Boy, this has been a bit drawn out - mainly through my own procrastination and inferior time management skills. My report for the 2006 ICT Learning Grants is up on the wiki where I originally started my efforts. By real research standards, you wouldn't even call what I've cobbled together as "research" but it does represent thinking changed and challenged over a period of time examining an idea that many people in education immediately think is good without any further clarification. The report had to be submitted in a proprietary Word document format but I've extracted all of the interesting stuff and pasted it (not without formatting issues) into the wiki so anyone interested or referenced can take a look. I relied a lot of my conversations with other edubloggers to sort through my ideas so if you commented on any of my posts tagged in my E-Portfolios category, then you may well be referenced.

A snippet to attract your interest:

I found out that very few classroom teachers even know what an e-portfolio is and only very few can see a real use for the development and construction of their own. I did find a number of educators worldwide who have constructed their own e-portfolio (or online presence) using the Web 2.0 tools I originally expressed an interest in. I read and tagged a significant number of posts and articles describing the purpose and components of an e-portfolio. I located many useful Web 2.0 resources that could form part of a “small parts, loosely joined” e-portfolio in my search for possible options for my teacher volunteers. There is a lot of focus on e-portfolios for students throughout the world but finding open, viewable examples from teachers on the web and other research exploring their development was hard to find. I found that many educators are involved in developing online presence via the use of blogs, social networking, wikis, podcasting, photo-sharing and content aggregators but much of this is not necessarily defined by the e-portfolio concept – in many cases the term PLE (Personal Learning Environment) was preferred.

The only disappointing thing seems to be that these grants are disappearing without a whimper. There is no talk about any 2007 grants and the Research Day Expo where the teacher-researchers would have presented their findings has been quietly canned and presenters pointed towards the 2007 CEGSA conference instead. I'll be using some parts of my work in my presentation about Online Teachers.