Here at Maricopa, we’ve been trying to corral the herding cats of electronic folios for several years, back to a Dialogue Day in 2002, to a not so fruitful play with a consortium (it put the software cart before the eport need horse), to creation of our Ocotillo Action Group in 2004 to an excellent Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett in February 2005.
Along side that was been the evolution of the MyEport developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College thanks to Audree Thurman, and made available to the other Maricopa colleges on a server hosted in our office. We’ve seen a rise up the curve in tis use by faculty and several groups of students in Art, Teacher Education, and Library Technology. The software works well because of an easy to use but flexible interface, and is getting richer with tools for slide shows, quiz/polls, RSS and other forms of syndication, weblogs.
More is just around the corner as a new version is coming out featuring support for media streaming, including automatic podcast generation, wikis inside an eport, RSS for calendars, and more (see the new changes list and examples). Furthermore, we are moving the Maricopa ePort server from its home the last year on the Apple XServe running in my office (and running this blog) to our main server that has tons more RAM, power, and connectivity, and with a shorter URL (yeah!).
But there seems to be even more brewing, as I am deducing from the links on the new changes that Audree’s college has a new web site design that is actually being driven by content created and managed by the ePort software, or how it is identified, as a “webport“!
This is utterly amazing and is certiainly going beyond your grandmother’s eportfolio.
With all that, I think and hope we will see a sharp rise in the use (and variety) of eportfolio activity at Maricopa. It will be interesting to see it unfold (or explode).
