An e-portfolio is a collection of information and digital objects that demonstrate your learning development, skills and competencies. Like you, your ePortfolio is unique and reflects your interests based around the structure of your learning and development at the University of Lincoln. By keeping your portfolio up to date you can easily find work you’ve done in the past, keep track of your aims while at university and beyond, and of course, use the data to build a CV which will help you applying for jobs.
Students and staff can now create their own e-portfolio by visiting http://portfolios.lincoln.ac.uk. (Thanks to Joss Winn for making the domain available)
Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a series of entries here showing you how to set up your portfolio, how to make different views available to different users (for example, you might want different employers to see different versions of your CV), and how to export the data so you can take it with you when you leave.
For now, why not click on the link above and explore. You don’t need to register, because you can log in with your usual university username and password.
Portfolios.lincoln uses the open source Mahara portfolio tool which is still very much in development. We’re currently using the latest stable version (Mahara 1.1), but will evaluate new versions as they become available and upgrade when stable versions are published.
Does this mean you can turn off the CV building features in Portal and Pebble Pad? I might use Mahara since it has a decent UI…
Well, we’re not removing any services because people may already have built e-portfolios in Pebble Pad and anyway, I think a portfolio is a personal thing and being all for choice I wouldn’t want to corral people into using one tool. So, you can turn off whatever you like, but we won’t be forcing you to use anything in particular.
Having said that I do think Mahara looks the easiest of the e-portfolio tools for beginners and as you’ve probably realised Portfolios.lincoln is an installation of Mahara.
Incidentally I wasn’t aware the Portal had CV building features – unless you’re referring to the Word templates I built about 3 years ago and posted on there for people who wanted paper portfolios. But as they were met with a tidal wave of apathy at the time, I thought they were pretty much forgotten. If it’s not that could you point me to the right place? Thanks
Julian, I have enjoyed your Mahara series so just posted about them in our Google Group for managed learning environements http://groups.google.co.nz/group/mle-reference-group/browse_thread/thread/31782d53e98f4e03/5f4ae9d578954ebf?hl=en#5f4ae9d578954ebf