E-Portfolios and Blogs: Online Tools for Giving Young Engineers a Voice

Weblogs or blogs, as they are referred to by the Internet savvy, are gaining popularity as a medium for publishing content on the Web. They allow the author to voice their own opinion or ideas, and have the potential to reach a massive audience via the Web. On the other hand, e-portfolios are gaining recognition as a personal learning and development tool, where users can learn through reflection, and are able to showcase their work to demonstrate skills, competencies and capabilities. This paper presents an e-learning system that couples a blog with a learning e-portfolio. The system is called dotFOLIO and is currently being trialled in a first year engineering course taught at the University of Sydney. An evaluation of the system was conducted through a survey to gather the students' initial perceptions of reflective learning and of using dotFOLIO for a learning activity that was previously paper-based. Preliminary results of this survey are presented