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4.2. Effects on the handling of online information
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It is only a matter of time that the possibility to set guarantees of
existence will affect the learning in an online environment in more
than one way. A major impact is, without any doubt, the necessity to
develop a long term content strategy at the very beginning of an
e-portfolio project. This is due to the fact that reliable availability
of information goes hand in hand with considerable costs.
This reflection process is also triggered in the owners of the
e-portfolios. Learners have to think about how they want to handle
information created by themselves. At present, these questions are
usually not discussed until its nearly too late. However, the
possibility to determine guarantees of existence ensures that an
agreement on how stored information should be handled has to be reached
at the beginning of the usage of e-portfolios.
The learners, on the other side, need to decide whether their content
should be deletable at all times or should be available for a certain
period of time. This way, an author conveys how much he/she values
online published information. He/she either states that he/she intends
to handle information freely or that he/she gives a guarantee for its
availabilty. What needs to be taken into consideration is whether it is
an advantage to express the value of information via a guarantee of
existence and whether the authority over information can or should be
passed on to others. If an author allows others to extend the guarantee
of existence for instance, he/she may give up on his/her authority over
the information but, at the same time, clearly demonstrates his/her
commitment to created content.
Owners of e-portfolios can certainly decline the option of the
guarantee of existence. However, we reckon that information without
guarantee of existence is more likely to be disregarded than
information with guarantee of existence.
We concede that it is not possible to provide each piece of information
with a guarantee of existence. This is due to the fact that owners of
e-portfolios have to be provided with limited ressources by the
decision-makers.
Readers greatly benefit from information with guarantee of existence.
If a certain piece of information is reliably available until a certain
point of time, there is no need to store the information anywhere else.
At present, the only possibility - and thus common practice - is to
store important, online information on parallel media such as hard
drives or webservers or even print it out. This is the only possibility
to guarantee reliable availability and reliable reference of content,
which should be included in the personal learning environment.
Subsequently, information is stored several times together with all
problems regarding disk space, security, copyright etc.
You can find a printable version here:
 GOE for online information as a precondition for hyperlinked e-portfolios (PDF, 361 kB)
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