Yesterday, each of our graduating English majors presented their "showcase" portfolios to a pair of English faculty, giving a ten minute speech followed by a question & answer period. Instead of an exit exam, we ask students to reflect on how they have met the objectives of the English major in a 6-10 page paper and to talk about where they're going and where they've been, using the portfolio to illustrate and support their claims about their own learning.

We've only been doing this for two or three years now, but I've found it a rewarding process for both student and teacher. Some students get stressed about having to "defend" their work, but the students with the best attitudes approach it as a sort of celebration of their learning. It's thrilling for me to see how far the students have come over four years -- I'm always awe-struck on some level by how quickly they mature and it's renewing to see that I've made a positive impact -- no matter how small -- on the student's thinking. In fact, I think of these moments as not only a way for the student to reflect positively on their development, but also as a means by which we can gauge the effectiveness of our English program.

I've always been a proponent of the "electronic portfolio" option, which allows students to assemble their work online in the form of a webpage, rather than a binder brimming with papers. Only a few students have taken us up on this option. Donna Hibbs was the first, and her's was a great model for others to follow. This year we had only three e-portfolios and the remainder of our graduating English majors chose to submit their portfolio on paper. I only worked with Julie Young's portfolio, which I thought was outstanding -- she did a great job and I admire her skill in web design and data organization, on top of all her talents as an English major.

Nevertheless, I was thinking about some of the cons of electronic portfolios as assessment tools or educational technologies, even as I was grading them side-by-side with paper portfolios. I thought I'd write about these problems here.

Revision
Young entitled her portfolio "Revision" -- and I know from working with her just how much energy she pours into rewriting. And though I didn't mention this to her (and didn't hold it against her), I found her title very ironic, because it called my attention to the fact that e-portfolios give no sense of the process of revision. They rarely contain work that includes commentary from teachers or peer reviewers; there's no sense of process attached to the writing; in fact, there's no way, really, to tell if the papers in an online portfolio are the same ones that produced the grade in the course or whether or not the student revised the paper before putting it online. Does it matter? Maybe not. But I think the feedback that writers get from others (students, teachers, editors) can and should be part of the reflective process as the student uses the portfolio to assess their own growth. Often it's the commentary that "teaches" and so if a student reflects on their learning, they would want to reflect on that material.

I think students harbor the belief that 'clean' copy is good copy, so uploading the MS Word file that they printed their paper from only serves to erase the comments that otherwise were intended to help the student revise or re-see their work from another perspective. Thus, the e-portfolio serves -- in an odd way -- to privilege product over process. Granted, a 'showcase' portfolio at the end of a student's career at a college inherently does this. But the idea of the portfolio -- and of most writing courses -- is to help students see writing (and learning) as a process...and a portfolio, ultimately, should be that: a work-in-process rather than a closed book. Even our Q&A sessions often felt more like advising sessions than exercises in probing into what a student did or did not learn.

One solution for this might be to ask students to include links to earlier drafts or scans of commented papers in .pdf format or some sort of reflection essay on their revision process.

Document Issues
E-portfolios are somewhat clumsy when students upload (at best) .rtf files or Word documents or huge scans of images or .pdf files. Even when they put their work into hypertext, often there's so much of it that students don't recode everything but simply "save as" .html in their word processor, causing innumerable changes in format. If I were working on an e-portfolio, I'd probably 'save as" html and then re-edit -- by hand -- every paper, to make it look something like the work I've done on the sample essays from Paradoxa. It takes a lot of time and a little know-how that not every student has. And unless they're blogging everything or writing every paper in html from scratch, the juggling of different document formats is a lot of trouble for the student and his or her audience online.

Perhaps this issue could be solved by distributing standardizing guidelines for format, but then this risks streamlining out the creativity and personality that an e-portfolio could harbor.

Permanence
If a school provides web space for e-portfolios, then they're doing themselves a favor because the option most students would take otherwise would be to upload their files to some "free" website service which not only forces pop-up and banner advertising, but also might have some questionable terms of service that would -- in effect -- hand all publishing rights over to the web provider. But by the same token, how long is a school required to host a student's portfolio online? Should the student be allowed to showcase their work to future employers...and will they have rights to edit those files long after graduation? I'd think they should, since I see these portfolios as works-in-progress that don't magically "end" just because a student has received a diploma. But there are economic and spatial issues that might prevent this from occurring in an ideal fashion. Just as students who use their school e-mail accounts encounter issues with staying in contact once they graduate, there are similar problems that could occur post-graduation.

There are potential problems, moreover, for both the institution and the student, because of the very nature of publication. What if a paper in the portfolio is plagiarized by a student (after all, uploaded files in .rtf format make this a snap!)? While a great portfolio makes our institution look good, what does a poor portfolio do? What if the student adds a very personal paper written in freshman composition that embarrasses the student five years later? Because essays that are written for teachers often are written in a sort of "safe harbor" (which publication on the web is not), then what happens when a student uploads documents they wrote under the assumption that they were private? Virtually all the potential problems that are associated with student writing online threaten the portfolio process.

Perhaps CDs are a better way to go.

Shifting the Burden of Office Supplies
Okay, so this is a minor point, but over the past five years I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of pages I've had to print on behalf of my students. With an electronic portfolio, it increases tenfold. I have to ask myself: do I want to strain my eyes for another few hours reading on screen, or do I want to print these pages out to refer to later or even bring with me to the portfolio defence. Naturally, I'll read on screen. But you can bet that I'm going to skim more quickly and "surf" rather than "read" in some cases. I'm not convinced yet that that's the best way to assess a student's career.

Students could be asked to provide hard copy of any new paper (like the introductory essay we ask them to write).

Complicating the Presentation
Although students can utilize our smart classrooms at Seton Hill and project their e-portfolio onto a wall, few actually click through different pages, showing and telling. Instead, they present a talk. And frankly, I think I prefer it that way. If a student went page by page through their bound portfolio, I'd be tempted not to pass them because they would seem under-prepared or disorganized. Similarly, a student could hide behind their e-portfolio as a sort of shield from public speaking, the way some people poorly use PowerPoint. The portfolio is something the group can turn to during the presentation/defense, but doesn't necessarily need to.

Well, I'm sure there are more problems -- and MANY more benefits that I've bracketed off for now for the sake of focusing on this issue. Hopefully, I'll take these ideas back to my colleagues and talk about ways that we can improve the system. Naturally, if a student wants to work in the electronic media, such as students in our New Media Journalism program, then an e-portfolio makes a lot of sense. But for now, the students who do use electronic portfolios are paving the way to standards and realizing the pros and cons of this method through the risks they take. So far, I've been very pleased with the work they've done.

You can ping this entry by using .