The new portfolio

At Confused of Calcutta, JP continues to crank out some great posts about the changes being brought by new information technologies.

In "Musing about lifestreaming and learning," JP examines the Feltron Report, Nick Feltron's report on his personal activities for the year. The cost of collecting, aggregating, summarizing, and posting tremendous amounts of personal data has dropped, making it possible to assemble a "portfolio" or "CV" or appraisal stream of one's activities. The result is potentially exhibitionism, or pervasive surveillance, or accountability, or - I hope, in some cases - an accounting of informational worth or social capital across one's many networks.

In "Thinking about Twitter: a submarine in the ocean of the Web," JP describes the many ways that he uses Twitter. In a way, this is the flip side of the lifestreaming post: he looks at the fraction of people's lifestreams that bleed through on Twitter and makes judgments about sources, services, and content via their recommendations. This post provides a nice view of how social capital (using the term loosely) is created through the "capillary conversations" going on in this part of the lifestreams.

Taken together, these give us a broader idea of what the new portfolio should look like. I see applications to formal (academic) programs, but other realms as well.