The world of digital portfolios
My students have been doing portfolios in my class since the first semester I taught, when they told me I had to stick to a traditional model of grading that to me seemed to set up an adversarial relationship between me and my students. I couldn't take it. Grading pulled all the wrong strings, and seemed to go directly against any model of process we constantly harp on in composition.
My students have been doing electronic portfolios since my second semester teaching. I started teaching in a computer lab, and have slowly helped my students get better at representing their work digitally. At this point, I can't imagine going back to a traditional model of grading, and I can't imagine teaching anywhere but in a computer lab. It has fundamentally changed the way I think about work.
And my conception of portfolios keeps changing. As does Kathleen Blake Yancey's. Her current article in CCC is fantastic, putting into words a lot of my own thoughts and goals for my teaching. Strangely enough, she is talking about the very things I've been addressing on my blog, delivery changing and disappearing from print, and reemerging with the onset of digital forms of writing.
What I plan to do now in my teaching of portfolios is work more at letting my students do the representing in ways that are meaningful to them. It's easy enough for them to imitate my syllabus and arrangement of texts on a website. But as this article talks about, there may be many more things my students could do with these very public and immediate (hyper)texts. And I am initiating the use of collaborative portfolios for my teaching, to see the ways that my students might represent themselves as a class. But as Yancey states:
Yeah. The brilliance is all over these ideas. I have a lot to think about.
My students have been doing electronic portfolios since my second semester teaching. I started teaching in a computer lab, and have slowly helped my students get better at representing their work digitally. At this point, I can't imagine going back to a traditional model of grading, and I can't imagine teaching anywhere but in a computer lab. It has fundamentally changed the way I think about work.
And my conception of portfolios keeps changing. As does Kathleen Blake Yancey's. Her current article in CCC is fantastic, putting into words a lot of my own thoughts and goals for my teaching. Strangely enough, she is talking about the very things I've been addressing on my blog, delivery changing and disappearing from print, and reemerging with the onset of digital forms of writing.
What I plan to do now in my teaching of portfolios is work more at letting my students do the representing in ways that are meaningful to them. It's easy enough for them to imitate my syllabus and arrangement of texts on a website. But as this article talks about, there may be many more things my students could do with these very public and immediate (hyper)texts. And I am initiating the use of collaborative portfolios for my teaching, to see the ways that my students might represent themselves as a class. But as Yancey states:
...the medium is suggestive rather than deterministic. The virtures of the digital outlined here are more potential than realized, but this articulation demonstrates potential for a new identity, one not fully determined by medium, but possible within and through it. (753)
Yeah. The brilliance is all over these ideas. I have a lot to think about.
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