Meredith Henson is eCDF ePortfolio Project Manager based at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand.
The ePortfolio Project is charged with developing an open source ePortfolio application and to provide implementation strategies for the New Zealand tertiary sector. We are however developing the system with consideration to an international focus and appeal.
This project is a collaborative venture funded by New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission’s e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University (lead provider), Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Victoria University of Wellington.
Central to the project is the belief that technology solutions cannot be developed outside of considerations of pedagogy and policy, which seems a particular weakness of the systems we have surveyed. The ePortfolio system being developed by this project will be cross-disciplinary in its application and flexible enough to be used for different purposes, including:
- peer and instructor feedback on student work;
- providing accessible evidence of students’ progress towards graduate outcomes;
- capturing digital artefacts and student reflection;
- generating multiple presentations by students for various publics (in the form of digital CVs that include actual examples of student work).
The following principles are key to the design of the application.
- Student ownership of ePortfolios.
- The ability to set permissions of access to various nominated groups.
- The ability to add folksonomy to all entries and artefacts.
- An aggregating function that would permit users with various permissions to access only what students permit them to access.
- The flexibility for formal or informal / social and personal or course-related areas.
We believe the ePortfolio application being developed will provide a superior product in terms of functionality as well as sustainability, security, interoperability and stability over existing ePortfolio applications, and will provide the functionality required for ePortfolio system adoption amongst the education sector and beyond. As such our ePortfolio system has been given the name ‘Mahara’ which is Te Reo Māori for ‘thought’ (think, memory, think upon, remember).
Mahara will be made available as an open source application (that is, freely available under a GNU General Public License) and be accompanied with tested guidelines for implementation, case studies of implementation and user documentation.
Our research report on a theoretical and literature-based framework for the development and implementation of an ePortfolio is available for review via our Eduforge project pages.
The project will run for one full year, from July 2006 through the end of June 2007.
If
you have any questions or comments regarding the project, or would like
to join our development efforts, please feel free to contact:
Meredith Henson
ePortfolio Project Manager
+64 027 24 21 000
+64 4 801 5799 ex 6454
m.j.henson@massey.ac.nz
or
Mark Nichols
Strategic E-Learning Facilitator
+64 6 356 9099 xt.8830
+64 0276641184
M.B.Nichols@massey.ac.nz
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