Project #5 — E-Portfolio of Your Work in WRA 202

project last updated: 11.16.06

Context

The Professional Writing program at MSU asks its majors to develop and maintain electronic portfolios of their work in the program. The E-Portfolio project in WRA 202 is intended to introduce you to the e-portfolio as a genre. (At the back end of the major, the WRA 455 Portfolio Seminar is intended to help you out when you are using/designing your portfolio for the job search.) The e-portfolio you develop and maintain will serve two purposes as you track through the Professional Writing program: (1) Within the program, it will be used for assessment of student learning within the major. (Note: The PW program is developing an assessment procedure that should be implemented sometime in 2007. Stay tuned.). (2) For your own purposes, it will serve as a professional portfolio for employment purposes, showing potential employers what you have learned, what skills and experiences you have as a professional writer.

For your final final project in WRA 202, the requirement is for you to produce an e-portfolio. You can approach this assignment in one of two ways:

• If you are new to the major, just starting out, and do not yet have an e-portfolio, then your assignment is to create an e-portfolio for your work in WRA 202 only.

• If you are an advanced student in the major, have already taken several courses in the major, and already have a professional e-portfolio, then you can opt to use this assignment as an opportunity to expand, develop, and revise your existing e-portfolio, adding in the work that you have done in WRA 202.

Basically, creating this portfolio will involve

• designing a portal web page ("home page") that will serve as the entry point or index for your portfolio (in your AFS space),
• providing an overall reflective statement about your work in WRA 202, and
• loading, organizing, and labeling projects and documents from the WRA 202 class to be included in the portfolio

You may revise the work you have done in WRA 202 before including it in your portfolio — but that is not required. You may decide to include drafts, notes, design mockups, or other materials to show how you engage the writing *process*. You might decide to include notes for each of the projects, or even your project reflections, to explain what the project was and what your contribution was.

The reflective statement is especially important — and all students should include a reflective statement about their work in WRA 202. That reflection should accomplish several goals:

• focus the audience's attention on your key strengths as a writer —> what do you want them to SEE about your writing?

• comment on each of your assignments in WRA 202 —> what does each show about you as a professional writer? what skills and talents have you developed as a result of each?

• talk about aspects of your talent that are not necessarily evident in the written products themselves —> for example, how you engaged the writing process, what you learned doing the project

One of the aims of the portfolio is not only to organize and present your work, but also to create an identity for yourself as a professional writer: What characterizes your work in general? What are your key strengths as a writer? What does the work show about you? What have you learned how to do?

Who is the audience for this portfolio? As with most projects, this one has multiple audiences — and the importance of various audiences depends to a great extent on where you are in the PW program. The most immediate and obvious audience for the portfolio is ME: the portfolio will collect and organize your work for the entire WRA 202 course and allow me to make a holistic evaluation of your learning and progress in the course. If you are a relatively new major, the portfolio might serve an assessment purpose: that is, it could be used by PW faculty members to assess the effectiveness of the program and the curriculum overall. If you are a junior or senior, you might want to design this portfolio for job purposes: thus, your key audience might be prospective employers. This portfolio could also be used to feature the PW program to other faculty and students.

Major Deliverables and Due Dates

M DEC 4 —> if you would like my feedback on your e-portfolio, then send me the URL (via ANGEL email) by this date

W DEC 13 —> final, revised version of e-portfolio

Design and Architecture

For this project you can (a) repurpose the same page template that you used for Project #3; or (b) download and use some other OS template; or (c) develop a template and design of your own. (Important note: If you use or repurpose someone else's template, be sure to credit their work!)

For those who are new to web authoring and who are doing their first e-portfolio, I would recommend that you repurpose the template from Project #3 — that is, take the HTML page combined with the CSS style sheet to create your e-portfolio home page. The architecture of the site would look like this:

main e-portfolio page
- overall reflection/overview
- followed by brief reflections on each separate project in WRA 202 (sort of like the annotations for Project #3)
- with links to the projects themselves (either PDFs, as in the case of Project #1, or URLs to your AFS space)

In short, your e-portfolio would resemble your web resources page: that is, it would be a single main page (with reflections) providing links to the separate projects that you have done in WRA 202.

You can also go to CSS Tinderbox and other sites to find OS ("open source") templates that you can use for this project. The CSS Tinderbox site is only one of many that offers templates for writers/designers to use. What you would do is download (a) the HTML code for the content, and (b) the CSS style sheet that controls the styles and designs of the page, as you did for Project #3.

Evaluation Criteria

In addition to the general criteria for all assignments related to PRODUCT, PROCESS, and PURPOSE (see WRA 202 course syllabus), the following criteria are especially important for this project:

PURPOSE
- Does this e-portfolio help you establish a distinctive identity as a professional writer?
- Does this e-portfolio show that you have learned and developed as a writer in WRA 202?

PRODUCT
- Does the design of the entry page help establish your professional writing identity?
- Is the design of the entry page professional? Does it convince an audience that you are a capable designer?
- Are the documents well organized? Are they accessible? Is the navigation clear? Can an audience find and download the documents from your portfolio?

PROCESS

Issues/Questions

1. An e-portfolio can show the products that you have produced in your course work — it can show your design skills, your stylistic strengths, your critical and analytic abilities. But how do you show professional writing skills that are not necessarily represented in the products themselves — for instance, the ability to copyedit and proofread, or the ability to work effectively in teams, or the ability to manage and coordinate large-scale projects? Many professional writing skills are not easily "captureable" in the written products that you produce in classes. How do you represent/capture the invisible work that is nonetheless critical to being an effective professional writer? (People in management and administration have this problem. How do you make administrative work, management work visible?)

2. Here's a challenge: How do you explain Project #4 in your e-portfolio? The overall product itself represents the work of 18 people. How do you represent your contribution to Project #4 in your e-portfolio?

3. Does your e-portfolio show your ability to reflect critically on what you have done and why? Critical reflection is obviously an important component of your work in the Professional Writing major. (God knows we, the PW faculty, talk about it enough.) It is not enough to simply be a good writer or good web designer — you also have to understand what good writing is and be able to articulate that understanding, explain it to others, and, at times, argue for it. When you create a web site (for instance), you need to be able to explain the rationale behind your choices: Why did you design it THAT way? How did you decide what users needed? What guided your content decisions, your design decisions? If you can't explain your choices, then you haven't really achieved "professional" status. An effective e-portfolio should do more than merely collect your good work ... it should also demonstrate your ability to explain that work, to articulate what you are doing and why. You have been practicing that kind of reflective ability in your WRA 202 project reflections — and you should demonstrate that skill in your e-portfolio as well. (In case you didn't know it, we are preparing you for upper management. :)

Sample E-Portfolios of Professional Writing Majors (here and elsewhere)

Heather Carlile (MSU) -- http://www.msu.edu/%7Ecarlileh/portfolio/
Adam Treadwell (MSU) -- http://www.msu.edu/%7Etreadw10/adamportfolio.html
Tarbox (Rensselaer) -- http://www.rpi.edu/~tarboj/
Brown (Kennesaw State) -- http://pigseye.kennesaw.edu/~abrown15/
Schuerman (Clemson) -- http://people.clemson.edu/~aschuer
Byers (MSU) -- http://www.kristenbyers.net/portfolio/
Kuhnmuench (MSU) -- http://www.akuhnmuench.com/portfolio/
Parker (MSU) -- http://www.msu.edu/%7Eparke131/portfolio/
Van Duinen (MSU) -- http://www.msu.edu/~vandui11/portfolio/