Storing Stuff

Not quite sure where I’m going with this one but the issue of storing stuff has cropped up a few times in the last week.

  • Eportfolios – a place to store stuff and make it available to different audiences – yourself, your peers, your teacher, your employer, the world. At work we’re looking at Mahara & Pebblepad
  • Repositories – see my earlier post on Language Box, a place for teachers to store, organise, share  teaching material
  • A course team needing to share material for developing a new module – we’ve been looking at delicious, Google sites & our VLE, Moodle

So lots of people with similar requirements, storing and sharing stuff online…. still no idea where this is going so will need to return to it…

Reader Comments

  1. Concerning e-Portfolios and storage:

    It depends on what you understand an e-Portfolio to be. If you are using an institution-based system you fall into all sorts of problems such as IPR, is the stuff you store legitimately part of your coursework and can you take your account with you when you leave etc. Anyone who has taken the effort to create something worthwhile would want to keep a backup copy anyway.

    As far as my company is concerned, I advise that the e-Portfolio is a transitional tool, to store those artefacts that are (reasonably) currently in use – ie for the current course of study and any other artefacts that might support job-applications, life-story etc.

    However, and this is my ‘big thing’, the only way to make an e-Portfolio truly ‘portable’ and survive ‘multiple transitions’ is for it to be hosted externally. Apart from anything else this means that anything you do choose to store or display on your e-Portfolio is your responsibility and no question of the institution owning the IPR or claiming that it is not part of your coursework.

    Cloud Computing an the other hand allows you to store anything and everything where-ever you like – with little chance of pulling back anything that you later regret or have improved upon. And inevitably people often forget what they have stored and where!

    The bottom line is that I do not see an e-Portfolio as being a pantechnicon of all you posess. A well-organised spare hard-drive seems to be the only logical solution.

  2. Interesting post on this and Language Box Matt.

    Ray’s comment seems to take the angle of considering what the/an e-portfolio is. I would suggest it really depends on what the content is for.

    Personally I’ve recently created a Google Site page that either links to my other content online (blogs, wikis, etc.) or links to new pages where I am authoring content or pulling things together (including a back up of some PDF/doc files I do not have online). This is really just a way of keeping all my stuff together, as I have so many Foxmarks now that it can not really be done just with the browser, rather than what most people would see as a portfolio.

    I recently wrote a brief note on e-portfolios that may be of some interest:

    http://iangardnergb.blogspot.com/2009/03/which-eportfolio-for-me.html

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