Abstract:

This article follows on a previous paper presented in ICERI 2014 in relation to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and product design applied to learning. Technology implementation in education has often intended to precondition user behaviour to validate preconceived ideals. In a sense, it may fall into an instrumentalist trap that forces participants to follow process and fit to template while user freewill, individual growth and innovation are left out of the equation. Users may also be reluctant to take on new technology if they cannot distinguish the challenges of learning and knowledge are complex after more than 40 years of globalisation. Today, society and professional training are interconnected, networked, open and dynamic. Therefore, it is difficult to unpack technology if it is not transparent to users who only have marginal understanding while trying to sort out the push and pull between technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge.

The document narrates on the proposal of e-portfolio as pillar supporting a new constructionist and critical design and making industrial design curriculum developed for three years up to 2014, with its launch in 2016. The hypothesis was to implement students’ electronic portfolios to allow the occurrence of several phenomena in relation to curriculum and professional requirements while also helping to glue together all four years of study with a customisable and participative process. This technology implementation had greatly two aims. To capitalise on participants’ social network and media skills. To assist them to build innovation and professional process at a time digitalisation is also changing people’s thinking, reading, storing information, recalling memory and converting it into knowledge. This followed studies telling many millennials and GenZ are great users of technology. However, they expect to communicate with mobile consumer-like tools while finding difficult to work with technology at higher-level thinking required professionally.

The e-portfolio model was based on several parameters:
• Activity: As a customisable and organising behaviour that gives purpose to technology
• Platform: Working as unfinished statement, open ended question waiting for designers and users to reconfigure and form onto a new argument
• Technology: Behaving and interacting with users as a living entity. Therefore users need to engage in a domestication of technology without reducing it to an asset or commodity.
• Organic and dynamic structure: In the act of re-organising and evolving through time
• Artefact: As embodiment of what people make, know and use
• History and timeline: Since no person or object is really without a heritage and a family, so to speak
• Memory and narrative: As a representation of individual and community shareable values, meaning and story-telling
• Context and place: As the unique environment where the problem lives and is resolved
• Knowledge: As what people already use in the form of argumenting, skills, competencies and tools.
• Boundaries: As in the limits of knowledge and activity and the blurred frontier of unknown that personas (living or virtually living) need to cross to evolve
• Culture: As the collection of living history, behaviour, knowledge and artefacts that are material expression of identity

Keywords:

E-portfolio, ICT, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, Design Education.