I am shocked to find I have not posted here since September last year! So much going on. I will post here in due course about my Uni's choice of a new VLE system. Prepared to be amazed!

I am demonstrating and running a workshop on Elgg as a potential e-portfolio tool at the JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire and Humberside, E-Portfolios: A Beginner’s Guide at Leeds University Tuesday, March 27, 2007.

"In its simplest form, an e-portfolio is a tool that allows learners to record and present their achievements and personal progress in a digital format. In a broader sense, it could also support activities such as reflection, planning, sharing, and collaboration. Capturing this information and enabling these activities could take place within a webspace, blog, or in a more structured, template-based system".

As most of the delegates are from other institutions, i.e. not Leeds Uni, rather than set up a lot of temporary user names for our local installation of Elgg I have set up an Elgg Space called Elgg SandBox to run the hands-on part of the workshop. This also has the advantage of being the current version of Elgg rather than the 0.6 version we are currently using at Leeds. Sadly it does not have the e-portfolio presentation plugin installed that Brighton University commissioned but this is one of the things I will be covering in my initial presentation. The workshop will start with about a 15 - 20 minute demonstration within elgg.leeds but I will be teleporting to elgg.org to show the switching between blog and forum views and to eduspace.net to show the presentation tool. Then the delegates will work through a number of exercises in the Elgg Space I have set up using a worksheet. They will also be going to a workshop to see (possibly try) a commercial structured e-portfolio system called Pebblepad. One of the objectives is to compare the pros and cons and issues involved in using dedicated structured (institutionally constrained?) e-portfolio systems and more student/learner-centred/controlled blogging/social networking alternatives.

If any Elgg users here would like to register themselves with Elgg SandBox just to have a look around or even join in, please feel free. You will be more than welcome and, if any discussion develops there, please make any contribution you wish.

The JISC e-portfolio event I attended earlier this week and ran an Elgg workshop helped clarify for me a number of issues about e-portfolios, particularly what they are (process and/or product), what they are for (several options here) and how we could implement them for our staff and students. A useful JISC publication on this is the briefing paper e-Portfolios: What institutions really need to know March 2006. The paper foresees:

" ...an important shift in the ownership of e-portfolios from individual institutions to the learners themselves. It anticipates a new generation of technology where an e-portfolio for lifelong learning will no longer be an institution-provided package or system. It will be a learner owned application, independent of any individual institution, interacting with services accessed over the web".

The paper also distinguishes process from product.

The distinction between e-portfolios as a learning development tool and as a presentation tool came through pretty clearly in the discussions at the event. Less apparent was the notion that an e-portfolio could be a set of interacting web services, or perhaps partly an aggregator of such services, or the wider range of possible 'audiences' for different compiled presentations. There was general recognition that whatever an e-portfolio is ideally it should be adaptable to transitions in career and personal development and should be transportable. This could mean the ability to export and import to other systems (or instances of the same system) or it being located outside any particular insitutional setting.

The latest version of Elgg with its enhanced social networking and personalisation capabilities and the Presentations tool would seem to make it an ideal platform for exploring the potential of e-portfolios as defined above. It adds the social networking/community elements that are missing from the dedicated e-portfolio products I have seen so far. It would be interesting to set up a project with staff and students from a variety of different subject areas in the my University (perhaps across a number of institutions) using the latest Elgg to develop this approach to e-portfolios and explore its reception by staff and students and various possible 'target audiences'. I'm sure there is tremendous potential.

It emerged at the event that none of the participants had e-portfolios themselves! It will be hard to convince colleagues and students that this is a good idea if we don't feel that it is useful for us too. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I potentially have an e-portfolio of sorts if I exploit my blog here with the new presentation tool. I would have to be much more disciplined in how I used it though.