In search of an e-portfolio
We’ve been discussing E-Portfolios as part of the E-Learning course, and had a look at several examples of same, and considered the different purposes to which they might be put. Skipping over the interesting and complex issue of “high stakes” uses to which they might be put within education (i.e. for cumulative learning or assessment at some level), I find that, just to look at, many tend to come across a bit dull and CV-ish, like the ones at Elgg.net. Given that e-portfolios are considered to be most useful/successful when the subject has the greatest personal ownership of the portfolio, it’s hard to see how things this dull would inspire.
But, of course isn’t this, www.relocution.com, a kind of e-portfolio? Extremely flexible, portable and free. I’ve got a bit fruity with it, of course, and some bits are still broken, particularly those brought across from earlier experiments in Blogger and previous installations of Wordpress. But mostly it hangs together - it’s useful to me, and broadly reflects what I’ve been up to, at least those bits there seems no harm in making public.
I just really like WordPress. You don’t have to do complicated stuff - I created a test blog at Wordpress.com and it seems pretty good. Picked a theme that supports Widgets, and can have all sorts of drag-and-drop fun moving things around in the side bar. Support for Pages is also good, so all in all it seems that for an organic portfolio, that can grow and evolve with you, Wordpress has much more promise than Elgg.net on the one hand, or Blogger on the other.
If Relocutiont’s to be an eportfolio and curriculum vitae, and some sort of chronicle of how-we-got-here, it’s probably about time I included in it some of those earlier attempts at Personal Web Sites. Much is long gone, scattered across servers, hard disks, CDs and floppies over the years. But thanks to the Internet Archive I have tracked down a couple of things that it’s interesting to see again. It just shows how hard it was to make a personal web page that was genuinely useful or interesting, either to others or to oneself, before Blogging and Web2.0 took off. Most of the graphics have gone, and colours and backgrounds, and comparatively few of the links work, but something survives. “Look on my works ye mighty…!”
- Somewhere in Archive.Org there is a small relic of a web page Steve and I created when we first signed up with Cityscape, circa 1996. It’s rubbish, of course - just because one can make a web page, doesn’t mean you should. But, for better or worse, it was a start.
- www.ulcc.ac.uk/~cziarmd - This is the sort of thing I managed on my ULCC web space, circa 1998. I think this must have been a second incarnation, as my epitaph for Kevin Coomber doesn’t seem to be there. This changed again circa 2000, to something even more basic.
- www.wendy.org.uk/diablo - When ULCC changed the way it ran personal staff web pages, circa 2002, the page got this makeover. All pretty pointless, really, but a few fun bits still hanging around, like the Love And Rockets strip I scanned. And the wedding photos, if you can find them. (You don’t need to go yet to the Archive - the Wendy site is still running at ULCC.)
- Most interesting of all, to me, to find, is L Plus Plus, an online Latin course, complete with interactive Javascript exercises, that was part of my MSc project at Birkbeck. Again, it’s unfortunate that the graphics don’t survive, but it looks like I’ve some good, ready-made material to use as I experiment with WebCT, Moodle, etc.