A colleague and I will be doing short presentation on e-portfolios next month at a College retreat for IR and faculty. The retreat is an opportunity for faculty and staff to get together and share concerns, so that’s a good idea, especially if something comes of it.

With e-portfolios there are the usual things to talk about: different potential users (students, faculty, administrators) and different users (reflection, evaluation, program assessment, job searching). While fairly basic, our audience has probably not given much thought to the subject, so it could be of use to them.

Then there are the pedagogical, training/technical support, and implementation challenges of portfolios:

• How will individual faculty and departments integrate them into courses and programs?
• Who will train faculty? Who will teach the students? Who will support the students as they build their portfolios over their college careers?
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• How will portfolios integrate information from a range of databases (verified transcripts and recommendation letters, vetted course assignments, and material uploaded by students in a range of media)?

These questions are relevant to everyone in the audience present and point specifically to their particular areas. So I think they might be useful in establishing some groundwork for determing our needs as an institution.

However, I am more interested in two broader issues that bring us into this quagmire, where each issue or challenge seems to lead to another. The first issue recognizes that e-portfolios are only one element in an emerging transformation of higher education. In part, this is evident in the portfolio’s connection with multiple databases. Right now, for us that means integrating our Banner system, with its information about student grades, registration, advisement, etc, with our CMS (currently WebCT) and the students’ personal webspace.  However, there’s more to come. There’s the possibility of a university portal system, which could draw an a number of RSS feeds, and an individual blog. It may not be long before we need to make streaming video a part of our students’ portfolios (e.g. video of student teaching at our teacher-education-centric college). Then there’s the SUNY Learning Network, which uses a different CMS from WebCT. Our students take courses there and may increasingly do so.

The second issue is the ongoing debate between proprietary and open source models of software development. I suppose I am partly swayed by the notion that open source is more democratic, perhaps more ethical in terms of "information wants to be free" and so on. It seems that many arguments about how this will turn out ultimately fall upon economic, market-driven outcomes. That is, will open source applications out perform proprietary ones in the marketplace?

That seems all wonderfully Darwinian, and yet we know that the best software is not always the one that dominates the market (yes, Windows users, that means you!). Microsoft has been heavily advertising its SharePoint software lately. That will be major competition for open source like OSPI or Sakai or uPortal, as are WebCt and Blackboard. However, though I am swayed ideologically toward some of the language associated with open source, I am also skeptical. In the end, open source is no less capitalistic than proprietary models. The issue of copyright still remains open. We will have to see if these institutions can continue to work together, especially as hundreds more join them (which will be necessary if they are to become successful).

Ultimately my interest in the open source model is more intellectual/scholarly. I don’t know if its more productive or profitable or results in a better application. I do know that the distributed process of composition is very interesting to me. As others have noted, it’s not the same as the Linux or Apache models, which rely largely upon individual volunteer efforts. Here we are talking about open collaboration between existing, hierarchical institutions and individuals within those institutions.

It will be interesting to see where we go, but as I continue to study the issue, it strikes me the answer nees to be. or perhaps at least should be, SUNY-wide rather than individual college or university. After all, if we can make the model work within SUNY, what chance has it in a more diffuse context.

Rhetorically speaking, I think it’s clear that one of the major challenges will be helping people learn to communicate and collaborate in a new environment.

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