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The point is that people will be using ePortfolios for their own purposes. It’s not just something that they’ll be told to use in a formal educational setting.

So, young people will choose to use ePortfolios in their leisure time; to use them for fun. Which you would almost never do with a CMS—I suspect almost no one chooses to use a course management system on their own time for fun.

The more engaged, the more time on task, the more that a person puts into something, the more they learn—this g'es along with all the data I’ve seen over the years.

There are times when something comes along that everyone talks about, something that really changes things. ePortfolios, of course, is one of those things, but it’s different in its very nature.

What’s happening with universities in this knowledge age is that the boundaries between the university and the rest of the world have pretty much dissolved. We are now a learning culture, or a knowledge culture.

ePortfolios are not a higher education application. It’s not a K-12 application. It’s a cultural application.

Trent Batson

And what we're trying to do here at WSU is bring outside employers into the process. Then we can have those employers validate that what we're doing aligns with what they find to be valuable. At the same time, we have the opportunity to demonstrate to employers who work with us the complexity of the work we do.

A real student-centered model would put the authority, or ownership, of that ePortfolio in the hands of the students: They could share evidence of their learning for review with peers, and offer that evidence to instructors for grading and credentialing.

An issue will be finding faculty with the imagination to integrate these options into their teaching and learning, and an even more difficult issue will be credentialing that kind of work.

Right now, we've only swapped the little red schoolhouses for the little online boxes we call course management systems. Students enroll, read posted information, and maybe listen to podcasts. A few of the more sophisticated students have some kind of electronic discussion with other students in the class, but the instructor is still at the center of the classroom. That model, pedagogically as well as for all kinds of practical purposes, is starting to lose its effectiveness.

Higher ed professionals are beginning to recognize that ePortfolios may be more effective than standardized tests when it comes to documenting student learning.

"We don't care about test scores. What we want is evidence that students have been involved in internships and service learning programs, and that they've done project work and have developed team, collaboration, communication, and leadership skills."

In a recent conversation with the lead developer of Desire2Learn's new ePortfolio system (www.desire2learn.com), I was pleased to hear that the system, which offers infinite management combinations for content and permissions, can also present the user (student or faculty member) with ratcheted-down options and therefore a simpler interface. A user can be set up to use just a minimal essential set of options.

Users still may not use Desire2Learn's ePortfolio system while they sit on a deck overlooking the water, but they at least have the option of a lower threshold for using it for their academic work.