1 Introduction and Objectives
This paper will critically discuss the process towards the recommendation of an institution-wide ePortfolio solution at the University of South Australia. The university has approximately 1000 full‐time equivalent staff in 18 schools and more than 33.000 students across four campuses and several off-shore programs. Abrami and Barrett (2005, p. 1) define an ePortfolio as a "digital container capable of storing visual and auditory content including text, images, video and sound ...". Moreover, beside an ePortfolio system's capability to create, manage and present digital materials, a recent JISC report (2008, p. 6) emphasises the need to support the "rich and complex processes of planning, synthesising, sharing, discussing, reflecting, giving, receiving and responding to feedback" required to realise the multiple benefits associated with the use of ePortfolios.
An ePortfolio Strategy Group of 12 members was formed from academic staff from the faculties and academic and professional staff from centralised units. The group's objectives were to (a) provide an idea of the scope of currently available ePortfolio applications and best practice principles; (b) determine the University's strategic ePortfolio needs and (c) produce a recommendation paper to inform the project sponsors about the ePortfolio application that is best-placed to meet UniSA's strategic needs in the short-to-medium term.
Early on it became clear that making a recommendation was not a straight forward process. Members of the strategy group represented a variety of areas within the University ranging from academics teaching in different disciplines to academic developers, trainers and IT specialists and discussions became increasingly complex as facts from different domains had to be considered during the decision making process.
2 Context and problem statement
Before a strategy group had been convened in early 2010, several schools in the University had already been piloting one of the ePortfolio candidate products for more than a year. Hence, their understanding of what an ePortfolio could or should do was very much a reflection of their own experiences so far. This particular context created several complexities influencing discussions around ePortfolios.
• Complexities due to the parallel introduction of two major innovations: The piloted ePortfolio was frequently judged by LMS standards (e.g. it's ability to support large classes and assessment), thereby neglecting the fundamentally different purposes of an LMS and an ePortfolio.
• Complexities inherent in the ePortfolio concept itself: ePortfolios can be used for a wide range of high level purposes (e.g. career services, supporting students' learning during placements, professional networking or accreditation). Additionally, each of these purposes can be understood differently within a discipline specific context.
• Complexities due to the intertwined nature of usefulness and usability: It is not sufficient that educational software fulfils specific functional requirements (being useful); it also needs to do so in an appealing and intuitive way (being usable) . As such, recommending an ePortfolio was not only a matter of analysing the current state of affairs but required the group to discuss future support measures as well.
3 Solution
We suggest cognitive semantics (Lakoff, 1987) as a means to support cross-disciplinary discussions around the selection of educational technologies. More specifically, we introduce prototypes, frames and metaphors as means to make ePortfolios discussions more streamlined, focused and accessible.
‘Prototypes' refer to quintessential examples of a wider category (Lakoff, 1987). Categorisation has been describes as a means to communicate maximum information with least cognitive effort. Similarly, prototypes enable us to operate with complex categories more efficiently, that is we recognise, learn and recall elements that are more prototypical faster then elements that are less so.
‘Frames' are knowledge structures that capture typical features of a situation. Frames can support the organisation of various perspectives on ePortfolios by bundling discussion points relevant to these perspectives. Using frames as a means to focus discussions is seen as an important instrument to maintain the coherence of an argument without reducing its scope.
Ultimately, cognitive semantics does also help with the cross-disciplinary character of ePortfolio discussions as ‘metaphors' have been shown to be excellent means of explaining one concept in terms of another (Lakoff, 1993).
4 Conclusion
The work of the strategy group started off with a string of discussions with academics that had used ePortfolios in the past, vendors who represented various candidate products and other universities who were in similar positions, looking for a suitable ePortfolio solution. A first idea was to capture the essence of these discussions in a checklist which would allow to rate different products according to the same criteria. However, even though a checklist seemed to be a natural response to the quest for an objective evaluation, it did not seem to capture the various complexities the strategy group had to resolve.
On a philosophical note, our experience reflected Lakoff's (1993)criticism of the objectivist paradigm. Lakoff argues that even though there is an independent reality, the properties we use to describe this reality are not independent of the describers. In similar ways, members of the strategy group framed discussion topics according to their areas of expertise and used metaphors as means to support the cross-disciplinary discussion.
We found that framing the discussion appropriately played an important role in focusing our arguments. Finally we believe that prototypes, frames and metaphors do not come easily. All three semantic constructs are culturally / institutionally determined, i.e. they depend on shared experiences and values which we expect to be different in each organisation.
References
Abrami, P. C., & Barrett, H. (2005). Directions for research and development on electronic portfolios. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 31(3), 1-15.
JISC (2008). Effective Practice with e-Portfolios: Supporting 21st century learning (Vol. 2009). Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind: University of Chicago press Chicago.
Lakoff, G. (1993). The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought (pp. 202-251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
