Secret's Out: ENG 642 is a Giant E-Portfolio

E-Portfolios are useful. They’re getting more useful year after year.

As our symbiotic relationship with technology and internet grows steadily more symbiotic, academia is striving to understand it more and more. For this purpose, e-portfolios were introduced into course criteria. The purpose of these portfolios is for students “to demonstrate that they can make connections among those things they have learned” (weaver 2005). Across subjects and platforms, students are encouraged to take the infinite hours they have spent browsing obscure topics on Wikipedia and cat videos in YouTube and synthesize their vast knowledge of the internet into a comprehensive portfolio. “The goal (is) to see how a student might best demonstrate general education competencies without letting a structured portfolio template or tool interfere with his creativity and learning” (30)

But more than that, the portfolios allow a second level of analysis to emerge: the remediation. Yancey’s article, “Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-first Century,” doesn’t use this word, but it’s clear that it is implied. The e-portfolios allow commentary from the students on their experiences creating the portfolio and so allow a synthesis of creation and creator. “Put simply, students’ explanations, whether through reflective commentary or interviews, provide a window into the e-portfolio experience” (30). Students are invited to participate in the project they are putting together, reflecting on their process and intention with their assignments.

The freedom allowed in these e-portfolios regarding platform and range of artifacts has allowed greater expression from the students. Included artifacts  typically include directly course-related material, semi-course related material, extracurricular material, and reflection on either or all of these. “Whether outcomes are programmatically identified or student-designed, the process of connecting artifacts to outcomes rests on the assumption that the selection of, and the reflection on, a body of evidence offers another opportunity to learn and a valid means of assessment” (31).

By making an e-portfolio for one class and reflecting on the journey to the complete portfolio, the student learns more about him/herself, the platforms used, and the material studied. “Researchers have also inquired into the impact on learning as students move from a reflection on learning inside a single context—that of the course—to a reflection on learning in a larger context, across courses” (30). In this way, the student realizes the potential of Stroupe’s Elaborationism and learns more by analyzing the process than the material itself. “The student’s ability to effectively describe his or her experience outweighs the experience itself” (31). By being invited and encouraged to actively participate with the material instead of merely analyzing it, the student feels a stronger connection with the subject and learns it better because it becomes less static with interaction.

Since I’m unable to be in class today to discuss this, I guess I’ll talk a little about my reflections of this article in relation to the Computers and Composition class.

I feel that if there’s a single article we’ve read that sums up why ENG 642 is necessary to a curriculum, it’s this one. I’ve taken very few classes that have asked me to evaluate material in term of a personal interaction with the material and not just objectively analyze it. This is the first course I’ve ever taken that WANTS me to focus on my process and wants to help me understand why I work the way I do in relation to academic material, the internet, my extracurricular hobbies, etc.

It’s true that by analyzing these connections between myself and the texts we’ve read, I have a better understanding not just of the texts themselves, but of the technology they employ. I have a better understanding of Prezi and similar presentation programs, of blogs such as blogspot and tumblr, and of video making software (iMovie, PopcornMaker) and video distributing interfaces, YouTube being the most prominent. All this just by being asked why I consciously made a creative choice to use one technology over the other in an infinite sea of possibilities.

By asking why I thought my platform was best for the message I wanted to convey, I am implicitly being asked to understand the affordances of the program but also the affordances of MYSELF. What are MY possibilities as an internet creator and a producer in Anderson’s Prosumer Model? How do the affordances of my program of choice match up with my own, or not, and WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Furthermore, in the context of Computers and Composition, these questions are given equal weight with the standard ‘answers’ of analysis. They allow me to really analyze how I, a person of the computer age, can really make the most of my contributions to society and academia. 

Yancey sums up her article, and the entire objective of our class, in one sentence: 

“Reflection, which we once thought of as a proxy for learning, may itself be evidence” (31).