ePortfolios and eGovernment: From technology to the entrepreneurial self

Abstract We analyse the electronic portfolio (ePortfolio) in higher education policy and practice.While evangelical accounts of the ePortfolio celebrate its power as a new eLearning technology,we argue that it allows the mutually-reinforcing couple of neoliberalism and the enterprising self to function in ways in which individual difference can be presented, cultured and grown, all the time within a standardised framework which relentlessly polices the limits of the acceptable and unacceptable. We point to the ePortfolio as a practice of (self-) government, arguing that grander policy coalesces out of a halting, experimental set of technological instruments for thinking about how life should be lived.

[1]  N. Rose,et al.  Governing the present: administering economic, social and personal life , 2008 .

[2]  A. Fontana,et al.  The Birth of Biopolitics , 2008 .

[3]  Roger Burrows,et al.  Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations , 2007 .

[4]  M. Foucault,et al.  The Government of Self and Others , 2010 .

[5]  Sarah R Lambert,et al.  Moving towards a University-wide implementation of an ePortfolio tool , 2007 .

[6]  M. Michael.  Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity , 2000 .

[7]  Paul Henman,et al.  E-Government and the Production of Standardized Individuality , 2010 .

[8]  Nikolas Rose,et al.  Powers of Freedom: Contents , 1999 .

[9]  A. Fejes.  European Citizens under Construction: The Bologna process analysed from a governmentality perspective , 2008 .

[10]  Ian W. Ricketts,et al.  The Prospects for E‐Learning Revolution in Education: A philosophical analysis , 2008 .

[11]  The Electronic Portfolio: A Means of Preparing Leaders for Application of Technology in Education , 2001 .

[12]  K. Tribe.  The political economy of modernity: Foucault's Collège de France lectures of 1978 and 1979 , 2009 .

[13]  Michele Knobel,et al.  Let's talk 2.0 , 2009 .

[14]  M. Foucault,et al.  The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 , 2003 .

[15]  G. Hall,et al.  Education or service. , 1953, Canadian hospital.

[16]  Sandra Wills,et al.  Australian ePortfolio Project. ePortfolio use by university students in Australia: informing excellence in policy and practice , 2008 .

[17]  D. Nestel,et al.  An e‐portfolio in health professional education , 2004, Medical education.

[18]  K. K. Cetina,et al.  Unscrewing the big Leviathan: how actors macro- structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so , 2014 .

[19]  A. Liesner.  Education or Service? Remarks on teaching and learning in the entrepreneurial university , 2006 .

[20]  Katja Bachmeier.  Powers Of Freedom Reframing Political Thought , 2016 .

[21]  Ross A. Klein,et al.  The Politics of Environmental Activism: A Case Study of the Cruise Industry and the Environmental Movement , 2007 .

[22]  Gary Greenberg,et al.  The Digital Convergence. Extending The Portfolio Model. , 2004 .

[23]  T. Lemke,et al.  From Foucault's lectures at the Collège de france to studies of governmentality : an introduction , 2010 .

[24]  L. Archer.  The new neoliberal subjects? Young/er academics’ constructions of professional identity , 2008 .

[25]  Douglas Love,et al.  Portfolios to Webfolios and beyond: Levels of Maturation , 2004 .

[26]  J. Law.  Introduction: Monsters, Machines and Sociotechnical Relations , 1990 .