Eportfolios

(Note: I will, eventually, get around to doing my first 2-3 blog posts.  That will not happen this week, but it will happen.)

I admit I rarely think about portfolios, either about doing them, convincing/coaxing/bullying students into doing them, or about looking back at them.  It’s just not something I think about, particularly not from a rhetorical or pedagogical viewpoint.  I like them, they’re important, but I admit to not thinking about them very deeply.  That said, I have compiled a lot of them; I am a creative writer, majoring in creative writing, and I have therefore written not only a lot of pieces for my workshop classes here, but also for my classes in community college.  (Admittedly, those classes did not have a lot in the way of actual reflection or revision.)  Creative portfolios have always been print, in part because the professors preferred it, and in part because the internet is a teeming shark tank of potential creative-idea poachers, and writers get paranoid about their copyrights–even if the work in question is less than Pulitzer material.

I have less experience building an e-portfolio, even though I have helped students make their own and guided them through the process.  In doing that, though, I have noticed a weighted emphasis on reflection and revision, feedback and incorporating that feedback, which is not that different from the hard copy portfolios I have had to do in the past.  Revision is always emphasized, but reflection is a bit harder to teach and a lot harder to encourage.  But as a tool, I like the idea of a portfolio–even if, as one of my students tried to do, they delete it as soon as the assignment is done.  It encourages reflection, even if the actual reflection is not especially deep or thorough; it encourages looking at one’s writing as a whole and over time, which is not often brought up, unless one is either an academic or a creative writer; and these things encourage improvement, since portfolios are usually influenced by Yancey’s mentioned outside collaboration–feedback, essentially, from either one’s classmates or one’s instructor, and usually it’s both.