I like to think of my eportfolio as a digital scrapbook of learning. Not only do you show it to others to display what you are proud of and allow them to learn about you, but you can reminisce on what you’ve learned, and look through it to refresh your learning.
We can use our portfolios to display our learning, much like one would display a family scrapbook of what you did on vacation. When someone asks what you did during the summer, you could say, “I took a trip.” But it would be more meaningful if you said, “I took a trip, and here are the pictures that tell the story of my journey.” An eportfolio is the story of your learning journey.
In his blog, Dwayne Harapnuik (Harapnuik, 2019; Provezis, 2012) shared an example of a student who came to the US for schooling. When he returned to his country and people asked him what he did and what he learned, he was able to show them his eportfolio with examples of his projects and what he learned. This is more meaningful than just telling someone you took a science class and made an A. Saying you made an A does not share what you learned. And ten years from now, looking back at an A will not help you remember what you once learned.
Just like your vacation scrapbook, your eportfolio should profile what is important to you. Since eportfolios are about your educational journey, it should show the learning that is important to you. In education, students are driven by grades. But grades should not be the important part of education. The important part should be the learning.
In his blog post “Who Owns the ePortfolio” Harapnuik (2019) discusses students taking ownership of the learning in their eportfolio to make it meaningful to them. He notes that when students cater the content of their eportfolio to suit the expectations of the professor, the eportfolio is not useful to the student, and the opportunity to learn and make meaningful connections from reviewing their learning is lost.
If your eportfolio only contains work important to your professor then the usefulness of it as a personal learning tool diminishes. If the work is not important to you, once the course work is finished you will never review the material again and you will not share the materials with others to share your learning. We must take ownership of our eportfolios and the learning within them to truly make them a useful tool for us now and in the future.
Reference
Harapnuik, D. (2019). Who Owns the ePortfolio [Web log post]. Retrieved November 19, 2020, from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=6050
Harapnuik, D. (2019). Why Use an ePortfolio [Web log post]. Retrieved November 19, 2020, from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=5979
Provezis, S. (2012). Weaving assessment into the institutional fabric (NILOA Examples of Good Assessment Practice). LaGuardia Community College: Urbana, IL: University of Illinois and Indiana University. Retrieved from http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/documents/LaGuardiaCC.pdf
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