"E-Portfolios as Reflection Resumes...
...for Student Success Beyond the Academy."
Presented by Michael Cotter
Michael Cotter teaches English and is the director of the writing program at Norfolk State University in Virginia. His discussion is about e-portfolios. This topic is an idea that many professors are looking to use as not only a writing tool for students, but as an opportunity for reflection on the improvement that a student might make over the course of an entire semester. Cotter, however, focuses his talk on how e-portfolios can be useful to students beyond the academy. He says that the approach to creating an e-portfolio should be two-pronged: it should look both forward and backward. He cites Rod Keller, a professor at Brigham Young University, as the source of this approach in a discussion on using the e-portfolio as a career objective for faculty members. That view would not only showcase the "good stuff" but also showcase the path that has led to where we are. This is applicable to students.
The e-portfolio he envisions for students would chronicle everything that has brought the student to where he or she is. This would include not only the course work but also extracurricular activities, the student's technological competencies, and the events that impact the student's life such as service learning or leadership opportunities. One of the goals of this type of writing is to show students the application possibilities of the writing they are doing in a class to their lives after college. He suggests that employers frequently want to know about what a student has done beyond just the GPA; employers want an answer to the question "Who are you?" E-portfolios can help students answer that question.
Another aspect of the e-portfolio is that it serves as a personal social register. E-portfolios with the capacity to store and link files work very well. With this type of e-portfolio, students can connect documents, photographs, music, and video that demonstrate their successes and failures, the overall process by which they have arrived at the people they are. It becomes a register of their interactions beyond the classroom. It also serves as an academic timeline, chronicling the improvements they have made from their freshmen year onward. Additionally, the e-portfolio can serve as an extracurricular activity log, highlighting those out-of-the-classroom experiences that have shaped the students as people. These combined records demonstrate not only a student's competency in a field but also his or her humanity as a participant in real life. The e-portfolio requires students to be articulate, to be readers, to be writers, and to be critical thinkers, which will all be beneficial to success beyond the academy. The e-portfolio is ultimately about getting a student to reflect, demonstrate activity, and to apply skills and knowledge to the future.