The trouble with print portfolios
Traditionally, if a teacher wants a collection of a student’s work over the course of a semester, a portfolio meets the need. Students select their best work, print it all out, staple it together, and hand it in. It’s familiar—they printed out all the individual assignments for grading in the first place—and simple. It works great if we want to make sure our students know how to produce paper-based documents, slice a lot of trees, and become adept with staplers.
But what if we want our students to be comfortable with more modern information delivery and consumption methods, with electronic documents and online delivery? What if we want students to see their work as more than just papers to be printed and submitted, or see the writing process as more than write/revise/submit? Student portfolios submitted to teachers have an audience of one, a potential impact of zero, and a lifespan of one grade. The writing is literally done, according to the mind of the author, to please a single person for a single course and nothing more.
Today’s information flows are far more dynamic and interconnected. Online text is expected to have hyperlinks, to logically connect with other writing, not stand in isolation. This ecology of hypertext is far different from the traditional paper-based way of looking at information distribution. Theorists like Barthes, Bolter, Landow, and Manovich write entire books about the change hypertext has brought to our information-processing habits. Should we still expect students to submit isolated, print-based documents?
Similarly, today’s students are being asked to act as “producers of knowledge” (Johnson; Lippincott), users of information (Brown and DuGuid), “conscientious citizens” (Jenkins), meaning-builders (Lessig), and contributors to a collective intelligence (Jenkins). Each of these authors show that effective learning happens within a context, specifically one that is responsive—emphasizing a flow of information that is impossible with a print portfolio.
The shift toward ePortolios
A current movement in portfolio design is toward ePortfolios—student-made websites that serve as an online collection of the work that would traditionally go into print. The intent is to make a more flexible and dynamic “document” that allows students to present their work in a variety of ways. Many students default to using Google Sites to host their material because it is free and ubiquitous. Of course, using Google accounts now brings up questions of privacy which are generally left unanswered in such deliberations.
When it comes to the products students make with these systems, I have found that they are little more than brief introductions “Welcome to my portfolio” followed by a list of attached files. In effect, the website becomes little more than a digital staple. And what a staple it is. The process of creating and hosting even the most rudimentary website can become problematic in a course that doesn’t have such skills on its list of objectives. Additionally, students can continue to change the content of these sites or remove them altogether, making the version that a teacher grades subject to whatever happens to be live at that moment. A deadline becomes a moving target.
A middle ground: Digital portfolios
I propose a solution to the tricky transition we seem to be making. Rather than jumping from paper delivery all the way to complete websites, we could make a smaller move to a portfolio that maintains the traits of traditional portfolios that students and teachers are familiar with but that also benefits from electronic document creation and distribution. If we still get our students to make a single document as evidence of their best work, we could focus on content, rather than on the delivery method.
Many modern word processors, including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, support Master Documents. These documents are essentially binders, holding links to “subdocuments” that exist elsewhere. Students can write their essays as normal, then create a master document into which they compile their work. This master document can include an automated Table of Contents, which can update itself to reflect the changing contents as students add more files. The ToC even has hyperlinks to the various subdocuments, making navigation through the portfolio simpler. Page numbering, if automated in the individual essays, continues consecutively throughout the document. These simple automation elements are invaluable when dealing with larger documents like portfolios.
Beyond document organization, we could teach students to enhance their documents with hyperlinks and metadata. Bibliographies, rather than being static informational pages, could include hyperlinks where appropriate, allowing students to directly connect their documents to others that helped shape their thinking. By adding document metadata, students could ensure their names, class information, and assignment overviews remain a part of the document. If portfolios are published online, search engines could use that metadata to better understand the document without relying on essay content alone. Even student names could be hyperlinked to their email addresses, making the portfolio a point of contact for future researchers.
Suddenly, what had been a static portfolio now serves as an automated, interconnected document. The same content as before can easily be presented, but now, a layer of extra information and functionality can enhance the portfolios, making them work as part of a network of information creation, rather than as a single entity designed to serve the wishes of the teacher. By creating digital portfolios, students could view their documents as a tool to help future learners connect ideas to others.
All we need to do is teach our students a little bit about document design: adding metadata through document properties, consistent formatting through document styles, advanced document management through master documents and tables of contents, and interconnectedness through hyperlinks. Students can learn these tools quickly because many are extensions of existing knowledge. I produced a short instructional screencast last semester to help my students create their own master documents. They picked up the process with very few technical hiccups. The tools, then, can be used in future assignments for other classes, and the document-design skills help in the workplace, as well.
Rather than asking students to create websites in composition class, I say we focus on the composition. Keep the attention on student writing and their documents, but ultimately help them produce a document that takes advantage of the tools they use every day and goes beyond the staple.
Disclosure of re-use:
1) I presented a poster about creating digital portfolios at the 2012 UCF Information Fluency Conference.
2) I gave a presentation about learning to make digital portfolios at the 2012 Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy.
3) I presented digital portfolios as “A Byte in the Middle” to the 2013 CCCC Computer Connection.
4) I updated the poster for the Digital Pedagogy Poster Sessions at the 2013 CCCC.
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