In the absence of a blog, here are my reflections on the process of creating this electronic portfolio. In reality, this is the ninth tool I have used to publish my e-portfolio on the Web. The first version of my new e-portfolio was published using a portfolio system developed by the Maricopa Community Colleges. These are some of the comments that I write in the blogging tool that is included in the Maricopa system:

I spent an evening going through my web pages and my hard drive (my digital archive) to select the specific artifacts that I wanted to use in my portfolio. I set up an Excel spreadsheet that let me list the artifacts (21 in all) and then create hyperlinks to each URL.

Portfolio at a glance-Excel

After creating the list with the URLs, I added comments in Excel to represent the captions for each artifact. I played around with converting the document into HTML, but spent too much time fighting the Microsoft style sheet codes. So I just converted the document into PDF, which I will use on the WWW. I uploaded the Excel spreadsheet to this portfolio as a document, but I might prefer using the PDF.

Portfolio at a Glance - PDF

After selecting the artifacts, I tried to identify which competencies or skills each artifact demonstrates. I found five or six major categories right now, maybe more when I think about it. But the major categories have emerged. Now, all I have to do it create a collection for each grouping, and write an overall reflection plus record the captions. Since I had all of the artifacts on one of my websites, all I had to do was capture the URL.

From start to finish this project has taken me an evening, and most of the time was spent in selecting the artifacts and writing the captions. Those aren't really technology issues...they are portfolio issues.

It took me about two hours to finish all of the entries using Plone, which was mostly a copy/paste job between my Mozilla files and my web browser. Not too bad for 8 pages. I only had to change the relative link to the documents within the portfolio, not the links to the artifacts on the web.


I am impressed with this program, and the implementation on this server. Even though I am only given 10 MB of online storage using this server, it gives me a genuine feel for how the system could work on my own server. And the fact that I have it installed on my Mac laptop, means that I can continue to experiment with it when I am not connected to the WWW.