Activity Summary:

ePortfolio guideline

Instructions:

English 150

Assignment #6: Final Electronic Portfolio

Fall 2014

Proposal due__________                        Parts 1, 2 3 due_________                      Closing reflection written during final exam period

Audience and Purpose

Your immediate audience for your eportfolio is your instructor. More importantly, however, analyzing the different parts of your eportfolio is really for you—to reflect on your communication growth over the last few months more completely than you have in the small reflections you’ve done along the way. The purpose of this project is to begin an online text that will serve you in future classes and for your future academic goals. As you finish English 150 and do this more in-depth self-assessment, you will 1) compose an overall reflection for your eportfolio that defines your persona and introduces its contents, and 2) explain in individual section reflections how the artifacts you’re including show your communication abilities.

Utilizing the electronic mode of communication

You will compose your portfolio using your personal site on WordPress. WordPress allows you to network material together and offer a degree of interactivity between you and your audience. WordPress also affords the ability to creatively combine text, image, and video, as well as manage multimedia and other forms of content for varying rhetorical effects. Consider how the electronic mode will enable you to showcase your communication abilities. For example, you may want to make supplementary materials available for download (drafting materials, peer response sheets, etc.) or include a recorded video of a successful presentation in the oral mode. The following are some considerations for composing with electronic mode:

• Create a menu that allows users to easily navigate your site
• Use hyperlinks to network your portfolio with other materials or websites
• Combine text, image, and video in ways that are rhetorically effective for achieving the purpose of your portfolio
• Utilize other affordances (headings, hyperlinks, widgets, forums) that enable users to navigate and interact with your site

Eportfolio contents

Since the arrangement and organization of your site will be up to you, it will be helpful to review [Course readings on web and document design] to decide what organizational hierarchy will work best given your personal goals for the eportfolio. An example eportfolio can be found here: [url of example]. For this electronic eportfolio, you will present yourself as student who has worked all semester to develop an impressive skillset in the written, oral, visual, and electronic modes of communication. Your instructor will evaluate your eportfolio by [date of evaluation]. After this date, the eportfolio will be available to you to continue to develop and revise as you continue your education at ISU. Note: On pages 3 and 4 of this assignment sheet, you’ll find a proposal for the parts of your eportfolio that will allow you to plan your artifacts and ideas for reflection and to share those ideas with your instructor in a proposal conference to get feedback on your thinking:

1. Introductory page with reflection

The introductory page of your eportfolio will introduce you as a composer, a student, and a scholar, and provide your audience with an introductory reflection. The purpose of the opening reflection is to think back over the semester and re-examine with new eyes the communication work you’ve done in English 150 in order to assess your growth as a communicator using the WOVE modes. Write your introductory page in the form of an “About Me” page, using the following questions as a guide to help you generate ideas.

Note: You don’t have to address all the questions and may add information not included in the questions. Whether you decide to structure your reflection as a letter or an essay, it should include an introduction and conclusion, and it should cite examples from your work..

Communication habits/processes

• How do you identify yourself as a composer, a scholar, or a student (your major, club affiliations, or other markers of identity)?
• What persona would you like to project (professional, informal, in between)?
• What are your current or future goals, and how do your artifacts demonstrate your progress toward those goals?
  • How have your composing processes become more sophisticated since you began the course?
  • How do you go about generating initial ideas for pieces you’re composing, as well as the details and explanation needed to develop and support those ideas?
  • How do you accommodate different audiences when you communicate? How does audience consideration affect choice of communication mode(s)?
  • How do you draft and revise your compositions?
  • How do you use others (peers, instructor, friends, family, etc.) to assist you in making effective revisions?
  • How have you improved your editing process? What are your typical problems with mechanics and what kind of progress have you made with these?
  • Which of your composing habits have remained the same during this semester and why? Which have changed and why?

Communication development

• What artifacts demonstrate your talents or strengths in the following areas?
  • W—writing (the Rhetorical Analyses, the Documented Essay, etc)
  • O—oral (interviews, large group discussions, small group discussions, presentations, etc.)
  • V—visual (Place or Artifact analysis, brochure, etc.)
  • E—electronic (WordPress posts and pages, e-mail content, ethical use of the Internet and electronic images, etc.)
    • What new discoveries have you made in these areas?
    • In which area(s) do you wish you’d been able to do more?

2. Revision of writing with reflection page

For this part of the eportfolio, you will revise one of your earlier assignments (1-4) and embed the document on a WordPress page. As you think about which piece to revise, choose one that 1) allows you to focus on writing and 2) you can easily see ways of improving.

Important: Revision here means more than editing; it means, “re-seeing” the subject. You should include additional material, delete parts that don’t work, reorganize the piece, refine your opening and closing, improve your title, etc.—in other words, you need to do a significant amount of rewriting. Importantly, envision and specify a likely audience for your piece and think about what you can do to facilitate their understanding of your communication.

Planning and Drafting Your Revision

As you begin, look over earlier drafts of your chosen piece (and any accompanying process materials) as well as feedback you received (both from peers and instructor), asking yourself the following questions:

• Which areas need the most improvement?
• Where have I changed my mind about anything I wrote earlier, and how can I incorporate that changed thinking?
• Where can I offer additional development or clarification?
• What doesn’t seem to belong?
• Can I see a better way to arrange the ideas in my new version?
• What other issues do I need to address to make this piece more effective?

Refer to Chapters 10 and 11, The Everyday Writer (EW) for advice on revision, focus, and development. The piece you submit here should clearly be more successful in achieving its purpose and reaching its intended audience than the earlier version.

With your new-and-improved draft, include the original graded copy of the piece with my comments and any new process materials you generate during revision.

You will also include a thorough, thoughtful reflection that gives information about the following aspects of your revision. Your reflection should:

• Describe additions made to the piece (written, text, visuals, source material, etc.). Highlight a couple examples of these additions and explain their benefit.
• Describe portions you chose to delete. Explain the benefit of those deletions.
• Explain what parts you decided required no changes. Give a couple of examples of these and offer support for your decision.
• If you reorganized or reformatted elements, explain how doing so benefits the piece.

3. OVE piece(s) with reflection page(s)

Include in this section of your eportfolio, one or more examples of your work that highlight your best efforts in oral (e.g. small-group work, interviewing, individual presentations, group presentations), visual (e.g. brochure or other piece with image included), and electronic (e.g. e-mail correspondence, brochure, or other piece that relies heavily on the electronic) communication.

In your reflection for this section, discuss the following:

• Why you chose this/these piece(s) as evidence of your best work in the oral, visual, and electronic modes
• What, if any, changes you made to the original versions, why, and to what benefit
• What you believe the piece/s demonstrate about you as an oral, visual, and electronic communicator

 Eportfolio Evaluation Criteria

• The eportfolio includes all required components (see above).
• Demonstrates the affordances of the electronic mode of communication
• The reflective pieces (introductory About Me page, individual section reflections, and closing letter/essay) accomplish the following:
  • Include specific references to prior work (examples) to support your discussion
  • Demonstrate a thoughtful, honest, thorough and coherent analysis of your progress
  • The written revision (Page 2) better satisfies the criteria of the original assignment:
• Substance: demonstrates a thorough rethinking of the subject
• Context: contains additional material appropriate for audience and purpose
• Organization: achieves improved focus, structure, and coherence
• Other OV piece/s (Page 3) demonstrate/s competence in these modes
• The Eporfolio demonstrate/s competence in
• Style: innovative use page titles, headings, fonts, color, and other visual appeals and CSS
• Delivery: usability: utilizing hyperlinks, multimedia, and interactive elements
• Revision and reflection avoid errors distracting to the reader

Eportfolio proposal

Purpose of chart and planning questions

• To sketch out the contents of your final eportfolio, plan what you will be doing with each of your presentation pieces, and begin to consider what you can meaningfully say about them
• To discuss your proposal with your instructor and get feedback on your plans

Planning the contents

In the space below, jot down your thinking about the pieces you’re planning to present for grading in your eportfolio 

* * For the OV section of your eportfolio, you may submit one piece that integrates the 2 modes, instead of a separate piece for each.

Thinking of what to say about the contents

Now that you’ve tentatively chosen some pieces to present in your eportfolio, in the space below, sketch out ideas you have at this point for reflecting on these pieces (e.g. what your chosen pieces show about context, substance, organization, style, and/or delivery; what their strengths are, their weaknesses; what strategies they try to use; etc.)

Ideas you have for reflecting on your revised written piece

Ideas you have for reflecting on piece(s) contained in your OVE section

Posing questions about your plan/proposal

Note in this space, the questions you want to ask your instructor about your plans or any other aspect of the eportfolio during your proposal conference:

Evaluating your proposal

• Does it show careful thought?
• Is it complete?
• Is it specific?
• Does it give you meaningful ideas to discuss with your instructor?