I’m currently evaluating e-portfolio tools and today’s quick review was about uploading folders and adding them to my e-portfolio. I’ve only had an hour or so today, so I’ve looked at Mahara and Pebble Pad, and I’m not greatly impressed with the capacity of either of them to handle folders. Mahara doesn’t seem to allow uploading of anything other than single files. Pebble Pad does offer the option of zipping a folder. (I suppose you could upload a zip file to Mahara – I’ll have to try that later ) But when you do upload the zip file, Pebble Pad unpacks it and treats each file as a single asset. It would be nice to have the option of adding the folder and its contents as a single asset,

Of course, in Pebble Pad you can recreate the folder as a webfolio page and link to each assets, thus creating a de facto folder (Which could, with a bit of design work look quite nice). In Mahara you just have to create a new folder and upload everything into it. On the other hand you can display it as a folder in a view.

But really, what an e-portfolio needs is a way to put things in the right place quickly. Many resources these days do consist of multiple files, so I think this would be a useful functionality. (I suppose, in the interests of full coverage I ought to have a look at how Blackboard’s E-portfolio tool manages this.)