The LTD Project Blog

It is a pleasure to follow Helen Barrett’s work on portfolios. I’ve been especially excited about it since she demonstrated the utility of blog pages as readily exploitable portfolio building venues: WordPress.com (V.2) (2006)

In a post on December 8, 2008, she touches twice upon a concept of freshness (¶¶ 2 and 3, or ¶¶ 3 and 4), yet her Digital Archive for Life Diagram includes a node for “‘Legacy’ Stories” (March 16, 2008):

I realize that her current endeavor, Balancing 2 Faces of ePortfolios (January 30, 2009), focuses on higher education. Nevertheless, the broader context of her work suggests less of a two-faced concept of portfolios for learning, and more of a continuum or flow from currency to legacy, as well as from process to product.

While developing portfolios in higher education contexts may be very much one-off endeavors for students coerced or cajoled into it, where she’d originally situated reflection under the time line, between collection and selection in the graphic displayed on her recent post (January 30, 2009) hardly represented or promoted the recursive nature of the reflective process. She seems to have taken this into consideration in later developments of the diagram that she has linked to that graphic (Balancing 2 Faces of ePortfolios, 2009).

In a work in progress, cceraso defines a portfolio and provides rationales for learners’ creating and maintaining them. She answers the questions:

• What are the advantages of keeping a portfolio?
• Why do we keep it online?

Then, at the end of her definition, she refers readers to wikipedia definitions of portfolios and e-portfolios.

I’m looking forward both to coming developments on an adjacent portfolio evaluation page, and to seeing how portfolios are coupled with self-assessment tasks for learners collaborating on the Corpus wiki.

If you’re interested in portfolio creation on a blog, Helen Barrett shows and tells how to go about it. For a review of her demo., see: Wordpress blog for portfolio (The LTD Project Blog, 2007.03.15).

As part of a suite of portfolios developed using a variety of online tools, Helen Barrett (2007) explains and demonstrates how to create a portfolio in a Wordpress blog. She outlines five phases of portfolio development:

1. defining the intended purpose of the portfolio, perhaps in terms of “outcomes, goals, or standards;”
2. collecting and selecting artifacts to support that purpose;
3. reflecting on each artifact and group to produce rationales for their inclusion to achieve to the purpose of the portfolio;
4. interacting: getting and responding to feedback on the collection, reflection and satisfaction of the intended purpose, perhaps from peers or teachers; &
5. presenting or publishing the completed portfolio.

(Barrett, 2007, How To)

In Wordpress, she uses static pages and sub-pages to represent artifacts as evidence of five competencies, namely her:

1. Electronic Portfolio Competency – Knowledge, Skills and Experience
2. Digital Storytelling Competency – Digital Video Editing Skills
3. Technology Competency – Multimedia & Web Page Authoring Skills
4. Teaching & Instructional Design Competency – Presentations
5. Writing & Assessment Competency (My Publications)

(Barrett, 2007, My Portfolio)

Reference

Barrett, Helen. (2007). Helen Barrett: Electronic Portfolios and Digital Storytelling to Support Lifelong and Life Wide Learning. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://hbarrett.wordpress.com/