E-portfolios

Compiling a digital portfolio is a strong contribution to a student’s learning path as well as providing a business professional with a means of collecting and preserving valuable projects. Continual reflection upon their work arms students and business people alike with more confidence in their own competence and worth as they embark on their professional careers or justify their desires for advancement. This chapter will confine itself to the types of portfolios most frequently used in the business world or in preparation for entering a career, showing that content in each can be cumulative or separate. It will describe ideas for the types of artifacts to compile along with how to format them effectively and digitize them creatively.

Electronic Portfolios for Career Exploration

For more than 50 years, an all-girls Catholic school located in Guatemala City, Guatemala has aimed to shape the intelligence and the heart of every girl so that they will fulfill their vocation and become strong, resilient women. In accordance with the school’s mission, in 2005 the forward-looking school counselors wanted to increase the students’ awareness of the importance of exploring and planning their professional careers, as it was recognized by many national and international organizations that women who received a formal education could have a greater impact on the economic, political, and social life of their communities. By starting to use electronic portfolios at an earlier age, students are better equipped to make more informed choices in terms of the direction they would like to take their careers.

Implementing ePortfolios

The E-learning Strategy of the University of Zagreb was adopted in 2007 and covers the period 2007-2010. According to the report of the Centre for E-Learning at the University of Zagreb, 11 of its faculties have announced a plan for conducting other activities defined by the E-learning strategy, among which is ePortfolio. To date, several researches within the Centre for E-Learning have dealt with certain professional aspects of ePortfolio; however, comprehensive research has neither been conducted by the Centre nor any university in Croatia. This chapter presents the most important steps in the process of ePortfolio implementation at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics (FOI).

EPortfolio Use in Africa

Electronic portfolios have become more popular in the wider community as learning tools, knowledge retention mechanisms, and forms of assessment (Lougheed, 2005). Researchers propose different structures for the ePortfolio. To examine the extent of portfolio use in Africa, the author conducted an experiment using google.com with four results that were less illuminating than originally hoped. Although this kind of experiment is not a rigorous one, it points to the range of significance of portfolios in Africa in relation to other places.

ePorticulture

For centuries, educators have been experimenting with the art and science of promoting, collecting, and assessing student work—just as horticulturalists have explored improvements in the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants. While horticultural practices have evolved into an extremely complex science, so, too, has the use of new tools and technologies to nurture and harvest a wider range of student work. New digital technologies like electronic portfolios have opened the way for profound changes in education. The case can be made that, at the dawn of the 21st century, converging technologies and emerging social trends lay the groundwork for entirely new societal landscapes.

Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Language E-Portfolios

Over the past decade, e-portfolios have been widely used for different purposes in education. However, specific issues, such as whether students will upload and organize their documents in the language e-portfolio without incentives or whether the language e-portfolio will increase students’ cognitive load, remain unaddressed. A range of challenges faces eportfolio use in Taiwanese universities. The definitions, purposes, and advantages of e-portfolios described in this article provide readers with background for the further discussion of challenges in developing online language portfolios.

Mapping UK Eportfolio Developments within a European Context

This chapter outlines the European context of lifelong learning and educational cooperation across member states and the relationship of eportfolios to current development. It focuses specifically on the priority given to portfolio developments in higher education in the UK through reports and policy documents and particularly through the extensive funding distributed via the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education and Further Education Funding Councils (JISC). A model is presented that was developed by analyzing current practice and a matrix for identifying eportfolio developments in relation to purposes and learning processes, useful also for mapping key areas for future work.

Current ePortfolio Practice in Australia

In order to support innovation and productivity to ensure ongoing national economic development and growth, the current policy environment of the Australian Federal Government seeks to enhance the quality of education, encourage widened access to education opportunities, and stimulate integration between vocational education and training and higher education. There is increasing evidence of the multiple avenues of transition within and between vocational education and training and higher education. ePortfolios offer the potential to be a meaningful medium for convergence and integration of education and training.

Ideal Design and Content of Support Systems for Electronic Teaching Portfolios

Today, higher education institutions need to prepare for technology integration into even the most sacred of rituals: promotion and tenure for faculty members. A holistic approach is necessary to extract the practices and dispositions of the faculty and support providers. This chapter aims to define the Electronic Teaching Portfolio and to describe some conditions to satisfy before implementing a support system. Furthermore, the chapter describes the design and content of an ideal support system that is feasible to implement, given that the institution is willing to commit necessary resources.

Faculty Teaching Beliefs, Eportfolios, and Web 2.0 at the Crossroads

The advent of open knowledge and open source and the ubiquity of the phenomenon identified as Web 2.0, as evidenced by the phenomenal growth of Facebook, Google, and hundreds of other open and social Internet applications, have ramifications for education. At the same time, educators have been slow to understand that it is how a technology is implemented, not the technology itself, that most influences learning. This article examines how ePortfolios are being and will be used, depending in large measure on the teaching beliefs that guide their implementation and the quality of learning that follows.