The new breed of tools for building online portfolios: MyShowcase, ZESTi, others?
Interesting to see the latest generation of tools for building online portfolios & records of achievement. (zesti.com is another I’ve been looking at — if you know of more, please post in the comments) The recognition of learning and achievements outside institutional contexts has been a challenge that seems to have resisted solutions for at least 25 years (in the UK, the Manpower Services Commission worked on it in the wake of the 1986 White Paper “Working Together – Education and Training). Does the Web 2.0 framework give us a way out of this, by enabling us to join the small pieces, and build a portfolio by aggregating the evidence our achievements that is scattered across the web? The MyShowcase demo unfortunately hasn’t been working the last couple of days, but it appears not to targeted directly at individuals (it has to be installed on a server). ZESTi is a service anyone can use — but so far it doesn’t seem to integrate much with anything. Who’s closest to delivering something genuinely useful in this field?
MyShowcase is an open source content aggregator, mapper and
showcaser for e-portfolios to support learning and personal
development. It allows users to integrate learning evidence from a
range of online sources to showcase for continuous professional
development, career planning, and lifelong learning. Users can
bring together RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Flickr sets, files, and
weblinks and to create rich evidence streams of their online
content.
Organise using tags
All evidence brought into the tool can be tagged it using the
free-text tagger. Tags allow the user to group related evidence
streams and easily access them in future.
Map to frameworks
Users can map their evidence to frameworks relevant to their
study, including competency frameworks, lists of learning
objectives, qualification frameworks, and Continuing Professional
Development (CPD) frameworks.
Create showcases
Users can create showcases by hand-picking evidence and
providing contextual information against each item. Showcases can
be formatted and made available to both internal and external
reviewers, for use in assessment submissions, personal tutorials,
portfolios for potential employers, and ongoing CPD.
Agile Learning 