,

Google Sites is becoming increasingly popular for creating educational portfolios. Furthermore, it is free and works well for embedding different content types. Many schools and universities use portfolios that have been created in this platform. You can also easily insert and integrate your Google documents, e.g. drawings, text documents, and presentations. Here are two examples: 

https://sites.google.com/a/vmbulldogs.com/toolsofengagement/s-eporfolios 

https://sites.google.com/a/wisc.edu/eportfolio_example/home/bucky-badger-s-personal-eportfolio 

Emre 

Dr. E 

https://sites.google.com/a/wisc.edu/eportfolio_example/home/bucky-badger-s-personal-eportfolio

https://sites.google.com/a/vmbulldogs.com/toolsofengagement/s-eporfolios

James and others,

In my field of instructional design, reflection is only one component of eportfolios, and this reflection is centered on how each artifact reflects proficiency of the program learning outcomes. A greater purpose in my field is the demonstration of experience. Thus, it is useful to think of eportfolios beyond the reflective stance.

With thanks for the conversation,

Barb

Dear Barbara, I was impressed with the variety of options you offer students in terms of the platforms that they can use for compiling their e-portfolios. Since we seem to focus on 'measures' to determine the suitability of certain tools, do you have an idea of which of these platforms students favor?

The easiest one, Leona!   I would say that WordPress, GoogleSites, and Wix (not listed in my post above) are the most popular. Some students already have their own websites, so they integrate their artifacts into their existing site.

I have found that e-portfolios are an effective way for teachers to showcase their skills to a prospective employer for a new job or job promotion. Here's a sample of one of my in-service teacher's e-portfolio to illustrate my point.

Best regards,

Debra

http://jrsamaroo.webnode.com/my-e-portfolio/

Santiago, in the spring, I have a paper coming out that examines some of the philosophical and psychological issues associated with reflection, self-knowledge, and authenticity.  It will be appear in the Journal of Pedagogic Development.