Help & Support:

First-Year Writing Digital Portfolio Pilot

“An ePortfolio isn’t a place or a thing;
it’s a practice.”

"As a selected body of plural performances narrated by the writer in a reflective text and located at a particular point in time, portfolios seemed (and still seem) a representation preferable to incremental measures that seem, by contrast, to represent our successes as teachers at least as much as a student’s successes as a writer.

— Kathleen Yancey, "Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work." CCC 55:4 / June 2004.

In preparation for piloting Digication, a digital-portfolio platform, we had an initial training session on 8/24, where we began creating our teaching portfolios:

Dana Dunham
Elizabeth Bryant-Richards
Alan Ackmann
Scott Johnson
Scott Markwell
Eileen Seifert
Carolyn Leeb
Joyce Bean
Star Hall
Deborah Weiner
Tricia Hermes
Justin Staley
Darsie Bowden
Sarah Brown
Michael Moore

As we proceed with our digital-portfolio pilot project using Digication, we want to draw on the same intellectual and pedagogical questions and contexts that we have already developed in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse locally, and for which disciplinary research provides productive and practical ways of aligning FYW learning outcomes with programmatic and institutional assessment, lifelong learning, literate practices in academic discourse, and multimodal composing. The First-Year Writing Digital Portfolio Working Group will attend to these issues first by helping to decide,

• What are the goals and purposes of the First-Year Writing Digital Portfolio – from the perspectives of students, teachers, and administrators?
• Who are the audiences for students’ digital portfolios?
• What should be included in students’ digital portfolios?
• Who will decide?
• What will it look like?
• What happens to the students’ digital portfolios after a course is over?
• What difference will students’ digital portfolios make?

Michael Moore will introduce the session with some contextual background on writing portfolios and the transition to digital portfolios for teaching & learning uses:

• Introductions and overview of Digication FYW pilot site
• The why: intellectual, rhetorical (claims), technical
• Elbow/Belanoff to Yancey
• Two stories
• Pilot group support, AQ2010

Sarah Brown from Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS), and with a freshly minted M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse, will lead the technical training and hands-on session, during which we will design and compose our teaching portfolios. Sarah also designed our documentation:

• Getting Started
• Organization
• Navigation
• Creating a Banner
• Adding Images
• Adding Videos

We'll begin with two digital portfolio stories--