Unleashing the Power of Web 2.0

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Personal Learning Environments

Unleashing the Power of Web 2.0

6/1/2008

By John K. Waters

Kathleen Blake Yancey, Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and director of the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at Florida State University, leads the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research with Barbara and Darren Cambridge. The NCEPR includes over 45 institutional partners from around the world. From Yancey's point of view, Web 2.0 is definitely impacting the ePortfolio, but in bits and pieces. Blogs, for example, are becoming a commonplace component of electronic portfolios, and social networks are appearing and gaining some traction. Yancey also has observed tagging capabilities bundled in some ePortfolio systems, but mashups are barely in evidence, she notes. And that seems curious, for "mashup" emerged early as the buzzword of the Web 2.0 world. (A mashup is a lightweight web app that combines content and services from unrelated, even competing, websites. "You take Google Maps, for example, and combine it with, say, the eBay Real Estate listings or Chicagocrime.org, and you've got something new," explains IT industry analyst Jason Bloomberg.)

But even though mashups have been slow to the ePortfolio gate, Yancey agrees with WSU's Brown that ePortfolios and Web 2.0 technologies in general are intersecting in the most interesting ways. And that's because "Web 2.0 assumes a way of being that is social, that doesn't discriminate between formal and informal learning, and that has the future built into the model," Yancey observes. "Historically, most schools haven't shared these values, at least institutionally, though of course individual faculty and staff have. Some models of ePortfolios seek to expand the typical boundaries of school-- both in time and in spaces of learning-- in ways characteristic of Web 2.0. Interestingly," she adds, "some models were engaged in this expansion before Web 2.0."

Still, the evolution of the ePortfolio in a Web 2.0 world has as much to do with the students as it does with technology. "I see other moves having to do with bringing together what students learn inside and outside of school," Yancey explains, adding that students are "remixing the school ‘given' and the everyday ‘found.' And I see them shifting from consuming information and critiquing it, to also creating it in ways that experts do. We see this on a small scale in undergraduate research initiatives; the multimedia and linking activities characteristic of ePortfolios seem to facilitate this."

The Market: Meeting or Anticipating Demand?

While ePortfolio and PLE users experiment, and visionaries prognosticate, the eLearning product vendors aren't quite sure where Web 2.0 is taking the ePortfolio. No matter: They're forging ahead and adding Web 2.0 capabilities to their offerings, in anticipation of whatever may come next. Here's what they're saying: