Can you trust your presenter

I am surprised that one of the other main UK e-portfolio providers is not fully represented at this conference, given that they have a major presence in Australia. What they have decided to do instead is to trust some of their users to present their product.

One of these is the University of South Australia. The presentation starts with some understandable concerns about the ability of students to use an e-portfolio. However then the presenter launches into the challenges they faced implementing the e-portfolio. There was too much there; there were initially some technical bugs; the e-portfolio required a fast connection; it makes marking slower because there are lots of pages that need to pop up and the e-portfolio does not look like a professional tool e.g. pebbles and little kids does not tally with ongoing professional development.

Changes were then made to make it better but this seemed to be internal ones by the University rather than any changes to the product.

So what the presenter told the audience that the software was initially difficult to implement and then when it was successfully implemented the University of South Australia ditched the software in favour of open source software.

To then compound the poor presentation, the company now have an out of focus virtual presentation in which no attempt is being made to use multi-media until the end. We are just being given a static lecture.

I do not say any of this with great relish, because in my view it is incumbent on all of us in the e-portfolio business to effectively demonstrate what they offer in order to engineer the important ‘cultural’ change which will encourage more people to use e-portfolios.