ABSTRACT
At this moment in educational history, those of us in English-speaking countries operate at the intersection of competing tensions. On the one hand, there's a consistent effort to standardise, through both curriculum and assessment, in the hope that such coherence will promote learning on a mass scale. On the other hand, there's an equally important effort to personalise, through providing curricula keyed not only to so-called differentiation of learning and learners, but also to students as unique human beings and as partners in the effort to make education meaningful. In this context, particularly in both the UK and the US, electronic portfolios have been taken up by advocates for both trends, which is possible because portfolios are neutral ideologically: they can be used as tools promoting standardisation, and they can make available novel opportunities for learning. Which of these purposes they serve is a rhetorical matter, that is, decided and designed by those who assign, compose, and assess them.
