Help & Support:

Organizing Your Digital Portfolio

One of the contexts to think about when designing your digital portfolio is the difference in expectations for reading in print and reading in digital environments. It's different.

In your Digication portfolio, readers don't turn a page — they click. As you know from visiting web sites yourself, how many times you have to click and how many pages and destinations you encounter often dictates your impressions and evaluation of those web sites. You'll have this same rhetorical challenge with your digital portfolio:

• What do you want readers to see first?
• What do you want them to see next?
• Where do you want them to spend the most time?
• What effect do you want your portfolio to have?

Your Reflective Essay is a key component of your portfolio because it sets the tone and offers an organizing principle for readers, all of whom — no matter the platform, print or digital — need and want an organizing principle. Think about Facebook's organizing principle, and how readers' expectations and navigation have been shaped over time:

Prior to Facebook, the Geneva Bible (1560) was the first "annotated" bible, and the first to number chapters and verses — a shift in organizing principles for reading and literacy practices with no end of controversy. On many pages, the annotations were longer than the biblical text:

Your portfolio functions on a slightly smaller scale, but some of the questions are similar: who is the authority in the text, for example? Is an annotation like a hypertext link? If you can't provide an annotation for everything, what should be annotated?

Digication's structure allows you to decide on an organizing principle: you can arrange "pages" along the left-hand side menu; you can provide "headers" along the top; you can insert "modules" into your pages with embedded video, text, audio annotations, and images. On page 7 of Digication's Help Guide, you'll find ideas about structuring your portfolio:

Let's assume that you have a few short papers, a couple of longer ones, and various drafts and examples of revision to present and to showcase. 

Organize by Sections: one strategy is to organize your portfolio and materials as sections on the left-hand side of the page, named such that readers know what they're getting into when they click on a link: "Argument Essay," for example, rather than "Paper #1." When you are discussing and reflecting on your Argument Essay in your reflection, you can link to that page from within the reflection essay.

Organize by Pages: or you can create a section and pages for different assignments:

• Argument Essay Draft
• Argument Essay Revision
• Argument Essay Final Version

With this organizing principle, you can direct readers' attention to different features in each version: how you reshaped an idea; how you revised for tone; how you addressed objections; how you edited; or how you proofread.

Organize by Modules: you can create a page for an assignment and add separate "modules" for different iterations, concluding with your final draft.