E-Portfolios

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “More and more institutions are encouraging—or even requiring—students to create “electronic portfolios” that highlight their academic work and help them reflect on their campus experiences.” The article goes on to say “This month, Indiana University – Perdue University at Indianapolis and the University of California at Los Angeles formed a consortium to develop e-portfolio software”—at 10,000.00 an institution.

As much as I’ve encouraged, even evangelized, the creation of digital portfolios for graduate students, I think the consortium idea, and the price, is a bit daft. Frankly, I’d use some of the excellent blog tools that are already out there. Although BloggerPro doesn’t seem to have a license option, either Manilla or Moveable Type look possible to me as portfolio creation,management and hosting solutions. A school would create a couple of portfolio templates, make them available, add some custom locally written documentation and tutorials, encourage the interested students and faculty to learn the ten basic tags of HTML, and there you are!