Dr. Elizabeth Davis’s third Hack and Yack Series post. \u00a0Enjoy!<\/em><\/p>\n

One of my duties as the Coordinator of the Writing Certificate Program at the University of Georgia is teaching a one-hour course for certificate students in which they compose the eportfolio that serves as their capstone project for the certificate. The required \u201cEportfolio Workshop\u201d is the end point for the nineteen hours of coursework in writing intensive courses that students in the program take in order to earn the certificate. Though they can take the course more than once, generally most students take it during their last or next-to-last semester before graduation, after they have taken many of their certificate courses. Because of this, they are in the position of looking back at the work they did in courses that may have come several semesters earlier in their academic career and, because of the interdisciplinary nature of the program, their writing intensive coursework may be diverse, comprising courses from multiple departments and fields.<\/p>\n

It is no surprise, therefore, that many students feel quite daunted at the beginning of the workshop course when I suggest that a successful portfolio should not only present polished work, but also demonstrate unity and coherence. Sure, the larger purpose of the portfolio is to showcase the skills they have developed through focused attention to writing in their certificate courses, but, because reflection is the key to portfolio practice, a portfolio keeper must find ways to connect the dots between the individual artifacts in a portfolio and make them meaningful in demonstrating learning. Susan Kahn reminds us, in the Winter 2014 special issue of Peer Review on eportfolios<\/a> that, from the start, portfolios were inextricably tied to reflective practice: \u201c[They] were meant to cultivate habits of metacognition, reflective practice, and self-critique among students.\u201d Reflection provides the thread that weaves the strands into a whole.<\/p>\n

In reviewing capstone portfolios from the last several years, I am struck by how many writers, in their introductory reflections, note that the process of reviewing work from multiple courses generates revelations, showing that they came back to a particular topic or theme over and over again, even though they hadn\u2019t noticed that fact at the time. The process of inventorying their work and of placing projects into a designated folder of potential artifacts causes similarities to become visible for the first time. Such awareness often suggests the organization scheme that they ultimately use for presenting their work.<\/p>\n

In many ways, these eportfolios-in-progress become like Delagrange\u2019s conception of the \u201chypermedia-as-Wunderkammer\u201d in that they become \u201cobjects-to-think-with\u201d that bring together the \u201cdisjointed and disconnected pieces\u201d of the students\u2019 undergraduate careers into a whole that is \u201cmade sensible\u201d (Technologies of Wonde<\/a>r 122). I like this idea of creating texts that are meant to generate further thought and exploration and am inspired by the work being done in the eportfolio community on how eports support and sustain lifelong and lifewide learning and their potential for developing what Darren Cambridge<\/a> in Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment (2010) terms a \u201cnetworked style of learning\u201d that values emergence, connection, collection, revision, and invention (174-5).<\/p>\n

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