I just finished reading Dr. Helen Barrett and Joanne Carney’s paper of Conflicting Paradigms and Competing Purposes in Electornic Portfolio Development.

It is really a good paper for me because it answered many of my questions.

I have been always wondering why many people gave up updating their electronic portfolios after the class or the program as I saw. Also, when I went to EDIT2000 e-portfolio showcase, I talked to two students and they shew me their artifacts. But one of the students forgot what she did and how to demonstrate the power point slides.

Maybe it was just because she was not familiar with her works. But what is the reason behind these phenomenons? We usually look E-portfolios in Eudcation as :

• an assemssment tool
• a tool to help life-long learning.
• Marketing goal to show the author’s accomplishment to get a job

Barrett’s paper answered my question: There are conflicts when e-portfolio serves both as assessment tools for institutions and story-telling tool to help life long learning. Barrett said, “Portfolios are considered products, and are evaluated summartively to hold teacher candidates accountable for demonstrating particular levels of achievement. Assessment data from portfolios used for this purpose are aggregated to reflect the performance of a particular educational or professional organization. While administrators often implement electronic portfolios for this assessment purpose, students usually view this type of portfolio as something “done to them” rather than something they WANT to maintain as a lifelong learning tool…”

Barret and Wilkerson then put forward a new taxonomy to support institution need for an assessment system and learner needs for a reflective portfolio to support deep learning: