George Roberts
Oxford Brookes University, UK
MyWorld: a decentralising e-portfolio system
This paper problematises e-portfolio projects and introduces MyWorld (Wider Opportunities for Reflective Learning and Development): a decentralising e-portfolio system, which asserts that each person is the dominant node of their personal learning network. The more usual model has people linked into networks through institutions. MyWorld is learner centred.
Why are portfolios significant? Portfolios are collections of realia assembled by a person and curated by them. Portfolios make explicit and facilitate the representation of identity with reference to multiple ontologies at sites of engagement. As Guarino and Welty (2000) assert, "Identity is one of the most fundamental notions in ontology, yet the related issues are very subtle, and isolating the most relevant ones is not an easy task." Identity is dynamic and complex. It emerges from, "...multi-loop non-linear feedback systems." (Forrester, 1995) An ontology is an ordered classification of knowledge that assigns meaning (semantics) to instances and classes of items according to a structure or schema. For example the Joint Academic Coding System is an ontology. NVQ competency frameworks are ontologies. Sites of engagement are occasions at which a rhetorical display of evidence about a person might be deployed, such as job applications or assessment events. With the advent of the Lifelong Learning Record and related practices in the UK, e-portfolios are growing in importance and are part of the national identity card strategy. e-Portfolio systems are an overtly politicised issue.
The compilation of a portfolio is essentially dialogic (see, e.g. MacDonald, 2002): contexts evolve. Contexts are interpreted, signifying, meaningful systems through which discourse is carried (Scollon, 1998, 2001). All contexts are the product of previous contexts and contain within them echoes, traces and memories of earlier contexts. Contexts are "interactionally constituted environments" that are in continuous flux (Erickson and Schultz, 1997, 22). Portfolios instantiate these memories of former contexts.
Abstractions have equal weight in discourse as concrete things (Holquist, 1997). More importantly, abstractions are artifacts of technology. The technology for handling symbolic systems is as important as that for handling concrete artifacts. With the development of narrative technique and the aides memoires of oral poetics language became technologised. Discourse technologies (Fairclough, 2001) are among the principal means by which we reproduce the artifacts of our culture. Culture is built of contexts (Frake, 1997, p. 44) and, in turn, that culture provides the "scripts" by which contexts are generated. Lang (1997, p. 188) shows that "... persons, groups and cultures constitute each other". Pea (1993) and others (cf Salomon, 1993, passim) show "Parts of the whole component process may be distributed as social constructions or as a result of human-tool symbiosis" (Pea, 1993, 67). That is, the shape of the artifact is in a large part determined by the affordances of the tool. If the identity of the portfolio maker at a site of engagement is the artifact of the e-portfolio tool, the making of that tool is significant to our culture.
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