If not you're completely exhausted just by reading this far, take heart: this archived seminar is worth it. It is called 'The Power of "E": Using e-Portfolios to Build Online Presentation Skills' and is given by Cara Lane from UWashington in Seattle. It is an excellent overview of some of the benefits of using eportfolios with two groups of students: with junior students to improve their academic writing skills by taking them from the familiar (email and blog writing) to more formal ways to present themselves, and also with professional students to orient them to the presentation skills implicit in their future life.

It's also an excellent example of how a good web seminar can work, I have attended one that wasn't very involving, and I wasn't impressed with the idea then. This one was much better.

There is a seminar series from 5-9 June on eportfolios - details here - but I will be still away that week. There is one on June 6 about eportfolios with a number of speakers (I think it's 9am on June 7 here but don't take my work for that!). I will listen to it when I get back and review it for the team.

It is described here and discussed in slightly more depth here and there are hints at applying it to essay-type work here.

If you think this is worth pursuing I will put these links in the sidebar and do some more research on SOLO and how it has been applied to reflective writing.

They describe portfolios as being one of the following:
Shopping trolley - merely a repository for documents
Toast rack - discrete elements that assess different aspects and each of which is added without intergration (ie kept apart from each other re the separate sections of the rack)
Spinal column - portfolio structured round competencies or outcomes with evidence of achievement slotted in; also has reflective accounts
Cake mix - more integration between the various parts with theory and practice meshed so whole portfolio (the cake) assessed rather than components

Also see this upload for some of my thoughts/questions on the process

And here is another article from 2004 that she wrote with David Gibson about these issues, and (relevant to us) detailed suggestions about how to assess portfolio software.

Here is a graphic which compares assessment management systems with electronic portfolios. This is one of the philosphical problems that Barrett identifies - the need to balance quantitative assessment reporting systems with qualitative experiential measures of learning.

The answer is yes, but it would take me many many hours to recreate it that way. However, if you download the original Word document, which I've uploaded here, you can click on the icon for 'export travelling library' in the Endnote toolbar in Word. (You can see this icon circled in red below.)

This will give you the option to create a new library with the references in the doument in it, and when you open the new library you will find all the references are listed with their weblinks, with the exception of those that were originally downloaded as pdfs. If you want those I have got copies that I downloaded last week.

I'm afraid it isn't possible to upload an endnote database to the blog for sharing. We would need to have endnote installed specially on the server to be able to share it in this way. We'll have to share important articles by listing them in the sidebar.

I have been reading the literature about ePortfolios with the idea of settting up a taxonomy to assess the use of eportfolios that we can trace. I'm putting a list of the articles that I have found useful in the sidebar, under the heading Resources, along with a brief summary of each article - clicking on the link will lead to a copy of the article. If you have any articles you want to add to the list, send me wither a copy of the article or a link to where it can be found and I will add it to the list.