Audience, integrity, and the living document: eFolio Minnesota and lifelong and lifewide learning with ePortfolios

Policies and programs focused on using ePortfolios to support lifelong and lifewide learning should be informed by research. This article presents the results from research on eFolio Minnesota, a project that makes ePortfolio software available to all residents of the State of Minnesota in the United States. The most active portfolio authors of all ages are using eFolio for a wide range of interconnected purposes, with educational planning at the center, over time in multiple roles as students, educators, and workers. In the process of composing a portfolio, the authors who say eFolio has had a highly significant impact on their learning move from an experimental stage into a living document stage. In this second stage, authors are likely to have a strong sense of and connection to audience, real and imagined, and to see their portfolios as having integrity, as being faithful representations of their lives across roles and over time. Portfolio projects committed to supporting learning throughout life should enable access, foreground planning, promote findability, cultivate audiences, capture activity, enable layering, foreground the personal, cultivate collaborative contexts, and promote integral introductions.