Limitations of Web 2.0 applications in setting up eportfolios

I have had several weeks to explore various web 2.0 applications. So far, the ones I have looked at have severe limitations with regards to moving beyond a ‘scrap book’ level for the compilation of eportfolios.

All of the sites assist with the storage of photos / videos and a limited amount of text. However, they are more suited for use as archives from which the photos can be drawn from to form a bigger more complex product. Blogs, webpages, WIKIs and eportfolios are all likely candidates to use the Web 2.0 sites like flickr to store photos and other multimedia materia. When you need to use the photos in your blog etc. you tap in to your store of photos.

Although some of the sites are actually build to be accessed and worked on using mobiles, none of them are particularly user friendly. Most of the sites do not work very intuitively either so that a novice using a site has to fumble around for quite a while before working out what to do. Some of the sites that are not specifically set up for use via mobile phone have too much information on their front page. This then leads to problems with downloading the page and then scrolling through lots of text and hyperlinks to try to find how to log on into your own storage area.

So Web 2.0 applications that are simple photo / video storage sites are not suitable as standalone applications for setting out eportfolios. So it looks like I will have to adapt my plans. I will probably still use one of the web 2.0 applications as a repository to archive photos. It is relatively easy to post a photo on to a site like flickr from a mobile phone. Once it is there, I will need to work out how to ‘add value’ to the image so that the collection of images ‘tell a story’ of how competency is acquired.

As text is cumbersome to input using a phone, I will need to look into how we could collect audio files (say of methods for making products) and use predictive text or menus to enter recipes.