Big-Picture Thinking

In “Assessing the Future: Eportfolio Trends, Uses, and Options in Higher Education,” by Michael Reese and Ron Levy of Johns Hopkins University, I like their idea of "making competencies and outcome central to the curriculum,” “teaching portable skills,” “blending information literacy, technology fluency, and domain knowledge,” and “treating students as big picture thinkers.”

Ideally what I want, then, are students to see their assignments not as distinct academic exercises aimed at distinct skills, but as components of inquiry and thought about a semester-long investigation that might have implications for them beyond their semesters of first-year composition: to think and to write with purpose and context.

I also hadn’t thought about students loading their eportfolios onto DVDs, which they mention in passing, but even if they were to create online versions, there may still be some value in having a back-up on a DVD used as storage. However, I’m not as confident as the authors are that students are open to broadcasting their lives, and voluntary, mandatory, and privacy issues need to be accounted for (which is one reason among others that I'm beginning with the Canvas platform). Most of all, I was struck by one of their “challenges to adoption” which seems particularly relevant to our project: “users may be searching for a meaningful or well-defined problem for which e-portfolios [sic] are the solution.” I think when I teach research-based composition next spring, and I use the eportfolio format, that this will be the way to go.