Directions in Electronic Portfolio Development

Portfolios have been around a long time. Educators used them long before the digital age, which suggests that perhaps the new media and medium of electronic portfolios, in part, can be looked at through lenses from the past. For example, in the past, portfolios were assembled from collections of work stored in boxes or three-ring binders and now are stored in digital form. Electronic portfolios, according to Barrett (2002), are essentially a new kind of container and can be developed along two paths. One path uses generic tools (GT), such as word processing, HTML editors, multimedia authoring tools, portable document format (PDF), and other commonly used productivity tool software. The second path uses "information technology" customized systems approaches (CS) that involve servers, programming, and databases