The View from 2030: Ten Interview Questions

Darren Cambridge, Blue Skies plenary

Goodenough College, London

May 10, 2005

Tyranny of the Course

Back in the twentieth century, higher education was ruled by the tyranny of the credit hour and the course. This had been the case for so long, it felt as if it could never be otherwise. What role did electronic portfolios play in helping higher education focus on learning?

Ethnoclassification

At the turn of the century, the way information was encoded in electronic portfolios was either proscribed by standards created in isolation from practice or unique to an individual or institution. How were we successful in harnessing ethnoclassification to find ways of classifying and sharing information defined by actual portfolio authors?

Learning Passports

As far back in 2005, academic levels—school, universities, adult education—operated almost in isolation. In higher education, each institution was an island. How did we find ways to work together to make electronic portfolios “learning passports” that span levels, institutions, and nations?

Mapping and Tapping Associations

For the first several decades of electronic portfolios, we knew very little about how and why authors created links or associations between artifacts within and beyond their portfolios. Even into the twenties, we did little to help authors analyze and compare patterns of association. How did we succeed in mapping authors’ associative thinking with the help of the numerical power of technology?

Articulation Between Scales

While a few organizations had created portfolios in the late twentieth century, individual portfolios and institutional portfolios had few connections. How did we succeed in creating rich articulations between personal, organizational, and even regional portfolios?

Multimedia and Multimodal

Into second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, portfolios were largely hyperlinked, coded text. Now, portfolios contain audio, video, and active controls that personalize themselves for each reader and guide his or her experience through visual maps and kinetic spaces. How did the skills to produce these new kinds of texts become part of the curriculum?

Merging Integration and Aggregation

Around 2005, researchers began realizing the power of content syndication and aggregation to build portfolios distributed across multiple tools and sites and connected to social networks. However, they did so by sacrificing to essence of the portfolio as an integrated composition. What strategies and tools did we develop to situate distributed data within an integral narrative?

Cultivating Audiences

Even as late as 2010, we could not say that most readers of electronic portfolios knew what to make of them. Now, portfolio literacy is central to being an educated person and an effective organizational leader. How did we succeed in convincing and educating portfolio audiences?

Mobile Capture

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