I had the good luck this week to stumble into a very helpful blogswarm. And since it’s best to make use of their expertise while they are still checking back here, let’s cut to the chase.

Here is the new thought, re: eportfolios and other WP projects needing data aggregation.

Append an optional process at the end of WordPress MU setup that pre-populates the category table with canonical terms.

So, for instance, the table could be pre-filled with specific performance indicators appropriate to educational eportfolios, organized around a standardized phrase, such as “Demonstration of Classroom Management Skills (NC 2.1.3)”. You upload the artifact and you or someone bigger than you tags it.

Now here’s the neat part. Since we have faith these terms are the same across MU instances, reports are simply a matter of writing code that cycles through all the MU user tables and finds posts that are tagged with that term. Want a report of all users who have not met requirement NC 2.1.3? Easy.

Caveat: the people here with an intimate knowledge NCATE are still drawing up what the reporting requirements will look like. But then, there’s very little one can’t do with tagging and SQL. So I’m not worried yet.

So question…. does this make sense? Is anyone else using WP tagging in this way? Does anyone have NCATE reporting experience, and what can you tell me?

(Bill, I will eventually look into your neat hack in Drupal as well…]

Not a new thought, but one I’m newly fired up about after talking to Jon Udell last night.

We don’t make enterprise purchases for students when it comes to spiral bound notebooks, pencils, or binders.  So why do we move so quickly to consider e-learning questions “enterprise” questions? When looking at e-portfolio possibilities, why wouldn’t we just direct the students to sign on to a blog provider, perhaps even an ISP of their choice?

Students buy their own laptops and their own software for classes, they purchase required books and materials. There’s absolutely no reason from a student perspective that you couldn’t tell a student, here — go set up an account on Blogger and make yourself an eportfolio.

But there’s the rub. Enterprise e-learning is about classroom management and enterprise reporting. It is about the so-called measurement of learning. We force students to use enterprise systems, because like the email system we “give” them, it makes our lives easier and accomplishes goals that have nothing to do with the student.

What would e-learning look like if we started from the needs of the student, instead of the institution? What would it look like if the overriding question was “How can we use technology in a way that benefits the student?”

My guess is it’d look a lot like life. It would be a wonderful mess of different students and professors choosing different tools on an ad hoc basis. Their choices would evolve over time. And because the students worked with real tools (and possibly even on real problems) they’d graduate with bankable skills rather than detailed knowledge of how to use an LMS that has no analogue in the outside world.

I’m not saying it would be easy: it’s a hard sell to faculty, and there are certainly some institutional goals that such a bricolage would not meet.

But, if we started with the student, there would be no e-learning “system” in the sense of a single integrated application provided by a vendor. Instead of focussing on buying e-learning systems, we’d focus on building an e-learning culture.

If we started with the student.

The Sphere is abuzz with discussion of Michael Gorman’s rambling monologues about Web 2.0.

They are two profoundly confused pieces.

While Gorman’s posts will win no prizes for coherence of thought or depth of knowledge, they might just win a Gold Medal for Irony.

Why? Because in an article bemoaning the death of respect for subject-area authorities and scholarship, Gorman fails to reference a single thought leader in the field of social technology, choosing instead to fuel his B-grade Andy Rooney rant with cites from Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, a book which actual social media authority Robert Scoble has called “a marketing strategy wrapped in the clothing of a book”. A book apparently so riddled with factual inaccuracies that Larry Lessig has suggested that it can only be read as a self-parody.

What a weird world of “authority” Gorman must inhabit. He could have read Jon Udell, Doc Searls, Ross Mayfield, Dave Winer — all of whom have years of experience and a wealth of expertise in discussing the promises and problems of social media.

Instead he chose to crib the work of Andrew Keen, a move similar to turning to Susan Powter for an enlightened critique of dietetics.

If the loss of such a world of “research” is what Gorman is pining over, well, good riddance.

My wife has an interview tomorrow for a position at the public high school. Tonight, she is preparing by flipping through giant black binder.

What’s in the binder? A lot of stuff. Lesson plans from her student teaching days. Photographs from an inner city school activity she helped direct. The curriculum she developed for her curriculum class, with teacher’s notes. Peer reviews. Evaluations of clinical experience. Projects from most all of her upper level classes. Work from students she’d taught. Certificates of accomplishment. And tying it all together, explanatory text describing the significance of these artifacts.

She put this together as part of a required senior “capstone” portfolio project in Spring of 1997. I remember her assembling it, printing sheet after sheet off of floppy disks from her different coursework, flipping through dog-eared folders of past classes to find her most representative work, tracking down reviews and evaluations and lost projects, and smoothing over the rough edges and lacunae by writing up explanatory notes.

That was ten years ago. Today, she is returning to the black binder for a variety of reasons. After college, she didn’t go into public school teaching. Instead, she has made a living as a practicing artist, art blogger, and teacher of adult classes.

So tonight, she needs to refresh her memory on the difficulties of designing a public school curriculum. She’d like a couple examples of her student work to show. She’s been told to bring lesson plans, and so she wants to raid her old student teaching ones for ideas. She’s got a recommendation from the teacher who she assisted with the inner city school project: a couple pictures from that might make what they did there clearer to the interviewers. And perhaps most importantly, she wants to show how her current work relates very directly to what she learned student teaching.

As she flips from page to page that story becomes clearer.

So here is the great testament to the power of portfolios. It’s been ten years since she put this black binder together. And yet, this week, that binder might make the difference between her being the newest hire and her being an also-ran. And whether she gets the job or not, the activity of flipping through this binder ten years later has reintegrated her college experience into the narrative of her professional life. That’s powerful, powerful stuff.

And, here, I’m afraid, is the great disaster of ePortfolios.

Because do we really believe that in 10 years time any student we set up will be able to access any of their work? Will students really be able to log into Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, or Elgg and retrieve artifacts in the year 2017?

We all know the answer to that. It’s not pretty.

So it’s worth asking this question: How can we make our ePortfolio implementations pass the Black Binder Test of Durability?

[on a related note, check out Jon Udell’s larger piece on the need for durable, centralized digital assets.]

We need to stop asking how we can communicate with our college students in their idiom, which is a valid question, but ultimately a marketing and customer service issue.

We need to start asking the real question, which is how do we teach our students to collaborate and communicate in ways fit for the agile projects the future requires.

It’s the difference, in my mind, between marketing and mission.