(via Jeremy) It’s fun to watch e-portfolio guru Helen Barrett discover the potential of Weblogs as portfolio tools in her own blog. Her observations from NECC:

I was impressed by the number of sessions that mentioned blogs. I even had a couple of teachers of the airport shuttle ask me what a blog was! And I was able to explain it! I don’t think they saw the application to schools, but it was interesting that they asked.

And from BlogTalk 2.0:

I keep thinking about how this phenomenon can be adapted to electronic portfolios. When the two presenters from Sweden showed some examples from their moblogging at a conference last winter, including an audio entry that sounded like it was added by a cell phone, many bells started to go off in my head. Now, I need to learn more about moblogs. Another new term I learned” “vogs” (personal publishing of video or audio).

She’s writing some great stuff about the value and use of e-portfolios, much of which is directly related to the value and use of blogs. For instance, substitute ‘Weblog’ for ‘portfolio’ in the following:

I believe the two approaches (positivist and constructivist) have more to do with how portfolios are viewed in relationship to assessment. Are portfolios assessment OF learning or assessment FOR learning? Summative or Formative assessment? There is a great deal of difference. One has a perspective of what a student has learned to date (past-to-present); the other has a perspective on what more the student needs to learn (present-to-future). One is more of an institutional focus on accountability; the other is of an individual focus on understanding. One is often treated almost as a “bean-counting” exercise (have all of the standards been covered?) whereas the other is approached as an exploration of new insights.

Definitely thoughts worth following.
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Wired writes about the pressures of blogging, and, unfortunately, some of it resonates.

“I never can post something and say I’m done for the day,” said Zuniga, “because I’m always thinking about the next post. I’m always feeling like I’m letting people down if I don’t have any new stuff up on the site.”

Now I know the number of readers of this site pales in comparison to those interviewed in the article. But as this site has grown, I have sensed that there are many educators intrigued by the possibilities of these technologies, and for whatever reason, I’m in a place where I can provide resources and perhaps motivate them to try them out. And even though I feel a bit toasty with this from time to time, the fact is I’m still so freakin’ interested in how it’s all going to play out that it still feels pretty fresh.

Pretty interesting read, nonetheless…
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Just a quick observation on the new Bloglines… Whereas I used to use the saved folder to quickly store posts that I hope to return to at some point, I find myself now just putting those posts in my Bloglines blog. It’s too easy to do. The saved (now “clipped”) posts were always a little difficult to get to…now they’re a click away.

There’s a much larger content management issue that I’m going to have to write about at some point. I must scan at least 2-300 posts a day at Bloglines and elsewhere. (I can count the number of sites I click through to each day on one hand.) I do a full read of maybe 50 or so. I end up blogging 2 or 3 of the most relevant here, Furling a few others, now blogging more “clips” at Bloglines… But very rarely do any of those archived pieces of information or thoughts ever get reviewed again…maybe 10 percent. Maybe. Now I know that there may be occasions in the future when I’ll dig them up. And I know that some of that Furled content is being used on other pages of my site as a kind of filing cabinet. And I know that more and more I’m searching my own site for ideas that are in there (which needs to lead to another post about how blogs really don’t do a great job of making old ideas readily accessible.) But if I’m getting back to only about 10 percent of the stuff I save, it feels like I must be wasting a good portion of this time.

Much more to it than that, I know, but I need to think and observe a bit more before really digging into it.