Graham Attwell :: Blog :: Announcing Freefolio

Its difficult coping with all the different blogs. I am never quite sure what to post to the main Emerge site. Afraid of overwealming the site with my daily meanderings. And then forget to post anything at all.

Anyway this may interest some of you and I would welcome any feedback. From the (new) Wales Wide Web.

  I have spent a lot of time over the last year working on e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments. And I get bored just talking about things, I like to do them. So I jumped at the chance to develop and test an e-Portfolio system. This is the result - Freefolio. The development work has been undertaken by my friend Ray Elferink from Raycom in partnership with Pontydysgu.

Why didn't we work with an existing system? We thought very hard about it. It seemed that many of the dedicated e-Portfolio systems were too restrictive. They started from an institutional definitions of what learning would be represents through the e-Portfolio. Others - like Mahara - seemed geared towards particular sectors in education. On the other hand many people were using blogging and social networking systems for e-Portfolio development. that was nearer my idea. However, we were concerned that the basic structure of a blog entry did not provide another support for reflecting on learning. And so we came up with Freefolio. Freefolio is based on Wordpress. Within this we have implemented structured blogging, allowing XML templates to be added to the dashboard for particular kinds of post.

The system also features:

a) A space of aggregating community posts - 'Community Central'

b) An integrated discussion forum

c) A resource area - based on integration of media wiki

d) A learner profile area

e) Learner based access controls

f) User based sidebars through widgets

g) A standards compliant (Europass) CV with different formats for export

There is more work to do - isn't there always - and we know this version may not support everything you want of an e-Portfolio. But it is Open Source and easily extendable. Want to have a look? Go to http://demo.freefolio.net and set yourself up with an account (don't worry if you get a rather strange name on the from field on the confirmation email - we will sort that as soon as Ray gets access to the server).

I have tried to populate the site with a little content. Please add some of your own. And tell us what you think. We are planning to host Freefolio installations in the future for organisations who want this. And of course, we can build new features and customised versions. But, if you want to install Freefolio yourself, we will be releasing the code in the very near future. And we will be developing a web site around the demo install. I will write more about Freefolio over the coming days. But now is the time to put it out, I think. Release often, they say.

NB On my main blog Jeremy asked: "Sounds a lot like Elgg — was it too difficult to modify or adapt their open source code for this project?"

Here is my answer: "

Good question, Jeremy. I am a big fan of ELGG and ELGG started out as a e-Portfolio application. But I think ELGG has evolved into more of a social networking platform - and that is what Ben said (I think) at the ELGG do in Brighton. Although we wanted some social networking functionality, we have oriented this more towards the e-Portfolio type application.

We were also very concerned that the interface would be extremely simple for those with little (or no) experience of using social software and felt that this would be easiest to do in Wordpress (especially as we were on an extremely restricted budget!). Wordpress dashboard makes it very simple.

I definitely do not see Freefolio as an alternative or competition to ELGG. Depending on the context, needs, objectives etc. - sometimes I would use ELGG, other times Freefolio."

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, Open source, social software