ePortfolios sound so good in theory. It's all about giving students an easy and convenient way to archive, organize, and display the work they do all throughout their liberal arts education. Maybe they could even work on revising and building on their work all during those tough four years. They always provide a nice way for educators to get a feel for a student's whole corpus of work and administrators a handy way to monitor improvement and detect unhealthy trends. Articles like Joseph C. Panettieri's on University Business focus on the potential costs to universities arising from the setup and storage fees. After all, it's one thing to say that all students must have ePortfolios; quite another to make decisions about standards and whether or not to adopt a commercial, proprietary abomination like Blackboard and Adobe or an open-source solution. But let's forget a moment about the technical discussions that tend to obscure what I consider a more poignant issue: Are ePortfolios another way to exploit students? Can we, should we, force students to publish their work online? My answer is, of course we should, even though it will involve some crafty legal work and a re-thinking of university students' obligations to their communities. As public academics teaching at a public university, we ought to be concerned about how we can exploit our students MORE, not less.

Panettieri's article mentions the legal issues eportfolios and copyrights only briefly--he points concerned readers to the Electronic Portfolio White Paper to find out about the legal stuff. Unfortunately, this document asks the same questions it should be answering in regards to the legal cesspool of intellectual property rights and ePortfolios:

• Who is the owner of the items uploaded into an ePortfolio (the individual, institution or a combination)? What mechanisms are in place for resolving ownership issues?
• How will colleges and universities inform users of the rights of authors and publishers to documents stored in their portfolios, and what can and cannot be included, and what is possible under “fair use?”
• How will the system guarantee that the owner of the electronic portfolio created the work?

These are some pretty serious questions. I would add, of course, who decides which material (if not all the material) in an ePortfolio should be published online for all to see?

I think that, ideally, NO ONE should own the materials in the ePortfolio. The work should be placed in the public domain. I use the same rationale as service-learning advocates: Receiving a college education is a magnificent privilege. It's only right that these fortunate students should be giving something back to the community. Service-learning has them out picking up trash and serving up Ramen in a soupkitchen. I say, forget that, I'd be happy just to have their research and writing freely available to the public.

If we say, "Well, forget that, that stuff is worthless anyway. A freshman essay having any value to the community? Are you delirious?" I say that if students are producing worthless drivel, it's the fault of the educators. We should modify our assignments so that student writers are doing real work that can truly benefit the community ANYWAY. Thanks.

I'm lucky enough to be taking a Rhetoric and Technology class this semester with Joe Moxley. Moxley, of course, is a big advocate of having student work published to the web; you can't spend ten minutes with this guy without hearing about the advantages that having a real audience has for writers. His heroic effort to support the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations tends to fall on deaf ears. What's wrong with just letting this stuff be taken care of by a commercial microfiche company? Well, nobody reads it. Yes? And who would want to, pray tell? Moxley's answer, of course, is that students writing theses and dissertations will produce better stuff if they know it will be read by people other than their committee members and a few relatives. I would add that committees would work harder, too, if they knew that their departments were likely to be seriously judged by the quailty of theses and dissertations they let slip through the gates.

What's more important to me is that what we do as writers in the university ought to always already be geared towards community service. Good scholarship is always about, "How will this work I'm doing now contribute to the field?" For God's sake, if we were interested in making big profits selling books (commercial journal publishers be damned!), we should've avoided academe like the plague. This occupation, as I see it, is all about sharing knowledge and trying to make ourselves valuable to the communities that support us. Perhaps that's a point that is too often forgotten. At least at public universties, the fees are paid by the state. Private grants exist, of course, but their goal is to get some useful service out of the university. The public deserves the same treatment.

I'd like to go up to every professor at USF and say, "Okay, the state is paying you X amount of dollars. What are giving back to the state?" Teaching a few classes? How noble of you. What about all those copyrights you gave to a commercial journal publisher? What about that copyright for a textbook or scholarly monograph you sold to a commercial publisher? Then I'd like to ask the university presses, "Why the hell isn't this stuff available for free online? Who cares if you don't make money selling books anymore. It's not about selling books. It's about making scholarly work AVAILABLE." How can scholarship make an impact if no one reads the stuff?

As I see it, the public needs to be informed about how the university system is ripping it off. Every work published by a public university scholar, whether a student or a tenured professor, ought to be placed firmly and squarely in the public domain, no questions asked.

Truthfully, many people are trying to explore this issue. Nature is doing a series called Access to the Literature--the debate continues. There's some good stuff here, but, frankly, at this point open content is a D'U issue. We should be saying, "Open Content? Of course," instead of still explaining what it is and suggesting there's an issue here. The issue is purely whether we want to perform our roles as public academics or steal the public's money. We should be writing good scholarship and making it available--what we do needs to matter. Open content is a way to do that. According to Steven Harnad:

We are carrying out a much larger study across all disciplines, using a 10-year sample of 14 million articles from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)'s database; initial results, for the field of physics, show Open Access articles being cited 2.5 to 5 times more than articles that users' institutions must pay to access online.

I ask you, compositionists, which of our fine and prestigious journals are available for free online? Why is the information they contain, supposedly so valuable, supposedly so critical, supposedly so influential, available only to those who pay? After all, the authors don't get paid.

The argument, "Well, if we make this stuff available for free online, people won't buy the print version" is an example of the rampant stupidity typical of the modern academy. Who *cares* if so many people stop buying the damn print version that the journal shifts entirely to an online publication? Who *cares*? Maybe if our major journals go online, those oh-so-pompous hiring, tenure, and promotion committees will stop turning their nose up at online publications and start admitting that valid scholarship is valid scholarship, regardless if it's rendered in print or pixel.