EPortfolios in Higher Ed--Blogging The Quest!

Have wanted to begin documenting my adventures in ePortfolio land for a while, so this is the first plunge into these blogwaters. Starting this blog in Santa Monica at the Google teachers academy,to learn more about tools like Sketch up, google earth, and docs/spreadsheets and the ways that teachers are using the tools to support classroom activities.

The call to adventure (heroine's journey!) began almost 4 years ago, when I walked one summer into the chair of the Health Education Department's office one summer. Next to Mary Beth Love's desk was a pile of paper-based culminating portfolios from the class of 2004. Portfolios were required of all Master of Public Health students in the program, and it fell on her to grade them at the end of a 3 year program.
Opening one, I was struck by the reflective writing, evidence of community-based work, and how unique each portfolio was--scrapbooks of their time in the program.

"We could do these electronically," I naively suggested. Little did I know that a simple comment would inititate a journey into ever widening circles of vendors/solutions and opensource debates, conferences, research, and a new position within the university.
We did launch the MPH eFolio pilot, with our first eFolios completed by the class of 2005. I will hope to tell some of the unique, individual stories of how having an ePortfolio changed student's lives in this blog.
To learn more about that project: http://www.sfsu.edu/~hed/masters/portfolio.htm

New jargon, new academic technology friends, new pilots each semester within a wide range of disciplines. We made this site this year to assist with the effort: http://eportfolio.sfsu.edu

So while I begin today, hoping and imagining a web-based/Google eportfolio tool, or the big dream of giving each student upon admission a "toolkit" with email, LMS access and an ePortfolio, we are not quite there.
But it's time to keep track of what has happened on our cmapus, and this blog is the tale of my journey--or in the re-telling the best that I can muster at this point!