I followed out a link from a post at Kairosnews in search of the latest information about ePortfolios. ePortConsortium.org combines higher education and corporate folks in an attempt to figure out the best way to implement this technology. Now, I think I’ve already made fairly clear on this blog my feelings about the insertion of corporate logic into higher education. However, I also have a penchant for crawling into the belly of the beast and trying to summon the fervored affect of thinking some new innovation is “really, really cool.”

So, as sites like the one above describe, there may be some pedagogical value to the integration of a web portal, student information system (we use Banner at Cortland), a course management system (WebCT for us), and an interoperable ePortfolio system that speaks not only with other campus systems but might translate to other schools the student might attend as a transfer or graduate student. Since we’re gonna go database/XML crazy anyway, I’d throw in a blogging application as well.

The result is a kind of one-stop, one-login process, where the student/faculty/staff member gains access to all the network information s/he requires. E.g. the student logs in and sees all the relevant campus announcements, links to e-mail, WebCT courses, and maybe customized RSS-type feeds, as wells as tools to customize one’s home page/portfolio, including perhaps a blog (I think if one looks at what Typepad allows the neophyte to do to set up a page something to that extent might work).

Now, of course, the real benefits to this kind of system have very little to do with pedagogical applications. First, they allow for the presentation of detailed, certified information about students to be explored. That is, assignments, grades, and comments can be ported directly from a CMS into the portfolio. The student would not be able to edit these, though he/she would be able to select what was displayed in the portfolio. For example, students in secondary education-English need to demonstrate an understanding of multicultural literature. Through the Student Information System, the database can identify the course(s) they have taken that meet that requirement. The database can then link to the CMS and display assignments from those courses. Each student can then select among those assignments the one that best represents his/her work. In this manner the portfolio is created. The result is a portfolio of work that is certified and secure. Otherwise a student might potentially put any material into a portfolio, and in these days of growing academic dishonesty…. well, you get the point. Again, I want to reiterate that I’m not buying into this rhetoric; I’m just taking it for a test drive, seeing what the arguments are.

OK, the second application is the potential for serious data mining and marketing. There may be some question about information kept secure, but anything put into a public web portfolio is fair game. Part of the sell here is that students can keep their portfolios running after they graduate and/or transfer their portfolios to other systems (assuming we can establish interoperability). This is key for fund-raising. As alumni update their sites, it’s easy to track them and target them with any number of marketing offers from group insurance to travel to credit or whatever. Needless to say, any information that is not protected by FERPA can also be sold. Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but I’m guessing that even information that IS protected, if it is made public via the web through this system, can be sold (and it can be easily collected). While I’m trying to evil, as a side note, I wonder if this would work. Sell students a SUNY VISA and arrange discounts at a range of college-age market stores. Then you can merge data on their buying habits with data on their academic performance to create a really powerful profile to sell onto others.

If you’ve ever watched the PBS Frontline special “Merchants of Cool,” you know that marketers will go so far as to interview individual teenagers in their bedrooms and see what stuff they have. It’s like marketing ethnography. An intermediate step is reading blogs. Make blogging accessible for all your students, then you can quickly search the blogs. If you are curious about market penetration of a soon to be released movie, you can search for blogs that mention the title. By searching through the school system you can be sure you are examining you’re target market and correlate your data with other demographic information.

Gee…are we having fun yet? Cuz I know we’re making money. See this is what happens when higher education, capitalism, and new media hang out together.

Is there any way to stop this? Of course, there are a couple strategies. Some of what I’m suggesting here is probably illegal, unless you unwittingly sign away your rights. Colleges could make a legal promise to keep ALL information in their database private, then only that which the student made public would be public. Or perhaps they could make an offer to students: get 20% off tuition. After all, you have a shopper card for your local supermarket, right? What do you think they do with the information they collect on your buying habits? Of course it’s probably harmless… that is, unless you have a card for your local garden shop and innocently buy several hundred pounds of fertilizer. Then I think someone might be knocking on your door. If they aren’t then Homeland Security is inane…oh, yeah, I forgot.

Now what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the pedagogical value of ePortfolios. Well, I’m sure we can come up with something. The chatter is about “reflection.” I hate reflection b/c I suspect that most of it is total BS. I mean, this is a portfolio I’m going to be showing to others–my teachers, potential employers, the world. Do I want to tell them what I think or what I think they want to hear? If my students do the former, then I’ve failed to teach them much about rhetoric and audience, eh? I suppose there is some potential benefit in relation to assessment, which might at some future date end up improving some other student’s educational experience.

But then, I recall a line from Roger Waters’ Radio KAOS, where, in an unexpected moment of optimism, Waters looks upon the Live Aid concert and celebrates the moment in which “we” “wrested technology’s sword from the hands of the warlords” (even fleeting optimism is a singular moment in Waters’ albums). Anyway, my point is that if there is to be a pedagogical application to all this money-making, it’s going to come from some clever technological reversal of all this information. While I believe resistance is worthwhile, even if only as a delaying tactic, what I’m describing is as inevitable as Internet porn. In fact, it is Internet porn. No college co-ed has ever been as totally exposed and penetrated as the data-mined student of ePortfolios will be.

As such, I believe the future must be fictionalized, performative public/mediatized identities (like this one) and encrypted, ethical friendships (after all, what is a better definition of a friend than “someone who will keep your secrets secret”). Hence my interest in the code of friendship, as described in an earlier post.

At the same time, I must admit that the cynical, careerist side of myself is tempted by the prospect of pursuing ePortfolios and the integration (and profiteering) they represent. I have often said, and probably more than once on this blog, that I will not be the “one who cares.” That is, if the students want to screw the university (and themselves) with academic dishonesty, I will not be the one who cares. If the university wants to screw the students by selling their information or gutting their education, I will not be the one who cares. Students get degrees so they can get jobs; universities get cash and information they can sell. I’m just part of the circus act.

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