Eportfolios and Core Composition
Dr. Lindsay Doukopoulos and I are working together this summer to design an eportfolio version of our core composition classes for the fall. I believe that these are now both a standard part of many composition programs at other colleges and universities and also integral to interdisciplinary studies with an eye to creating a showcase of each participating student’s growth and accomplishments over the whole of his or her undergraduate career. Here at Auburn, Drs. Margaret Marshall and Leslie Bartlett have already established an eportfolio program for students who wish to create an online space to highlight their best work and experiences to help them enter graduate programs or get jobs.
What Dr. Doukopoulos and I are considering at this early stage of a composition portfolio design is a scaffolded sequence of assignments that uses the reflection that eportfolios are so good for. This would encourage the metacognition and integrative experience of bringing text and context together so as to encourage intentional learning. For me this is also another outstanding opportunity to bring active learning to the fore. As Tracy Penny Light, Helen L. Chen, and John C. Ittelson have written in Documenting Learning with ePortfolios, if they are designed well, such classes would create a “bias toward action.” I’ll be teaching two sections of the first half of our core composition sequence this fall in our active learning classroom and, in addition to the collaborative activities I experimented with last spring, I’d like to add more that will involve them designing their individual eportfolios and deciding what items to include as they integrate their writing into a multimodal environment.
Dr. Doukopoulos and I are looking into some of the research on eportfolio in the composition classroom and we are looking at what other institutions have done with it, particularly the Universities of Waterloo, Miami, Portland State, and Georgia. The latter university rewards the best freshman composition eportfolios and I’ve looked at their students’ work at http://www.english.uga.edu/fyc/pages/11. Many decisions remain for us, not the least of which is what platform to have the students create their eportfolios on and how to avoid overtaxing the end of semester graders, but we have a promising beginning.
