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The focus on the technical elements of learning platforms may be eclipsing the transformational nature of e-portfolios, the heart of the learners’ experiences, writes Merlin John.

It’s laid down as a ‘milestone’ in the UK government’s e-Strategy and has been interpreted as a key motor in the drive to get schools using learning platforms – “a personalised learning space, with the potential to support e-portfolios available to every school by 2007-08”.

It’s one thing to issue a national edict – ‘Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services’ - but quite another to see it implemented in a meaningful way. And the government’s lead agency on the e-Strategy, Becta, is not expected to issue guidance on e-portolios until next year, 2008. When there is no national blueprint for an e-portfolio a number of questions come to mind, like:

• Will the e-portfolio be ‘owned’ by the learning institution or the learner?
• What information should stay with the institution and what should go with the learner when he or she leaves?
• Should e-portfolios conform to national specifications and, if so, how can these be developed?
• Should e-portfolios be administered by the institution, or by learners with support from the institution, or by an independent, third-party organisation?
• What rights should parents have for their children's e-portfolios?

Many schools are not very far advanced in their thinking on e-portfolios unless they have run their own pilot or have been involved with an initiative set up by their local authority. Hannah Jones, of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), thinks that LAs should be schools’ first port of call. After all, e-portfolios will have to move between schools as students progress or change address so a wider view is needed.

Jones, who is NCSL’s Special Projects Director, in charge of its Strategic Leadership of Schools (SLICT), Building Schools for the Future and School Pathfinders leadership projects, advises school leaders to ensure that that their schools’ plans for e-portfolios are in line with those of neighbouring schools, which generally means working with the LA.

“If students in 14-19 education are in a couple of schools or places of work then they need to be able to access information and upload their own,” she says. “The way Building Schools for the Future is going it needs to be local authority-led so that students’ information can be passed on to follow them through. If you have a child moving from one school to another, should that child lose work, or the information have to be reloaded? It could become an administrative nightmare.”

Jones feels that the material in the e-portfolios should go through some self-, peer- and teacher-assessment. She points to the work of Shireland Language College and Djanogly City Academy as worth investigating.

Perhaps the clearest strategic view comes from one of the UK pioneers in e-portfolios, the University of Wolverhampton, which has worked closely with an associated third-party company, Pebble Learning, since 2004 to develop its own service for its students, the popular PebblePad. A response to the government’s desire to see students adopt personal development plans, it was the university’s attempt to develop reflective learners – and it has worked.

Professor Alison Halstead, Dean of Learning and Teaching at the university, says the key to e-portfolios is “who sees what” and one of the key determinants is assessments. This is normally in the public domain. Wolverhampton students ‘own’ their e-portfolios which are administered by Pebble Learning rather than the university. They decide what information goes into their e-portfolios, what they share with peers, and what they share with lecturers and anyone else.

Personalised learning really is personal, which implies an element of privacy. “The best way of thinking about an e-portfolio is to think of a diary - it’s private,” says Professor Halstead. “Just because it’s electronic and it’s not on paper any more we all think we own it, but if it was a paper-based diary it would be private. However, people can share whatever they want, and they can give permission for sharing. It’s the same with an e-portfolio.

“Because it’s ‘e’, people don’t think as clearly about it. They get confused and think, ‘Well, we own it and I want to look’. Why? How preposterous. If people have personal diaries they are personal. Imagine that you’ve had a bad day and there’s this awful teacher, and you’ve got it off your chest into the system and shared it with six friends – well that’s private.

“What students love about it is the dialogue and the ownership. We have used it for discussion and collaboration. One group used it where it was initially tutor-led discussion, and now they have taken over the ownership of sharing their thoughts with each other, and it has developed their confidence. You get confidence from knowing you are not alone.”

Of course students in higher education are more mature learners than those in school, so the degree to which information is shared may differ, but privacy is still important if students are to feel that their e-portfolio really is their own, and they are to feel confident about themselves and their places of learning.

Pilar Cloud is Managing Director of TAG Learning, which has been developing MAPS (Managed Assessment Portfolio System) over five years, notably with its award-winning partnership with Worcestershire LA but also with 142 others and involving more than 110,000 pupils.

Her experience with schools gives her the confidence to claim, “You can say that an e-portfolio actually allows schools to deliver all of the current requirements of the personalised learning agenda.

“What should e-portfolios be? Who should own an e-portfolio? In theory the individual, and it should be transportable between institutions and beyond them. That’s the ideal. In reality there are no standards of interoperability and the institutions own them because they are the ones paying for them.”

While it’s important to theorise about what e-portfolios can be, Cloud says that the most important thing is to work with schools on their own learning journey. The reality is that the schools decide who sees what information, and the model is based on current practice. This is just the beginning.

For her the issue has been clouded by the government’s framework for learning platforms, with its priority being technical standards and purchasing issues rather than learners and personalisation, which would take the debate – about learning - to e-portfolios. The e-portfolio remains a challenge: “For it to be successful a child should be able to say ‘This is what I want to share with my teacher, this is what I want to show my parents, and this is what I want to share with my classmates’ - at least three different views of their portfolio. We are heading in that direction as we think about how do we take this beyond school.”

Former head teacher David Whyley, who now supports schools in Wolverhampton to develop their ICT, has been involved in developing e-portfolios in his local schools for a number of years. His pioneering work in using handheld computers for learning in the Learn2go project has given him added insights.

The idea of just scanning pupils’ work into online filing cabinets is something that worries him. He envisages e-portfolios beginning with parental support in nurseries, with simple things like parents taking digital images of their children’s first achievements. As the child moves further up the school he or she gradually builds more confidence and autonomy on recording the learning journey, with increased use of digital devices, so that ‘ownership’ is established along the way.

Whyley accepts the need for privacy and says it comes with progression. “Right now our teachers can look into children’s work areas but they don’t intervene,” he says. The most important thing, he says, is to have a vision of e-portfolios that takes a learner from childhood through to lifelong learner. And it means having a concept of archiving, of securely editing out materials as they become less relevant to current needs.

At Birmingham’s King Edward VI Camp Hill Boys’ School, ICT coordinator George Rouse has been working with e-portfolios, including MAPS, for a number of years. First they used it for ICT but from September it will be for all subjects. The purpose is to help students get ‘in control’.

“They love to submit work this way,” he says. While his school may be more advanced than others it is still at the beginning, and his advice to other teachers for supporting this kind of work is: “Don’t be phased by the size of the project – 90% of what you put on you have already done, and it just needs re-organising.”

The issue of privacy has not emerged: “I don’t think the students think it should be private – it’s school work, like an exercise book.”

Culture change is important, he says. “I think a lot of teachers see themselves as teachers and not as learning facilitators, although I hate these terms. We do the teaching and they do a lot of learning and we concentrate on teaching every second. We shouldn’t be doing that. We should be allowing them to learn, but teachers feel that they have to control every step of the process.

“I think a lot of the time children are being held back by teachers from the things that interest them. And they’ve got skills and abilities that we are not looking at, that we are not interested in. This gives them the opportunity to tell us about it. They don’t have to catch you in class or chase you down the corridor. It comes up on screen and you think ‘That’s really good’.”

What is the biggest challenge to e-portfolios? Halstead is certain: “People trying to control it, and not appreciating that it’s personal. Is this different from the virtual learning environment which the institution controls? Yes, it is. That’s where we put ‘our’ stuff. The e-portfolio is theirs, to enhance and develop their learning with which we are invited to engage and share. It’s only on their invite.”

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Merlin John is an editor who created and ran The TES’ Online magazine. He is now freelance and works for publications including The Guardian, and runs his own web service at www.merlinjohnonline.net .

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