What is an e-portfolio?

According to Dr. Barrett’s FAQ about what an e-portfolio is, it’s a digital collection of an individual’s work, focusing on growth over time, the person’s reflections, insights, and personality, and often includes additions such as pictures or video. There are three purposes for an e-portfolio: learning e-portfolios that are aimed towards education and development, assessment e-portfolios meant for grading or evaluating, and employment e-portfolios meant for people who are looking for a job. E-portfolios help with multimedia skills, and usually the process you go through in making an e-portfolio is decide the goals of the e-portfolio, decide what message you want to send, gather work that answers reflective questions such as what?, so what? And what now?, add links and digital tools, present it to an audience, and post it online. There are also two ways to make an e-portfolio according to the tools you use. You can take the common tools approach, which requires limited software and digital additions, or the customized systems approach, which is designed with an online system and is more high tech. Both can be relatively inexpensive, but obviously the customized systems approach can get more complicated. There is also a series of steps people often take in the development process of an e-portfolio. First there is no digital artifcats, and there can be word processing in electronic files. Then there can also be databases, hypermedia, or slide shows. Then it goes to portable document format, then an HTML based web page, and last a multimedia authoring program.