I just had a great phone call yesterday with Chip from Serensoft about some posts I had made about accreditation portfolios. I had never met Chip before.

A common feature in many portfolio software packages includes the ability to publish a piece of work for a select group. At the School of Education at Syracuse University we have run a pilot for a few years where students have created portfolios at the end of each semester. Throughout this pilot, the portfolio authoring and review process is compressed into a short time frame at the end of the semester. My observation is that the students view the portfolio as just one more "to do" that needs to be checked off before they can pass their class.

Few students create term papers for fun. There is no motivation to do so. However, some constructivist teachers see the opportunity for students to publish their ideas and receive feedback from their peers and experts in the field. They can imagine their students generating new knowledge from the feedback they receive and discussing what they learned in the classroom. At the same time, they probably worry that their students will make them look bad, that they will say inappropriate things and that they will come under fire as a result.

While the restriction of the audience may be an important for some portfolio authors (particularly when discussing sensitive subjects, like elementary school students), I think that it may be too tempting to guide students to be too restrictive about their audience when publishing. When the emphasis of a school's portfolio implementation is to support portfolios for internal assessment events, it is probably too easy for schools to drop the ball on encouraging and motivating students to publish for outside audiences.

When I wrote for the LSB web site, I was writing for the general Sakai and OSP communities and had one of my rss feeds aggregated on Planet Sakai. When I started, it was a bit of a grind. I was new to it, wasn't sure anyone was reading it and sort of felt like a tree falling in the forest. I wondered if was worth the time it took to write it. Two years and a few months later, when I go to conferences I see that a few people have read my blog. Once in a blue moon I get a phone call or an email from someone (like Chip) who read something I wrote and who asks me a question about it. If I had restricted my writing to a smaller audience, I’m not sure that I would get that sort of feedback. Jakob Nielson and others tells us we’ll never hear from most of the people that see our blogs. That’s too bad, because that criticism/feedback is a big motivator for me to write more. When I write more, I do more research and I learn more.

However, students are not yet motivated and faculty find that getting a self sustaining discussion rolling to be time consuming. The culture of the classroom is one of planned units, curriculum to cover and deadlines. Reading student blogs is obviously new work that competes with whatever they do now and flies in the face of the current culture of the classroom. Building a self sustaining community of portfolio authors and peer reviewers in the classroom often feels contrived and artificial - because it is. See the Jakob Nielson article.

If an existing classroom culture did not exist, I might make the following suggestions to teachers and programs that want to begin using portfolios:

Open it up

Encourage students to publish emerging ideas for a broad audience and use that as fodder to generate classroom discussion.

Make it ongoing

If you have assessment event for which you require students to publish to a narrow audience, also encourage an ongoing, formative blog or journal component to the portfolio that is NOT tied to grades.

Read your student's blogs/portfolios

Make it part of your routine. Give them formative feedback regularly to encourage them to keep developing it.

Point others to your student’s work

I believe that getting feedback from outside the classroom will get student's blood flowing. It will be easier for you down the road to get them to participate in global discussions.