Why I love and hate student portfolios

I have a love/hate relationship with portfolios. The workshop on portfolios did a good job of summarizing the positive and negative attributes of portfolios for students. I personally think portfolios maintenance is an important skill for kids to learn in grade school. Here are some positives of portfolios: it allows the child to observe the evolution of their work, it can be a resource to the student in future projects, it allows the parent to view the academic progress of the child, and as I said, it's a good skill to have "in the real world." On the negative side, it does create more work for teachers (this is especially true with teachers of the lower skill and lower grade students), it's hard to grade (if grading is the purpose of it), and not all people are on board (including staff and parents). I think for all students, portfolios are a fantastic thing! I wonder if there are ready made modules for teachers to implement this in their classroom with minimal preparation time?!

But why do I love/hate portfolios? I think they're great, but I misplace my work a lot! And this was especially true of my grade school years: I lost my work all the time! Now, it's all on the computer, but sometimes, I don't know which computer its on! D'oh! I wasn't trained in portfolio maintenance until my senior year in college. I was lucky: I'm a bit of a pack rat, and I saved many of my old papers. But most of all, I don't like the idea of a "graded" portfolio. I think it's something that you do or you don't have. If you're in the latter half, a professor/teacher should guide you into bringing your portfolio up to snuff or better yet, have a peer help you out. Every student should have a different idea of what represents their best work, and I think it's more important that the student "present" their portfolio instead of handing it in and hoping it's adequate. The presentation could be in front of peers, teachers, and/or parents. Of these three groups, I prefer presenting in front of peers because students will form stronger opinions of their work in front their fellow students (although a teacher would need to be present in some way to facilitate this).

As a side note: it also doesn't help that the university only gives you 50 megabytes of space on their server: if I'm going to stay in the IDLT discipline, I think I'll be creating individual files bigger than 50 megabytes! 50 megabytes used to be a lot of space: back in 1993!