This is my attempt to articulate where I am in my understanding of various terms and to try to capture what I was thinking during our meeting. Please feel free to challenge, question or add to.

Shane

An eportfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items - ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback, data etc - which ‘present’ a selected audience with information about the subject of that eportfolio.

The subject may be a person and/or persons;
the author may be the subject and/or someone involved in their learning or assessment;
the audience may be human and/or machine.

Note: these digital items need not come from a single repository or system. If distributed a series of access permissions need to enable access rights to cascade from the eportfolio presentation to these assets (pictures on Flickr, videos on YouTube, qualifications thro' MIAP?)

The information presented in an eportfolio may be for the purposes of:
Assessment
Accreditation;
Application;
Advancement;
Appraisal;
Articulation... and many other purposes

- An 'eportfolio' is just a presentation. It is more than an e-collection of stuff. The folio is the bit which suggests that it has been put together for a specific purpose. The 'port' may represent the aspiration of being portable, as necessary for use by a lifelong (and lifewide) learner.

A tool designed with the express purpose of collecting, aggregating and presenting a single use/purpose eportfolio might reasonably be described as an ePortfolio System.

- this does not mean that the items it uses need be contained within that system. It will probably also contain tools for sharing and managing.

A tool designed to plan for, think about, and review learning; to facilitate communication and collaboration; to archive items created or selected by the user; to link to items and data distributed across other systems; and to allow the creation of multiple eportfolio presentations – for myriad purposes and diverse audiences – might reasonably be called a Personal Learning System (though I much prefer ‘space’).

- how is this different to an eportfolio system? I think that the eportfolio system is defined by its single use/purpose (evidencing competency to qualify/practice). The personal learning system is defined by its focus upon supporting learning, particularly collaborative or social learning.

An aggregation of tools and services which are utilised in the day-to-day working, learning, communicating and socialising of a user constitutes their Personal Learning Environment. The user’s PLE might include either of the tools described above which they use to build or manage their eportfolios and/or the user might choose to combine a range of other tools and services to the same end.

- further to PRJ's comments I do not seen a PLE as being institutionally bounded. It is not a thing it is a concept. It is the sum of all of the tools and services I use to learn.

In summary, an eportfolio is a digital presentation. A single/limited use tool might be called an eportfolio system; a more complex system with multiple uses including the creation of eportfolios might be called a personal learning space. All of the tools, desktop and networked, which a users utilises in their normal work/learn patterns is described as their personal learning environment.


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    Shane Sutherland:I think that a PLE is emphatically not a system - it is a concept. It is the (normally digital) environment in which I learn. It is a combination of tools and services. An eportfolio tool is a tool which helps you build an eportfolio in the same way that a photo sharing tool (Flickr) helps you build a photo gallery. It'snot the only way of doing it but it's blinkin' easier with the tool than without it! An eportfolio is simply a presentation of digital items - it needn't have been created using an eportfolio tool and it can aggregate any digital items the author can access. However, getting your 'presentation' out to the world, or to a carefully selected sub-set of it, then a 'tool' of some ilk is going to make it easier for most folks to do that. I understand the purpose of the 'thin model' but how does that ACTUALLY look to people who are trying to create, manage, share eportfolios at the moment?
    George Roberts:I took Shane's definition of PLE to include all the tools and systems that a person might use, This would include those they could personalise beyond the system(s) provided by institutions as well as those they couldn't, including eportfolios. Peter's definition, above, of a PLE is the more narrow one that was emerging in the JISC-CETIS PLE reference model. However, the second part of Peter's comment aligns with my understanding of e-portfolio: people have a wide choice of systems that they might use to make representations of themselves using digital objects in various personal and institutional repositories for various rhetorical purposes. Not all these systems are called eportfolios and not all the products of these systems are called eportfolios, though the processes may map very closely onto an eportfolio reference model.
    Peter Rees Jones:I think a Personal Learning Environment is more than Shane suggests: it is the environment a Learner can personalise beyond the system an institution provides. Shouldn't the same be true for e-Portfolio? Learners should be given an increasing choice of the kind of services they use for their own learning and development. This is a key requirement of the e-Strategy which the "thin model" integrating e-Portfolio into Personal Learning Space is intended to support. Fundamentally many vendor systems are inadequate because learners (and their teachers) can't break out of the box: new e-Portfolio products have an opportunity to link to a wider range of resources. Peter
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