From Metaphor to Analogy: How the National Museum of the American Indian Can Inform the Augusta Community Portfolio

The museum metaphor captures some of the more obvious affordances of the digital, networked environment in which ePortfolios are composed and used. Museums feature multiple media working in concert and offer their visitors a choice of multiple ways of navigating their collections. Many ePortfolio scholars emphasize the importance of individual, rather than institutional, ownership of ePortfolios and the capability of the ePortfolio genre to create a highly personalized representation of individual learning and identity. The chapter proposes an extended analogy between the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Augusta Community Portfolio to map to key debates about ePortfolio practice.