Collaborative Opportunities for ePortfolios

Abstract

ePortfolios are being used to demonstrate competence and illustrate good practices. Incorporating collaboration into ePortfolio systems can support these goals by helping a distributed learning community ground their discussions in rich exemplars and reach consensus on what constitutes good practice. Our primary focus is on teaching portfolios, that is, portfolios created by teachers to understand their practice. A design space for adding collaborative elements to ePortfolios is presented in terms of authoring, evaluation, publication, and learning community support. Techniques discussed include collaborative authoring, workflows for formal review, and social networks. Finally, the CoFolio (Collaborative ePortfolio) system is presented.