blogging and eportfolios

I have been inspired by paper 0020 (the first paper during the staff skills session at ALT-C 2009) to revive my work blog, so this is my first post in a long time.

Their interesting study looked at piloting free web-based eportfolio tools (including wetpaint) with their learners, as a way of encourage them to document and build on their learning. However, they found that students only maintained these during the assessed part of their course - at the end of it only 1% continued to update their portfolio. They also found that students seemed to prefer working in a more chronologically and structured way, and started to treat their eportfolio wiki more like a blog. As a result they are going to pilot a blog-based eportfolio stucture with their next set of students - along with a few other changes along the way.

Whilst I suspect that more than simply the platform used by the project team will have had an impact on the students lack of engagement (it will be interesting to see if they manage to increase the 1% continued use after the end of the assessed element of the course), it has made me consider the way I have used this blog in the past, and how I can use it in the future.

In terms of an eportfolio, or record of my learning/learning development, I think it could be a useful tool - so lets see how it goes!