A Review of The Web Portfolio Guide: Creating Electronic Portfolios for the Web

If you do an Internet search on "electronic portfolios" or "Web portfolios" or "teaching portfolios," you get a ton of hits. You find great resources like

Teachers and administrators at schools from kindergarten through university are in all stages of creating individual class Web projects or developing electronic portfolio systems. In fact, as Trent Batson suggests in the December 2002 issue of Syllabus, in an article called "The Electronic Portfolio Boom: What's it All About?," it is clear that "the term 'electronic portfolio' [...] is on everyone's lips. We often hear it associated with assessment, but also with accreditation, reflection, student resumes, and career tracking. It's as if this new tool is the answer to all the questions we didn't realize we were asking" (15). Well, it's not a new tool. But it is a tool for which there are still very few texts helpful for classroom contexts.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Instructors' Preface
Introduction

1. Understanding Web Portfolios
Why Should You Create a Web Portfolio?
How Does a Web Portfolio Work?
What Makes a Good Web Portfolio?

2. Planning Your Web Portfolio
Keeping a Working Portfolio
Analyzing Your Situation
Assessing Your Work
Planning for Reflection
Assessing Your Work
Planning for Reflection
Planning for Documentation
Creating a Web Portfolio Plan

3. Creating Your Web Portfolio
Creating and Using a Template
Copying and Filling in the Template.
Incorporating Artifacts in Web Portfolios

4. Graphics & Multimedia in Web Portfolios
Graphics, Multimedia and Copyright
Graphics
Audio and Video.
Slide Presentations

5. Revising & Editing Your Web Portfolio
Getting Feedback
Revising and Editing

6. Publishing Your Web Portfolio
Uploading your portfolio to the Web
Publishing Your Web Portfolio on Disk

7. Creating the Professional Web Portfolio
Professional Development Web Portfolios
Professional Marketing Web Portfolios
Electronic resumes and web portfolios
Marketing Your Web Portfolio

Glossary
Bibliography
Portfolios
Electronic Portfolios
Professional Portfolios
Index
About the Author

          Generally, there are three flavors of books about ePortfolios. There are texts about the construction of portfolios, texts that focus on portfolio presentation, and texts that look at issues of assessment. If you're interested in integrating ePortfolio pedagogy into your curriculum, you need to buy at least two books which cover these three categories. The first is the American Association for Higher Education's Electronic Portfolios: Emerging Practices for Students, Faculty, and Institutions, edited by Barbara Cambridge, Susan Kahn, Daniel P. Thomkins, and Kathleen Blake Yancey; and the second is Miles Kimball's The Web Portfolio Guide: Creating Electronic Portfolios for the Web. (A third book I also recommend, one that focuses on programmatic use of portfolio assessment, is Liz Hamp-Lyons and Bill Condon's Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Practice, Theory, and Research.)
          Kimball's book, in particular, is useful for both teachers and students as they plan, create, revise, and deliver ePortfolios. And the Instructor's Preface includes one of the most succinct overviews of portfolios as authentic assessment tools that I've ever read, especially in the context of "wedding" technological literacy instruction and portfolio pedagogy, as Hawisher and Selfe put it. Here's one golden nugget, for instance, and it's perhaps the most important theme that Kimball threads throughout the text: "Integrate portfolios into pedagogy. Web portfolios, like traditional portfolios, work best if they are tightly integrated into courses and programs, rather than tacked on to the end. Introducing students to the concepts and techniques of portfolio building early in a course or program generally yields the best results. Providing time for portfolio workshops can encourage students to see portfolios as a central part of the learning experience. Time spent on developing portfolios is generally well worth it because it helps students build a fuller understanding of what they have learned" (xxiii). These principles are extremely important for using technology in English, English Education, Composition, and Technical Communication courses. But they are absolutely crucial to effective ePortfolio pedagogy (Rice). Furthermore, the final chapter enables students to begin to see how their work might be scaleable in terms of creating professional portfolios or hypertextual resumes, including how to convert resumes to PDF and market them.
          Kimball also does a solid job answering the all-important question, "how is it possible to tell if a web portfolio is good?" (20). He points out that ePortfolios are more than just selected collections of artifacts. (As you review the literature you get to know this phrase well, "a portfolio is a purposeful and selected collection of works.") Indeed, Kimball describes how ePortfolios, because they use flexible new media, are highly malleable rhetorical instruments. Good ePortfolios must be constructed and presented in such a way that convinces someone particular about something particular. Of course, the "something" includes requirements and standards. But Kimball's text embraces the idea that there is a place for personal voice and thoughtfulness and reflection in ePortfolios, using textual rhetoric, visual rhetoric, and structural rhetoric. In most of the books about constructing and presenting and assessing ePortfolios, personal voice and thoughtfulness is not well addressed. And in most texts, the art of visual rhetoric and structural rhetoric, especially in terms of naviagational schemes and overall metaphorical themes and storyboard mapping, is also lacking.
          Many texts simply leave out the value of revising ePortfolios, too. In the process of selecting artifacts students make decisions about including and not including specific content. Reflecting about those decisions is a significant teachable moment. But it's not really until students have the ePortfolio completely pulled together that they begin to see new connections between artifacts and learning. Revising after this stage, and after one receives peer and teacher feedback, is very important. Kimball suggests students create a "revision action list," a list that includes ares of concern and prioritizes strategies to make effective and reflective changes (132-39). Kimball's approach here, as it is elsewhere in his text, isn't just about making a graphic prettier or choosing a better font. This is where the book excels. He includes sections about using powerful verbs, embracing active voice, managing sentence and paragraph length, avoiding wordiness, and finding a balance between casual and formal language. In other words, an ePortfolio is a combination of content and form. Twin legs that must be taught and learned together. That is, instead of finding a template and filling in content, or vice-versa, the content and the form are composed together; synchronously and dialectically. Kimball's text relates this principle well. And the companion Web site includes useful professional, student, and academic portfolio examples.
          There's at least one additional component of this text that "does it better than most." In the fourth chapter Kimball has a section on "Graphics, Multimedia, and Copyright." Because of the compelling power of the visual, the aural, and the multimodal in ePortfolios, it is very important for teachers and students to know fair use and copyright laws. Kimball points out, correctly, that fair use depends on four basic criteria:
  1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is commercial or nonprofit
  2. The nature of the copyrighted work
  3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
  4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (Consortium for Educational Technology in University Systems). (88-89)
Kimball clearly outlines what students generally can and can't use, while teaching the basic new media skills we tend to teach students; such as copy/pasting graphics, creating sound clips and video files, considering design principles of typeface and color, cropping/modifying/adjusting/optimizing/etc. .gif and .jpg files, and more. It's a good book. Buy a copy. Or, if you're a teacher, check out ABL's "instructor exam copy" link.
 

Works Cited

Barrett, Helen. "Using Technology to Support Alternative Assessment and Electronic Portfolios." ElectronicPortfolios.com 23 MAR 02. 7 JAN 03 <http://electronicportfolios.com/portfolios.html>.

Batson, Trent. "The Electronic Portfolio: What's it All About?" Syllabus 16.5 (DEC 2002): 14-17.

Cambridge, Darren. "E-PORTFOLIOS (NLII 2002–2003 Key Theme)." Educause. 7 JAN 03 <http://www.educause.edu/nlii/keythemes/eportfolios.asp>.

"Creating and Using PORTFOLIOS on the Alphabet Superhighway." The Alphabet Superhighway. 7 JAN 03 <http://www.ash.udel.edu/ash/teacher/portfolio.html>.

Dean, Kathleen. "The Portfolio Clearinghouse." American Association for Higher Education. 7 JAN 03 <http://www.aahe.org/teaching/portfolio_db.htm>.

"ePortfolio Dialogue Day Resources." Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction 12 SEP 02. 7 JAN 03 <http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eportfolio02/resources.php>.

"A Guide to Portfolios." Phoenixville Area School District. 7 JAN 03 <http://www.pasd.com/PSSA/writing/portguid/portguid.htm>.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Wedding the Technologies of Writing Portfolios and Computers: The Challenges of Electronic Classrooms.” Eds. Kathleen Blake Yancey and Irwin Weiser. Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 1997. 305-21.

Kimball, Miles A. The Web Portfolio Guide: Creating Electronic Portfolios for the Web. NY: Longman, 2003.

_____. "The Web Portfolio Guide Online." Longman. 7 JAN 03 <http://wps.ablongman.com/long_kimball_wpg_1>.

Mullen, Laurie, William I. Bauer, and W. Webster Newbold. “Developing a University-Wide Electronic Portfolio System for Teacher Education.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 6.2 (Fall 2001): <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/6.2/binder2.html?coverweb/assessment/mullenbauernewbold/main.htm>.

Rice, Richard Aaron. "Teaching and Learning First-Year Composition with Digital Portfolios." Diss. Ball State University, 2002. <http://english.ttu.edu/rice/dissertation.pdf>.

Syverson, Peg. "Beyond Portfolios: The Learning Record Online." University of Texas at Austin. 7 JAN 03 <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/olr/>.

Whithaus, Carl. “A Review of Electronic Portfolios: Emerging Practices in Student, Faculty, and Institutional Learning.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 7.1 (Spring 2002): <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/7.1/binder.html?reviews/whithaus>.

Whithaus, Carl, et al. “Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Practice, Theory & Research: A Review.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 5.2 (Fall 2000): <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/5.2/binder.html?reviews/whithaus/index.html>.