Why should you use an ePortfolio is a great question, and the answer is unique to every individual. EPortfolios can be extremely helpful during certain stages of schooling and career as a place to document and reflect on learning, and to promote oneself. But to maintain one takes a significant amount of time, which not all can devote, especially if they do not see a return on the time investment. Students must first decide what use their ePortfolios provide, then make the decision if it is a worthy time investment.
EPortfolios allow us to capture our learning experience providing a way to reflect on previous learning and make new connections. James Zull explains in his book, The Art of Changing the Brain (Zull, 2002; Barrett, 2018), that reflection is needed to have deep learning take place, and that learning is more meaningful if it engages our emotions.
One way of engaging our emotions when learning is through authentic projects that make us excited to discover ways to solve problems. The times when I have learned the most are when I have had a project-based assignment. Something where I had to figure out what needed to be done and how to accomplish the task. There is always an initial struggle to start; determining a plan and a path to accomplish my goal. But once I have completed the project, I have a profound sense of accomplishment, an emotional response.
We can also engage our emotions and reflect on our learning as we detail what we have learned in a story. Donald Schön (1988) notes that stories are a reflection that can aid in our learning, but we need to record our stories so we can reflect on them again. When I am trying to process an idea, I tend to put concepts in an order that makes sense to me, like a story. If I can make a story out of ideas, the connections then make sense. I do not have to memorize ideas because I have made connections in my brain that follow a plotline for the information. An ePortfolio provides a great way to document stories about authentic projects and provides us a way to reflect on our learning.
Additionally, ePortfolios are a place where you can invest in yourself and where you can make connections with the outside world (Harapnuick and Thibodeaux, 2020). If you promote your ePortfolio and share it with the world you can drive traffic to your site. As I pointed out in my earlier post about ePortfolios (Tompkins, 2020), you can use them to showcase your ideas and share who you are with the world.
The downside of ePortfolios is that they take time. The most common answer to why students with ePortfolios do not maintain their site after graduation is a lack of time (Thibodeaux, Cummings, and Harapnuik, 2017). While ePortfolios are a great way of documenting and reflecting on our learning, they are a major time investment.
In school, time is set aside for maintaining the site because it is expected for school. After graduation, even with the most robust ePortfolios, some students stop using them to their fullest unless they set aside time to blog their ideas and learning each week (or month). Former students will only set aside time to maintain an ePortfolio if they see a return on their time investment. Because of this, ePortfolios must be specific to every individual and must only contain items that the owner feels are necessary to publish to the world.
It is important to note that creating a site to review your own learning does not need to be public-facing. The only reason to have your ePortfolio public-facing is to share it with the world. To devote time to maintaining a public site, students must see the value in continuing to keep their ePortfolio public after maintaining it is no longer required. I believe it is up to the individual and how they want to use their ePortfolio post-graduation to determine if they need to have a public-facing or private site for their reflection.
Ultimately, an ePortfolio is an important part of learning. Looking at this as a teacher with my students in mind, presenting learners with formulas and textbook problems will not get the emotional response or reflection needed for deeper learning. We need to provide learning that triggers an emotional response for our students so the learning is something they can reflect upon and learn from. We can do this by teaching with authentic projects and helping them create their own stories from their learning using an ePortfolio. We can guide them with our own portfolio examples, but how they choose to use it in the future is up to them.
References
Harapnuik, D., & Thibodeaux, T. (Producers). (2020). LMD EP30 ePortfolio Why [Video file]. Retrieved November 24, 2020, from https://youtu.be/hx304CW-gKU
Helen, B. (2018). Why Reflect? - Reflection4Learning. Retrieved November 25, 2020, from https://sites.google.com/site/reflection4learning/why-reflect
Schön, D. (1988) “Coaching Reflective Teaching” in P. Grimmett & G. Erickson (1988). Reflection in Teacher Education (pp. 19-29). New York: Teachers College Press.
Thibodeaux, T., Cummings, C., & Harapnuik, D. (2017). Factors that Contribute to ePortfolio Persistence. International Journal of EPortfolio, 7(1), 1-12.
Zull, J. (2002) The Art of Changing the Brain. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing
Tompkins, R. (2020). My Digital Learning Scrapbook [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://rtompkins7.wixsite.com/eportfolio/post/my-digital-learning-scrapbook
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