WAC 4: ePortfolios

I have grounded my concept of a writing across the curriculum program (WAC) in connectivist theory: that knowledge and communication are network phenomena, a function of mapping and traversing complex, multi-scale networks. As Stephen Downes says in his post Types of Knowledge and Connective Knowledge, "connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections." To my mind, language is one of our primary tools for mapping and traversing these networks. Indeed, language is more than a tool—language is a fundamental part of the knowledge and communication networks themselves. Language is like DNA: it is the tool and instructions by which the organism/network emerges, it is part of the scaffolding of the emerging organism/network, and it is part of the maintenance system for the emerged organism/network. Language, like DNA, is woven into the very knowledge and communications that emerge from its play. It's a bit like making the blueprints and hammers and saws part of the house they are helping to build.

But this is still a very abstract concept that may not have an intuitively obvious application. A core, practical application in my WAC is the ePortfolio, an ideal application that fits nicely into a connectivist, network perspective. I'll say why, but first let me point out that I am not saying that ePortfolios are connectivist. A constructivist, cognitivist, or behaviorist can use ePortfolios as well as any connectivist, but I particularly like a connectivist take on ePortfolios. Here's why, and let me cite my source up front: Jonan Donaldson's article Digital Portfolios in the Age of the Read/Write Web in the current issue of Educause Review Online. Mr. Donaldson, an instructional designer at Oregon State University, says all of the things I want to say about ePortfolios and more, so I'm leaning on him heavily in this post.

The first key feature of ePortfolios is that they have emerged from the read/write web. I began using ePortfolios when the e(lectronic) in ePortfolios meant a PowerPoint burned to a CD. This was decidedly old-school and not very network aware. All that is changed, and now ePortfolios are best understood as a function of complex, multi-scale networks. This implies that all ePortfolios are on the open Web and not locked within some organizational silo and that they are owned and managed by the student.

Jonan Donaldson lists a number of affordances provided by ePortfolios:

• ePortfolios help shift from teacher-centric education to student-centric education, as students become active producers of knowledge rather than passive consumers of knowledge. Rather than simply learning the eternal truth from their teachers, students use ePortfolios to create connections among their bits of personal knowledge and the people they encounter in school. This fits well with Downes' contention that "The very forms of reason and enquiry employed in the classroom must change. Instead of seeking facts and underlying principles, students need to be able to recognize patterns and use things in novel ways. Instead of systematic methodical enquiry,… students need to learn active and participative forms of enquiry. Instead of deference to authority, students need to embrace diversity and recognize (and live with) multiple perspectives and points of view." ePortfolios can provide the scaffolding for this approach to learning.
• ePortfolios provide students with intrinsic motivation. As Donaldson points out, "Turning consumers of knowledge into producers of knowledge transforms learning into an active experience." Mapping networks is not a passive activity, and it requires some intrinsic motivation. Deleuze and Guattari make this clear in their distinction between mapping and tracing the rhizome. Traditional education is largely a matter of tracing which depends on extrinsic motivations such as rewards and punishments rather than mapping which relies on intrinsic motivations.
• ePortfolios enhance student autonomy. Donaldson says, "Not only can students individualize the look and feel of their portfolios through templates and design options, they can also enjoy increased individualization of content and the delivery format of portfolio artifacts." ePortfolios let students "recognize patterns and use things in novel ways" and "learn active and participative forms of enquiry." In other words, it helps fit the knowledge to the student rather than fit the students to the knowledge. (Many may seem autonomy as inconsistent with networking, but this is a misunderstanding of networks. Each node in a network must maintain its own autonomy and integrity to perform its role in the network and to make the network what it is.)
• ePortfolios enhance collaboration. Donaldson notes wryly that "it is often said that we learn best when we do, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that we learn best when we do together." A network demands collaboration and cooperation (in Downes' sense of the term) among its various nodes, and research shows that when students connect to (network with) a teacher, another student, or a community of practice, then they are more likely to stay in college and succeed.
• ePortfolios enhance digital literacy, as Donaldson notes, "incidentally while tackling the learning objectives at hand." Students learn to recognize, validate, and use a wider range of patterns in different kinds of data and information (text, image, video, audio, number, and more), and they learn to orchestrate this data into coherent, appealing documents. These are incredibly valuable skills.
• ePortfolios enhance students' digital image. Most of today's college students already have digital image that is unfortunately not under their control and not always positive. Building an ePortfolio helps the student to learn how to build a professional brand and why that brand is important. The online world is not going away, and our students must know how to navigate it and use its powers.
• ePortfolios enhance students' 21st century writing skills. As Donaldson says, modern writing means "being able to create digital content that conveys information effectively for dissemination through websites, blogs, wikis, online presentations, illuminating graphics, audio content, and video content." This ain't your grandma's writing. Rather, this is the production of illuminated manuscripts: documents illuminated with image, video, sound, calculation, hyperlinks, and yes, text. ePortfolios help us learn this kind of writing, the kind of writing we will do in the 21st century.

I want to add to Donaldson's list that ePortfolios connect students to their communities of practice—first as students and then as fledgling professionals. Blogs, Twitter, RSS feeds, and more tools that can be aggregated on an ePortfolio help connect students to their personal learning networks and to their communities of practice. They connect to each other to get through school and then to practicing professionals to join a profession.

Finally, perfect WAC would include ePortfolios from the faculty and staff. I know of no better way to teach students how to build an ePortfolio than by building one myself.

Yes, ePortfolios.

ePortfolios and Networks

In our roles as coordinators of Albany State's writing across the curriculum program, Tom and I have been talking about adding student ePortfolios to the program. We see ePortfolios as great tools for organizing student writing in any given class, resulting in enhanced learning in that class and an enhanced presence on the Web for the student. This seems promising. Then a few weeks ago, when we were discussing what to do this coming academic year with our next cohort of WAC faculty, I got the idea that we might have each faculty member create their own ePortfolio. I want to think through that idea a little more in this post, and I want to feed off an essay by Chris M. Anson called Portfolios for Teachers: Writing Our Way to Reflective Practice. The essay was originally published in Laurel Black's 1994 collection New Directions in Portfolio Asessment, but I found it in T. R. Johnson's Teaching Compositions: Background Readings (2005).

Anson seems to view teaching portfolios as a form of story-telling. He says that "teaching portfolios invite teachers to tell the story of their work and in doing so to become more reflective of their own practice" (3).  Thus, a teaching portfolio is more than just a collection of artifacts, or "a container for storing and displaying evidence of a teacher's knowledge and skills" (4); rather, a teaching portfolio is, first "something programmatic or anchored in a community, [and not] a 'file' stored away in a department cabinet" (5). Given my conception of writing as a function of networks, this notion of ePortfolios "anchored in a community" seems promising, but as I read his essay, I came to realize that Anson was writing in 1994, the Dark Ages of the Web, long before Web 2.0, and so I found the promise more latent than realized. The shift from print-based portfolios to ePortfolios is much more than the addition of a letter – it's a shift from an ossuary to a lively street corner. By the way, I don't think Anson v. 2011 would necessarily disagree with what I say in this post – it's just that Anson v. 1994 couldn't see Web 2.0 coming down the pike.

A traditional portfolio is a collection of artifacts that demonstrates one's roles, knowledge, and experiences. It defines one in some public, professional manner, as Anson's own, now web-based portfolio demonstrates. Even though Anson has moved his own teaching portfolio to the Web, it is still recognizable as a traditional portfolio: a collection of lists and artifacts. It has not become the living hub of Anson's own PLN, or professional/personal learning network, nor his Net brand, and this is what I think an ePortfolio can be. It's what I want to teach our teachers and what I want them to teach their students. In short, I want our teachers to use the ePortfolio to define themselves on the Web from the center outward (to follow Morin's dictum) in a dynamic document that orchestrates the shifting connections in their PLN, or community of practice. Unlike the portfolio, the ePortfolio is not a series of still shots; rather, it is a window into an unfolding drama.

An ePortfolio does all that a portfolio does. It keeps all the artifacts that Anson lists:

• syllabi & course overviews
• assignments & exams
• study guides & other classroom materials
• student papers with teacher's comments
• student evaluations
• teacher reflections on peer-observations & course evaluations
• self-evaluations
• narrative accounts of problem-solving
• responses to case studies
• journals documenting thoughtfulness about instructional issues
• goal statements & philosophies
• letters of assessments from others

But it does more. So much more. First, an ePortfolio is a nerve center that orchestrates and tweaks the connections that make up who and what the owner knows and can do. An ePortfolio is very much like Sporns' concept of the brain: an intensely rich neurological hub, an electronic substrate, that has the tools and connective tissue to self-organize into meaningful patterns and that has the resources to interact with its environment to augment and to extend its patterns of meaning.

But that is a bit abstract. What does such an ePortfolio actually look like, and how does it work? Let me  envision the ePortfolio that I want to create for myself and then help my faculty to create for themselves.

I might start with one of the public wiki services such as Google Sites. Wikis are a most flexible tool that can accommodate much of what might be created in an ePortfolio. For instance, a wiki can house all those different kinds of documents listed above. Thus, I am not overlooking or denigrating the repository function of an ePortfolio. My ePortfolio will house work that best exemplifies my professional skills and expertise, including Word-style documents, PDFs, and web documents, but because all this is on the Web, I can link to documents rather than physically house them all in the same space. Moreover, I can link to Google Docs which will update automatically as I continue to work with them and edit them. Of course, I can also create static, archive copies. The point is that I can display static and dynamic documents depending on what suits my purpose.

Then, my ePortfolio should have a blog component that captures my current thinking and my reflection on my work and professional learning network. My blog – this blog that you are reading just now – is often the incubator for ideas that turn into professional presentations and publications, and it helps me figure out what I mean. It helps me reflect on my thinking over the past few years as I uncover trends and patterns in my posts. Most traditional portfolios don't have this reflective, creative component – certainly not one that is as dynamic as a blog can be.

But my blog captures more than just my thoughts – it also captures my interaction with people who read the blog and make comments. Now we are adding a feature that the traditional portfolio simply cannot do as well as an ePortfolio: connectivity. A lively blog shows both those who read me and me myself the kinds of professional connections and conversations that I am cultivating. As most professionals know, my network of connections and conversations can say as much about my professionalism as anything I might say about myself.

Then my ePortfolio should have a reading component, links to my RSS feeds and social bookmarks and any other publicly available Web documents that mean something to me. Do you want to know what's really been on my mind for the past couple of years? Then look at my Diigo bookmarks. I should display those on or link to them from my ePortfolio.

My ePortfolio should display or link to my slideshows, podcasts, instructional videos, and whatever other multimedia documents I have hosted on the Web. It should display or link to online classes and webinars that I have participated in. Of course, it should also list, or better yet, link to any classes that I have taken or taught.

Well, this is already a rather involved list of things that my ePortfolio should do. Those of you familiar  with building personal learning networks will immediately seen how indebted this idea of ePortfolios really is. Some might argue that a portfolio should remain a static snapshot created solely for the purpose of demonstrating ones professional expertise to very specific people for very specific reasons. Obviously,  my idea of a dynamic ePortfolio doesn't agree. I should start building my ePortfolio soon, and I'll link it back to this post when I have something to show (if I remember). By then, I'm sure I will think of more things that the ePortfolio can do. and it would be great if some of you would drop some suggestions in the Comment box.

And thanks to Chris Anson for kicking off this exploration about teaching ePortfolios.