Finally, the global issue. ePortfolios are a global issue. In the last year there have been conferences. There’s one in Denmark I think in June, there’s one in London in June, there was one in Australia in December, there was one in France in the Fall, and I turned down a trip to Hong Kong in May to talk about that amongst some other things. There’s enormous interest. But the difference in how electronic portfolios are used is very interesting. AHE co-hosted a meeting with another group out of the UK in the Fall, and there were a number of presenters from the UK, and they use portfolios really somewhat differently than we do, and there are some folks over there that are very serious about lifelong learning with portfolios. Again it’s this impulse to collect – as I said in the CCC's article, the impulse of assessment is to collect, the impulse of technology is to collect, and lifelong is a collection. But honestly, less can be more. We are sitting in California where there was a governor Brown at one time who wanted to argue that small was beautiful. Less is more sometimes. And again, it’s all rhetorical. It’s rhetorical and it’s compositional. And that’s our area of expertise, and that’s what we need to return to in my view.
Do you have any final thoughts on digital portfolios or the possibility of widespread use?
I think there’s no question but that digital portfolios or online assessment systems, they’re not the same thing, but something like that, is increasingly in everyone’s future. I don’t think there’s any question about that. I hope that those of us who are committed to the teaching and learning of students – and I think frankly, who are open to change ourselves because I think it calls for that; actually, I don’t think you can have one without the other – that we’ll begin to develop a critical mass around this issue. I hope that people like Michael Day and the folks at Northern Illinois will share with us their experience, and I know they will. Michael gave a talk on this at Computers and Writing last year. So I’m confident we will hear more from them. I hope that as other people begin to take this up that we hear more from them. I’m going to write a book on this that I hope will go to NCTE; in fact, I have a sabbatical project, and that’s a big part of the sabbatical project.
I don’t think we’re quite at the fork in the road, but I think that it’s possible that we will be there very quickly. And I think it is important that we take the right path.
References
Gresham, Morgan and Kathleen Blake Yancey. (2004) "New Studio Composition: New Sites for Writing, New Forms of Composition, New Cultures of Learning" WPA: Writing Program Administration 28.1/2 (Fall): 9-28.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2004) "Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work." CCC 55.4 (June): 738-761.