I spent the last 24 hours (subtract sleeping from that) with first watching very impressive Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "unleashing" the facebook OS then aside from my daily business investigating into standards for e-portfolio applications (helpful node Scott Wilson). So what's the connection you might ask. Well while I was browsing the specs from IMS yesterday Zuckerberg's video popped up many times in front of my virtual eye ;-)
So what's at stake in the e-portfolio business? And what's the connection to Facebook?
It's only a few weeks since I deal with e-portfolios. My perspective and interest is derived from my experience with social software and web 2.0 applications and concepts and of course my 10 years of working at a university.
My working definition for e-portfolios goes along those lines published by IMS.
ePortfolios are collections of personal information about a learner that represent accomplishments, goals, experiences, and other personalized records that a learner can present to schools, employers, or other entities. Typical uses of ePortfolios go beyond the traditional concept of a transcript to include applying for jobs, designing personalized learning, and tracking career planning.
and extend a little further: e-portfolios are digital representations of a person and thus need to be an integral part of a person's digital life. Thus e-portfolios need to be either aggregators of data or citizens in bigger digital environments.
Now this somehow contradicts what is happening at universities, school authorities and in the software industry. And please hold on, in a view lines I'll link to the Facebook revelation.
From my point of view 3 main issues are at stake (on different levels of course) in the gradually rising e-portfolio business. This is not a comprehensive list by any means and very unsystematic. Only a blog permits that opportunity ;-).
So, well those three issues are:
- interoperability (portability)
- sales strategies (integration into administration software)
- adoption (is an e-portfolio really going to be a digital representation or just a little more than a storage for official data needed for school and work)
On Adoption: The most important issue is the decisive question: do I have an e-portfolio because I want one or because I need one. Well the latter is very likely. So after that decision the questions stays: can I make it my place or is compliance with institutions the overall guiding principle. If it's going to be my place - and we are far away from that - than it needs to be some sort of personal space with extensions into institutional requirements and not vice versa. Well this approach might be different from an institutional perspective.
On Interoperability: Aside from that portability is a first concern because you might want/need to move from one (e-portfolio) application (=institution) to another. But does that really matter? It does at least as long as an e-portfolio is part of your institutional life. If the institutional compliance is achieved via webservices and mashups that might be different. Than interoperability is about using and displaying data that resides here and there and portability is more a question of moving your digital presence along your idiosyncratic preferences to other applications.
On Sales Strategies: to make this post short. I could imagine that Facebook or any other user-centered application (note: social graph) that is able to offer decent APIs could host those modules/plugins that are needed for institutional e-portfolios. I think it makes particularly sense to develop an e-portfolio at my preferred personal digital presence and mashup data with several institutions where necessary instead of having my real digital presence at - for instance - Facebook and my faked one at my school's application.
And here is the innovation: schools, authorities and software vendors need to conceive of those requirements that are needed and offer either open platform (such that belong to users) that have APIS for that matter or better provide modules for existing platforms. And Facbook's F8 is just a nice example.
