Why Not to Use Blogs as E-Portfolios

Andrew Middleton recently posted a call for comments on issues surrounding the adoption of blogs as an e-portfolio tool. Some quick comments below.

Why do it?  The usual suspects: person-centred, formative approach, promotes narrative/writing skills, promotes regular engagement/activity, encourages peer interaction, promotes sharing of personal digital narratives.

Why not? Persistence, Identity, Representation.

Persistence: the persistence of blogs (via permalinks, trackbacks etc, to say nothing of the recently-sued Wayback Machine) is at odds with the desire to create a personal repository that can be selectively shared and edited, over time.

Identity: persistence creates the illusion of fixed identity, whereas higher education explicitly conceptualises its mission as formative and processual: we believe that students are shaped, and we want them to be so shaped, by their experience of participating in a learning community (Helen Barrett recently posted on this issue).

Representation: the accessibility of information via blogs / the Internet creates a kind of equivalence between individual snippets of information. Information is de-historicised. Yes, the information that comes via electronic communications is time/date stamped... But that is not the point, because users' temporal focus shifts from archiving towards access. We care about the date on which we access the information, not the date it was first archived. So it becomes harder to see what is current for an individual, and what belongs to his/her "past". Any given piece of accessible information has the potential to "represent" the individual, and sometimes, we create representations that we'd rather forget  :-)  

There are legal implications to creating persistent representations of identity, and these legal points are the ones that tend to get focused on in this context (see the recurrent UK debates around the introduction of identity cards). But there are cultural issues, too. For educators, these are just as important, maybe even more important. Students care obsessively about identity and peer relationships. They are extremely protective of the ways they choose to present themselves to others. They want to retain control over publicly-accessible representations of themselves. That's why they may be reluctant to invest in (course-related) blogs, because the status of the blog is ambiguous: official? for credit? part of course participation? for informal learning? for private reflection? For a blog that is explicitly conceived as an e-portfolio tool, all these problems of representation and ownership are magnified.

It's tempting to suggest that the ambiguous identity of the blog is precisely what attracts professionals to it. We can indulge in the pleasures of ambiguity, because our individual (private) identities are relatively secure. In a personal, private context, online journals (like Livejournal) attract adolescents and young adults because they can provide a secure space for exploration. But associating such private and personal exploration with a "public" space is especially problematic for a young person, for whom identity is always/already in question.

Thanks to Andrew for raising the issue -- I think it's exceptionally important that we, as a community, collectively question our own pieties and pet technologies on a regular basis.