WR Portfolio Project: BU College of Arts and Sciences

If you take permission from one-time students to archive their portfolios and use them in the classroom, this activity offers students a chance to perform a genre analysis on former students' writing portfolios and draw conclusions almost key portfolio features: Students will come to recognize that these portfolios are both archives of writing and personal reflections. This activity allows students to begin to imagine their own ePortfolios, collect the relevant material, and preview the range of possibilities that an ePortfolio invites.

Objectives

To identify primal portfolio features, varied styles, and organizational schemes; to brainstorm to identify aspects of students' own portfolios that will need careful attention.

Cardinal Terms

metacognition; self-assessment; portfolios

Part 1: Update your portfolio

Instructor Tip: Yous may want to hold 2-iii "portfolio check-in days" scattered throughout the semester, during which you set bated ten minutes of class fourth dimension at the starting time or cease of the catamenia to permit students to ask whatsoever questions about Digication, share the current status of their portfolios, and go along to discuss the work of curation and reflection that portfolios encourage.

  1. Update your Digication portfolio, incorporating some of your work from this form so far. Be prepared to share your ideas and your portfolio with the class.
  2. Postal service at to the lowest degree 5 separate exhibits in your updated portfolio, including your latest draft of our current paper.
  3. Endeavor loading this consignment into Digication in several different ways:
    • Re-create and paste from another document
    • Upload equally a file
    • Load into module every bit a gallery
    • Post a scan or a cellphone moving picture of handwritten notes/outlines
  4. Add brief commentary to your exhibits in the form of annotations or captions (where yous place this commentary is up to you–top of the page, sidebar textbox, bottom of the page?).
  5. Endeavor uploading different media: images, video, sound files, etc.
  6. Note that you may already have enough exhibits. If so, just polish the portfolio to make information technology look the style you lot want.
  7. Admission help if you need information technology: 􏰀If y'all are having difficulty with the e-portfolio platform, re-acquaint yourself with the procedures for using Digication by consulting the how-to site for tips on assembling your eastward-Portfolio or the Portfolio Virtually Portfolios.

Part 2: Clarify other portfolios

Instructor Tip: As a follow-upwardly action, without the discourse analysis component, you might consider using one of two dissimilar versions of a portfolio peer review canvass, either a checklist-style peer review or an open up-ended peer review.

  1. Peruse at least six portfolios (from archived educatee portfoliosthese samples or from another list of portfolios your instructor has provided), just cull iii to analyze advisedly.
  2. Consider the following questions for the three portfolios you take called to analyze.
  3. Hash out your thoughts with minor groups in form.
    • What do you observe when you read these three portfolios advisedly?
    • What strategies does the writer use to engage the reader?
    • Does the author make specific reference to any of the exhibits in the portfolio?
    • Is the tone of the introduction/cogitating essays different from the tone used in the writer's more formal essays? Tin you find evidence of this distinctive tone, and/or where does the author'due south personal voice come up forth?
    • Do the three portfolios take a perceptible organizing principle? What is the organizing principle of each portfolio, and where in the portfolios exercise y'all find show of it?
    • What do you notice about the commentary–the captions, annotations, and accompanying notes–that the authors provide for their exhibits? How and where does the author employ such commentary? Is it constructive? Does the author move across mere caption and engage in analysis in her commentary?
    • What practise you recall almost the various approaches in these portfolios? What can y'all say virtually the pros and cons of each?
  4. Consider your ain portfolio, and those of your groupmates. What might you alter most your portfolio later on reading the sample portfolios, and why?