1. Digital evidence - artifacts

Artifacts hold the evidence for your skills and competences in e-portfolio. They are tangibles instead of declarations. They are in digital format.

Examples can vary from digital documents (eg. project's outline in .pdf), software you worked on, audio and video files documenting your activities, photos of your work. They can be a direct result of your activities but also they can be prepared especially for e-portfolio purposes eg. taking picture of your project or recording your lecture.
Examples of artifacts:

• short text explaining the goal of your e-portfolio,
• textual commentary to the actual artifacts,
  
• reflective commentary on evidence with description about relevance to you and the explanation albout the reasons for the selection
  

Characteristics of a good artifact (evidence):

• coherence with the goals - the artifact should correspond to the e-portfolio's goal and should provide evidence for skills and competences that you want to present
  
• re-use - evidence that with little change can be re-purposed for different audience or different goal.
  
• accessibility - evidence should be availiable in the accessible file formats, such as PDF, JPG, TXT, MP3 and the like.
• access - when availiable through secured website, login options should be provided for the audience.
  

2. Examples of re-use

It is important to realize that one artifact can provide evidence for different competence and skills and also a particular format of the evidence can hold more information about the author than the other.

For instance your welding skills can be described in a short text but will be presented much better in a short film of photograph of the items that you have produced. Additionaly such an artifact will evidnece your digital competences of recording, editing and publishing.

Source:
1. Barret Helen, 2001, Electronic Portfolios - A chapter in Educational Technology; An Encyclopedia. Available at: https://electronicportfolios.com/portfolios/encyclopediaentry.htm