KY: I actually have a very small theory, not with a capital “T,” but a small “t.” It's about generations of change. I think it's quite clear that even though electronic portfolios don't have a lot of history, the patterns of development have nonetheless emerged pretty quickly. This is partly a function of the fact that it's located in technology and technology changes so quickly. If you're somebody whose morphing from print, then in some ways the logical first thing to do is to figure out what role links might play because that's an easy kind of “connect” to make (no pun intended).
Another easy way to think about it is in terms of what you want that opening screen to look like. What role will design play here? This question helps us think about design as a maturational process in the same way that writing is a maturational process. If you come at it that way, you understand that the dancing bears (which, yes, you will see!) is actually OK as a first step.
KY: Exactly. That's a kind of first step. The tendency really is to think initially of internal links and then people pretty quickly morph to external links and include those as well. The fact that you have those links doesn't mean that they're meaningful, but that's OK.
Then, if it's really collaborative, if it's really social software, which is another way to think about electronic portfolios, then you might be looking for layers of connection. You might be looking for a student's portfolio, say in a particular class, to have links to other portfolios in that class. Then to have programmatic links to those that are inside the institution and to links that are more content-driven, let's say. There are a lot of people who are interested in portfolios because of their potential to connect to non-school or (again in the jargon) “co-curricular activities.” And they're wonderful for planning devices: You can create an arrangement that has space for what's going to come next without your identifying what it might be. It's not that we couldn't have done some of this in print, but we didn't. You don't ordinarily have portfolios in multiple volumes, but you could have a very, very expansive electronic portfolio. And people do.
|
Of course, the other thing that's interesting about it is that you have lots of different kinds of exhibits from audio files to video files to PowerPoints. If you go there, you have to say “Do I actually have the kind of curriculum I might want to have?” In other words, if the exhibits don't emerge from the curriculum then where are they going to come from? |
This thinking engages you in thinking about the relationship between the portfolio and the curriculum itself which is a very fun way to think about it from my point of view.
Here again, you've got to come up with new criteria. The first time I did this, I was doing it in two different classes. One was an MA class in professional communication, and it was easy to say to those students, “These are technological skills you're going to need to have, and so this is the outcome and these are the criteria. If many roads can go to Rome, let's see which roads you'd like to take and what you learn in that process.” It was wonderful because the portfolios looked quite different, and as long you could see what the logic was, you were actually really on to something. We had a moment inside that class where the students were basically presenting drafts of these to each other in the same way that you would with papers. It was really fun and interesting.
Now, at the same time, I was teaching a sophomore-level lit class, and I had 37 students. I gave them the option to do a print literature portfolio, and I shared some live portfolios. I said, “These are models. They also look very different one to the next, but here's essentially what we're looking for; or you can do an electronic one, and I don't really know exactly what that one's going to look like, so you'll be taking a chance.” Some students wanted to do that. This experience helped me think about how the criteria might change, so it's really been a process.
Two other points I would make: I did have this theory about generations of change in e-portfolios and how one might grow into a more sophisticated and complex portfolio. I did an independent study with a student last year, Josh Reynolds, who helped me see where this theory seemed to be accurate and where it really wasn't. We did that in the context of knowing something about a number of other portfolio programs. There is this National Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research that I lead with Barbara Cambridge and also with the help of Darren Cambridge. We have two cohorts involved, so twenty institutions do lots of different kinds of portfolios. My preference is for a common tools approach. But there are institutions in the two cohorts who use Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI), and others who use commercial providers. Some of what I'm saying about generations of change, I think, is much less true for systems where there's less opportunity to create, where the system is more inclined to “script” you. And some systems, in my view, do some pretty serious scripting and don't allow the students much opportunity to work with the technology, to have control over how they're represented.
Given my own values, I'm less happy with that kind of situation. It's not that it doesn't do another kind of good work; systems have a kind of utility that common tool approaches don't. What happens is that the systems are, generally speaking, databases, and you can “mine the data,” and you can learn a lot from looking at the data inside the system. To date, people are not learning a lot. The data are there, but nobody has time to look at them! [Laughs] Another thing that a system can do is allow a lot of interoperability which means that people could move from one site of learning to another much more seamlessly than is often the case now. No question, systems do have value.
I think the model of technology you choose is pretty important, and it's something that people need to think about. My experience has been that when students want to do something new and interesting, they really want to learn the technology. I want to be in a place—both metaphorically and literally—where I can assure that that happens. That's fundamentally important because otherwise I think what happens is that the technology writes you. I would also point out that in the world of wizards (and I don't mean the Halloween people [Laughs]), this is evermore important. Take the case of the résumé as an example. If you go on Microsoft Word's website, you will find quite literally something like 147 wizards. You choose one, and it can résumé you. I think that in that moment, you miss an opportunity to learn something about rhetoric and composition that has to do with the relationship between and among genre, documents, visual and verbal rhetoric, rhetorical situations, and representing self. Finally, that's what a composition curriculum is all about.
