Electronic Portfolios
Colleges and universities are increasingly looking for ways to help students understand and represent the work they undertook during their time as undergraduates. One way this has been done in the past is through the use of portfolio projects. Often associated with capstone courses or graduation requirements, portfolios have provided a helpful way for students to select and present highlights of their college career, including documents such as major assignments and essays. The digital shift in culture and society that higher education is increasingly participating in brings with it new opportunities to rethink the possibility and power of portfolios for student learning and university assessment.
In its paper form, a portfolio is a way for a student to collect and organize representative assignments and projects. The paper portfolio can be as simple as a folder of major essays, though the more sophisticated paper portfolio assignments have often asked students to reflect on the assignments, to share drafts of progress, and even to include comments on the assignments from faculty. The inclusion of more reflective and progress driven elements of student learning into a portfolio help to create a more representative sample of a student’s learning and achievement in college.
The promise of Electronic Portfolios—often called “ePortfolios”—build on the possibilities and success of paper portfolios, while potentially expanding the concept in ways that are unique to the digital medium. An ePortfolio’s collection of information may include text, electronic files, images, video, audio, blog entries and hyperlinks to other online sources.
Electronic portfolios have many advantages over their paper counterparts, as they can be continually updated and are easy to share with many people. They can be used to display a student’s intellectual development, personal reflections about a project or area of study, and achievements related to a particular academic or professional goal. In this way, ePortfolios can be seen as a record of learning, providing evidence of the student’s progress and successes over time.
We are still in the very early stages of developing robust ePortfolio software, models, and assessment techniques, but the dialogue about the potential and possibilities for ePortfolios are underway. At this year’s TLISI, we brought one of the leading experts in the field of ePortfolios and writing, Kathleen Yancey, to speak about the unique role that ePortfolios can play in higher education. Video excerpts from Dr. Yancey’s talk can found below, and the entire presentation is available to Georgetown faculty and students.
Kathleen Yancey
Kathleen B. Yancey, the Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, directs the graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition Studies. Past President of The Council of Writing Program Administrators, she is also a Past Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest scholarly organization for college writing faculty. Currently, she is President of the National Council of Teachers of English, a 50,000+ member organization of literacy educators from pre-K to graduate school. With Barbara Cambridge and Darren Cambridge, she directs the International Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research, which has brought together over 40 institutions to focus on and document the learning that takes place inside and around electronic portfolios. And as part of her near-decade-long work with the middle and high schools in Virginia Beach, she is working with English teachers to develop a “new literacies” curriculum culminating in electronic portfolios.
Yancey is also the author, editor or co-editor of over 60 chapters and refereed articles and ten books, several of which focus on reflection, portfolios, and/or assessment. They include Portfolios in the Writing Classroom (1992), Assessing Writing across the Curriculum (1997), Self-Assessment and Development in Writing (2000), Situating Portfolios (1997), and Reflection in the Writing Classroom. The section editor for student portfolios in the AAHE publication Electronic Portfolios (2001), she guest edited the 1996 issue of Computers and Composition dedicated to electronic portfolios. In the June 2004 issue of College Composition and Communication, she published an analysis of electronic portfolios that contrasts them with print portfolios and that defines them as “web-sensible” digital compositions. In summer, 2008, Stylus Publishing will release her co-edited volume (with Barbara Cambridge and Darren Cambridge), Electronic Portfolios 2.0, which documents the electronic portfolio projects on many campuses, in general education programs, and in various disciplinary contexts.