4.2. Effects on the handling of online information
It is only a matter of time that the possibility to set guarantees of existence will affect the learning in an online environment in more than one way. A major impact is, without any doubt, the necessity to develop a long term content strategy at the very beginning of an e-portfolio project. This is due to the fact that reliable availability of information goes hand in hand with considerable costs.
This reflection process is also triggered in the owners of the e-portfolios. Learners have to think about how they want to handle information created by themselves. At present, these questions are usually not discussed until its nearly too late. However, the possibility to determine guarantees of existence ensures that an agreement on how stored information should be handled has to be reached at the beginning of the usage of e-portfolios.
The learners, on the other side, need to decide whether their content should be deletable at all times or should be available for a certain period of time. This way, an author conveys how much he/she values online published information. He/she either states that he/she intends to handle information freely or that he/she gives a guarantee for its availabilty. What needs to be taken into consideration is whether it is an advantage to express the value of information via a guarantee of existence and whether the authority over information can or should be passed on to others. If an author allows others to extend the guarantee of existence for instance, he/she may give up on his/her authority over the information but, at the same time, clearly demonstrates his/her commitment to created content.
Owners of e-portfolios can certainly decline the option of the guarantee of existence. However, we reckon that information without guarantee of existence is more likely to be disregarded than information with guarantee of existence.
We concede that it is not possible to provide each piece of information with a guarantee of existence. This is due to the fact that owners of e-portfolios have to be provided with limited ressources by the decision-makers.
Readers greatly benefit from information with guarantee of existence. If a certain piece of information is reliably available until a certain point of time, there is no need to store the information anywhere else. At present, the only possibility - and thus common practice - is to store important, online information on parallel media such as hard drives or webservers or even print it out. This is the only possibility to guarantee reliable availability and reliable reference of content, which should be included in the personal learning environment. Subsequently, information is stored several times together with all problems regarding disk space, security, copyright etc.
