Who are electronic portfolios for? I was thinking through the e-portfolio I’ve designed for the Education department and thiniking about how I could improve it. Now a student is required to go through and change information on each page (about 30 of them) to personalize the e-portfolio. If they need to change the navigation bar they need to edit all the pages. basically anything other than adding content to a page requires major work. There are ways to fix this by using php includes or SSI, but then the students lose the ability to burn their site to a disk and browse it from a computer as if it were on a web server.

It is the last which prompted the question. If the e-portfolios are for the students so that they can take them to a job interview or to plop on a different web server then the current design is best. If the portfolios are for the department then one of the other options would make more sense because it makes it much easier for the student. What seems to be the view of all of the efforts to create e-portfolio systems is that the portfolio is for the school and not the student, so portability is not a priority. Once the student graduates what happens to their e-portfolio? Are there e-portfolio innitiatives that make portability a priority and think of the e-portfolio more like an artist’s portfolio. For an artist the portfolio represents the best of their work and is what they take to give clients and potential employers a sense of who they are as an artist. Where is the e-portfolio innitiative that thinks in this way?