Writing Eportfolios

Reflection – A Hindsight Revelation

jbenson — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:08:06 +0000

Looking back at some of my previous posts, I realized that they seem somewhat negative in tone. While I certainly had some struggles with e-portfolio this semester, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that they can’t be an immensely useful tool when implemented correctly. The struggles we had in my FYW course I see largely as my own inability to present and establish our use of the technology in a concise and practical manner. My use of eports in AWD was considerably more successful in that sense. The creative freedom that I allowed my students in FYW with the use of eports, I believe in the end, felt like disorganization, or perhaps as a lack of a clear plan, while the structure of the DRF I used in AWD was something many of the students commented on as their favorite part of the technology. In hindsight, I think I would establish this format for both courses from the very beginning. In earlier conversations with my AWD students it was clear that the organization of their work was something that the students valued about the software, but it wasn’t until they posted their final semester reflections that I realized how important it was to them and ultimately how useful this was to their process of reflecting on their own work over the expanse of the semester.

In reading over the final reflection posts of the semester from my AWD course, I noticed that students commonly mentioned that they valued the organization that eports facilitated. While many of them enjoyed this aspect of the software, most commented that it didn’t change their process as a writer or couldn’t see the technology being of assistance to them outside of the course. As one student wrote “As far as e-portfolio goes, Its [sic] useful to keep all your work organized, and allow for comments quite easily. However I will not be renewing my ‘web page,’ because I can print out my work and give hard copies to potential employers.”

As I looked through the reflections, what struck me the most was the number of students that commented on each major assignment of the semester. I was happy to see that they were thinking back to the very first paper and imagining the connections between each unit and evaluating their own strengths and weaknesses as writers in relation to the challenges of the assignment. It wasn’t until I was reading over the end of semester reflections from another class that I became aware of how drastic of a difference I could see between the reflections that occurred in eports versus the hand written responses from my non-eportfolio class. While reading over the hand-written comments from my FYW course, I began to keep a tally of the number of different assignments considered by each student. Of the eighteen students in the section only one considered each major assignment in turn, while the seventeen others considered one paper or a combination of other papers. I establish the final reflection the same way in all of my classes beginning with a list of questions that they might choose to answer, but inform the class that ultimately they should write about whatever they are interested in, as long as it pertains to their own writing process as it relates to the work of the course.

I went back to my AWD eportfolio class to tally the number of comprehensive reflections and found that of the sixteen students, thirteen of them considered the challenges of each unit in turn. Perhaps having the work of the entire course visually available to them at one time and accessible at the click of a button made it easier to think about the progression of the course. Maybe being older students, addded with the connections of the class to their professional careers, allowed them to construct a larger narrative out of the course. Or maybe I introduced the assignment with just the right combination of words that set them off on a mission to include every assignment in their discussion, but I know for certain that this was not something I suggested that they do. In fact, the one opening comment that has become standard as I introduce these types of reflections is that “I don’t want the kind of performance based reflection that suggests that before this class you had no idea how to write and now thanks to my class you are brilliant.”

I’m not trying to suggest that any reflection that includes a consideration of each major assignment is necessarily better than a thoughtful, in-depth reflection that only considers a few of the assignment. Of course an in-depth careful reflection would always be my preference, but having a tool in place that assits students in reflecting on their work comprehensively, I believe, would only facilitate the type of in-depth reflection we prefer to see as instructors.

Audience and Purpose in First-Year Writing

kfreeman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:55:39 +0000

Eportfolios potentially highlight audience in a way that it doesn’t seem hard copy portfolios do in that they can be immediately published on the web. This advantage is perhaps more applicable in AWD courses where audience and purpose are much clearer and more specific than in first-year writing courses. However, this very possibility has helped me to reconsider audience and purpose in first-year writing. In the past, I’ve often focused more on “writing to learn” in first-year courses, using drafts of papers to work through responses to challenging reading and original ideas. The understood audience for most of the papers is me, or at least our class. Although I often make comments on the later drafts of papers suggesting students consider writing for a wider audience, this wider audience remains vague. While I appreciate, and don’t want to let go of, the theoretical impulse of asking students to use writing to work through difficult reading, the vagueness of the audience seems to abstract the work from having a tangible value for some students. I am hoping to begin to use eportfolios to start work against this vagueness in future semesters. The medium itself does seem to help students view their work in a familiarly “published” manner. Their final portfolios are in the form of websites, which look much more like “published” writing they are accustomed to seeing on the web. While it didn’t work for all students, a number of my students took the design of the final portfolios quite seriously, mixing image and text and really thinking about how readers might view their pages, suggesting they are beginning to think about why and how they are arranging their writing for others to read.

Authorship

kfreeman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:53:36 +0000

I admit that I have a little trouble with the word “ownership” when it comes to writing and learning, but I do appreciate the idea behind it, which seems to me to be about students laying claim to their work in a way that goes beyond fulfilling assignments given to them by someone else. I guess I’d prefer the term “authorship.” My hope is to have students move from thinking about handing in a paper to viewing their writing as “their work,” meaning a body of work rather than a series of assignments. TaskStream can help students shift toward this understanding of their work in a number of ways. For one thing, much of their writing is in one place, encouraging them to view their work in its entirety, including not only polished, finished work that is directed toward an outside audience but also responses, early drafts, and other writing that emphasizes their thinking processes rather than communication of their ideas. It also allows students privacy in a way that other online venues I’ve worked with don’t. In other words, I can’t see students’ work until they’ve submitted it; thus, they maintain “ownership” completely until they submit it and open it to viewing by me and/or their classmates. These basic concepts of considering a student’s whole body of work and of that student’s selection and presentation of that work are, of course, fundamental to the concept of portfolios in general, but it does seem that eportfolios can emphasize them in new ways.

Late change

mnoonan — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:06:10 +0000

My thinking about reflection (as it applies to TaskStream) came to a head in the final stages of the course. After offering a space for them to craft their own portfolio (something named the “google” project) I found myself stepping in toward the end to make a case for why reflection is in their best interest.

Here is what I said:

You should be thinking about how you represent your work in the project. How do you use TaskStream to create a portfolio of this Google project. How do you design this folio? What does the design say about your thinking? Think back to the start of the term and my initial thoughts about this pilot. At that time I said we are testing Tufte’s (1997) claim, “When the principles of design replicate the principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight” (p. 9). What does this mean to you now?
How does this project represent you as a reader/writer/thinker? How will it be evaluated?

Since the start we have been writing (and thinking) about the process of writing. You have been reflecting throughout the drafting project (self-assessments, revision plans, peer reviews, final reflection, responses, etc.) How will this kind of work be represented in your Google portfolio? One function of this kind of work was to foreground the goals of assignment. I used these moments to underscore what I valued about the project and to think about how the more general grading standards of the program might be usefully applied in this or that particular instance. These moments became opportunities to have conversations about assessment and grading. You were asked to articulate what your plans were and why you made the choices you made. This kind of work is critical for this project. Given that I have not talked at length about assessment and evaluation for this project (only in recent classes has this topic been raised by some of you), the reflections offer you the chance to build the context for my reading (and create a space for you to think through these kinds of issues). You have the opportunity to frame my reading of your project, take advantage.

You should, of course, be thinking about assessment. How else do you make those critical decisions in your work? With so much freedom, how do you take responsibility for the value of the work? I am the audience (or one of the audiences) for this project. You are writing for this course and so part of what this final should demonstrate is an awareness of how writing has been valued in this course. You should/could certainly return to the grading standards and think about how these standards connect to your work. This thinking should be/could be represented in the reflections in the project. But how you work reflection in—as one final reflection, as multiple reflections within the portfolio—is up to you. Your reflection(s) should (at some point) connect this project to your thinking about the rest of the course, the rest of the work you have done as a reader/writer/thinker.

Responding to student writing

kfreeman — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:44:46 +0000

I use three types of feedback in TaskStream: Webmarker for comments directly on drafts, pasted papers for whole-class peer review, and rubrics for final drafts. Although I had to practice a little with Webmarker to become comfortable with it, I now like it better than the comment feature on Word. For one thing, I don’t have to download papers, and this saves a lot of time and confusion (I no longer have to remind students repeatedly to have their name as a part of their file name). With Webmarker I can draw and write anywhere on the page, much like I would with a pen on paper, and I think this allows me to respond more directly. While it is true that, like writing on a hard copy, my space is a little limited, in some ways I think that these limits help me to be concise and prioritize my comments.

WebMarker (click to enlarge)

I’ve been using electronic submissions for a while now in whole-class peer review. It’s great to be able to project students’ work onto the screen and have the whole class be able to read and discuss it. TaskStream has made it easier again because I don’t have to download papers—I’ve had a number of problems projecting work in Word onto the screen, and I find using work that pasted into html much more reliable. It’s also easier for students in small-group peer review—we don’t have to worry about compatibility with software. Students sign in as Reviewers and the request comments. Beyond convenience, the comment feature of TaskStream also allows students to have a repository of comments from others about their papers.

I’ve also been using the rubrics on TaskStream to grade final drafts. I’ve used rubrics for years for final drafts, but what I like about the rubrics on TaskStream is that there is an area within each criterion where I can write comments. This allows me to explain exactly what a student needs to work on rather than only see a “score.”

Encouraging Reflection

kfreeman — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:15:13 +0000

One of the most obvious strengths of using eportfolios to encourage reflection is the simple fact that most, perhaps all, depending upon how one sets up the class, of the students’ work is in one space. At first this seems a merely convenient fact—and it has been the most consistent advantage noted by my students (other than the ease of not having to print their papers)–but I think it might be more than simply convenient. Seeing their work all in one place helps students to view their work as a body of work rather than as individual, isolated assignments. In addition to perhaps encouraging “ownership,” an idea I’ll try to explore further under that heading, I think it helps students to see connections, and maybe progression, though not necessarily in a linear sense, between different assignments.

The way I’ve set up my course, I hope, further encourages this view. Following the typical first-year writing course at NEU, students complete four units: three in response to essays and one that asks students to reflect upon their writing for entire semester. The first three units are DRFs, meaning that I’ve given specific prompts for students. Within each DRF there is a combination of assignments, from initial “reflective” assignments in response to the readings to drafts of the paper that concludes each unit. The final unit is undirected folio, in which students look back over the semester and write a narrative about their work. The “physical” corralling of their work, from early responses to drafts to peer reviews, I hope aids this reflection. I’m asking them reflect in a few ways: 1) One is very practical—students are asked to keep a grammar and style log throughout the semester. I comment on drafts and final papers and students then must keep a log of those comments, working to figure out corrections or improvements for themselves. I’m there to offer suggestions and help, but my aim is to get them to see these issues for themselves. While this log does include things like semi-colons, it is also about higher-order writing issues, such as integrating others’ ideas more fully or gracefully. This log then becomes a part of their final portfolio. 2) More importantly, I ask them to reflect on their experience with more substantive development, in other words on what they’ve learned about their own ways of thinking and understanding the ideas we’ve talked about this semester, and, in particular, how they can use writing to help themselves work through their ideas as well as express those ideas to others. 3) Lastly, I ask students to consider how the work they’ve done this semester might help them beyond the semester in other classes as well as in their careers and life in general. While I’ve always done this, I think the eportfolio gives this question a relevance it might not have otherwise because their portfolios are publishable in a way a traditional portfolio might not be. Also because students “own” their accounts in the eportfolio, they are encouraged to take it—and I hope the lessons it offers—with them in ways they don’t when a paper portfolio sits in their professor’s office after the course is over.

E-portfolio…just another tool for the student writer?

jbenson — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:06:14 +0000

The ability to publish student portfolios to a website using the Taskstream software dramatically expands the audience that can be imagined for the writing of the course. I wondered if a shift in the audience and purpose of the assignments for the course would have an impact on student writing, but I’m not sure that students in my class felt that shift occurring with the use of taskstream. It seems to me that many of my students felt that e-portfolio was just a different tool for submitting their work. I think next time I will make an effort to emphasize this shift more with the students.

I was initially interested in being a part of the e-portfolio program because we spend a fair amount of time considering images as texts in my first year writing course. For example, when reading the essay “Ways of Seeing” by English art critic John Berger, we study paintings by surrealist Rene Magritte, photographs by Gordon Parks, and Grant Wood’s classic work “American Gothic” and its ubiquitous parodies. Throughout the course we consider the persuasive nature of images and how they might complicate, reinforce, or distract from the text that surrounds them. Thus, student papers in response to the work of the course frequently include images. I had hoped that an e-portfolio program would allow them greater freedom when composing these essays and I had hoped that extending the purpose and audience of the writing outside the boundaries of our classroom would encourage students to think about their work as scholarship for the course and as a website for public consumption.

I imagined a technology that would permit student writers to seamlessly incorporate music, YouTube clips, slide shows, and their own writing to create complicated, multimodal texts that mirrored the kind of documents they see in daily life. Since many of the student writers in our courses are more familiar with a blog, a website, a video clip, or a facebook status update as a text than they are with a scholarly essay, it seems appropriate to use these various types of texts to discuss and create writing. Of course the reality of the technology was more difficult to work with than the effortless version of my imagination. My class spent a lot of time working through tech issues. The difficulties became distracting and I’m not sure we achieved the stakes that might be associated with the purpose and audience of a website.

In my AWD class, I frequently mentioned the possibilities of using the software as a career development tool (i.e. as a showcase of their work when applying for jobs), but many of the students felt their careers would not benefit from this type of display. Many of the students agreed with the criminal justice students who argued that the portfolios would not be of use to them in pursuing jobs as police officers. My two architecture students agreed that a collection of their work was integral to their professional development and even acknowledged that a showcase of their writing would be a useful addition. The problem arose due to the lack of compatibility between the programs that they use for developing their visual architecture work and e-portfolios. They were unable to publish the visual work that is a necessary component of an architecture portfolio in taskstream.

Next time I teach using e-portfolios I would like to reframe the questions of audience and purpose for the students when it comes to publishing their work in the form of a website. I think if I could emphasis this more or find a different way to communicate the heightened stakes of a publicly accessible document that perhaps it would have an impact on student writing in the courses.

Josh’s Overview

jbenson — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:44:51 +0000

I incorporated the e-portfolio program in two different forms in two different classes. In my first-year writing course (FYW) we used the folio function of taskstream which allows the students more flexibility in structuring the format of their responses. In my advanced writing in the disciplines class (AWD) I implemented the more structured Direct Response Folio (DRF). While I initially joined the e-portfolio program because of my interest in the creative possibilities that the folio feature might allow the freshman writers, ultimately I found my incorporation of the DRF in the advanced writing class was more successful. I have yet to decide if the technology improved the writing of students in either class.

I introduced the technology to both classes from the very beginning of the semester by including the following information on the syllabus: “This section of (FYW/ AWD) has been selected among only a handful of classes to participate in a pilot program of TaskSteam electronic portfolios.” I articulated the specific goals that I had imagined for the AWD course with the following language: “We will be using e-portfolio to submit and review drafts and to showcase your polished work.”

In the AWD course all drafts were submitted via e-portfolio and nearly all peer reviewing and final assessment occurred through e-portfolio. After some initial frustrations with the technology, most of the students decided that they liked the program. They cited the organization of their writing as their favorite feature of the software and many commented that they liked that they didn’t have to print hard copies of their work for class.

When asked about the likelihood of using their portfolios beyond the work of the course many of the students suggested that this type of document would not be useful in their career (I teach 3301 which includes a wide range of different majors). Some students asked about the individual cost of the e-portfolio accounts after they graduated and mentioned that they would only continue to use the service if it was free.

It was widely agreed that the ability to comment directly on the drafts would be a useful function. When I described the current options for on-draft commenting possible in Taskstream, most students thought that something closer to the review function permitted in Microsoft Word would be more useful. Many students suggested that they found the experience of peer reviewing drafts in class via computer an oddly isolating experience, but it was agreed that the convenience allowed when peer reviewing outside of class was liberating. They enjoyed being able to complete the review when it fit into their schedule.

For the most part, I agree with the students when considering the usefulness of the software in formative assessment. I like being able to comment directly on the draft of a paper, but I did like being able to access the student writing whenever and wherever I wanted. One aspect where I differed in opinion from the students was related to in-class peer reviews. Although many of them said it felt awkward responding to a draft electronically when the author was in the same classroom, the technology allowed me to monitor the reviewing process in a way that I had previously not experienced. I have always spot-checked the quality of peer reviewing that occurs during a class, but a complete evaluation of the peer review work usually doesn’t occur until I am looking over the drafts collected at the end of the unit. Taskstream allowed me to read over peer-review responses immediately in class as they became completed. Not only could I gauge the quality of the reviews occurring, but also the speed at which the students were completing them. It was also useful to get a quick and broad overview of the problems that the writers perceived in the papers of their peers.

As for the summative assessment of the work, I did enjoy having the rubric connected to the final assignment. This allowed the students to easily refer back the evaluation criteria before submitting their final draft. I personally felt a little constrained by the software when it came to the actual work of grading. I was forced to switch back and forth between a window containing the student’s work and a window containing my evaluation. I did enjoy being able to easily cut and paste quotes from the student writer’s paper into my evaluation, but I could achieve this fairly easily without Taskstream.

Overall, the students enjoyed the organization of the e-portfolios, but most questioned whether the software enhanced their writing in any noticeable way. While there were some things I liked about the using the program, I felt many of these things could be achieve with the software that we currently have available to us at Northeastern.

For the first-year writing course I was more interested in the creative potential presented by the software and decided to use the more flexible folio function of e-portfolio. In addition to the blurb on the syllabus introducing the software that I mentioned above, I also included the following specific goals for the FYW course: “We will be using e-portfolio to showcase your polished work. Each final unit will be submitted via the e-portfolio program and throughout the semester you will keep an on-line notebook.”

My approach to implementing e-portfolios in the FYW course was less successful. With drops and adds, the amount of initial work it takes to get the ball rolling in the freshman level course, and the learning curve of the technology we were unable to complete a notebook-like assignment on e-portfolio until the end of our second unit (near the middle of the semester). By the third unit, all of the students were up and running so we attempted to submit all stages of the writing process via e-portfolio. The students experienced difficulties in incorporating images into their work and consistently had trouble manipulating the formatting of the final documents. We dedicated an extra week of class time to addressing these issues (beyond the time we had already invested in the initial learning process). Students unanimously voted to return to the “old school” process of working with hard copies for the final unit of our course.

While creative possibilities might exist with e-portfolio in the first-year writing classroom, the freshman writers in my class found the technology distracting from the writing process. I certainly attribute some of this difficulty to my own learning curve with the technology, but in a course filled to the brim with other work, I feel that any technology adopted should be simple to use and not distract from the central concerns of the course.

Reflection as an assessment tool.

jsopchockchai — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:53:26 +0000

In contrast to the more free-form folio, I’ve been using the directed response folio (DRF) primarily as an assessment tool. I have students fulfill several requirements, mostly consisting of work they have already done; sometimes, however, the DRF asks them to write new content that complements the past work they’re presenting to me. This new work for the final unit portfolio/DRF is almost always reflection. And while students themselves do benefit from reflecting on the writing they’ve done, I find that there is an added benefit for me as an assessor of their work as well.

When I assigned students a photo essay in response to Edward Said’s “States” featured in Ways of Reading, students were to construct relationships between the photographs they had taken and the text they had written in a manner similar to Said. Grading such essays can be difficult because a lot of the work that goes into placing the photographs and performing “Said-like readings” of those photographs is in fact invisible or happening behind the scenes. I can comment on what possible meanings the images and text produce, but to what extent can attribute that to the craft of the writer? Reflection on such an essay, then, can provide insight as to how thoughtful a student has been in constructing a photo essay. When asked, for example, why/how they had chosen 3 photographs from a larger pool of 20, some students responded with two-dimensional statements such as “I chose these three photos because they reflect my love of music” whereas others actually demonstrated that they had understood Said’s method and thought about how the images chosen might juxtapose interestingly with something they had already planned to write.

TaskStream enables me to use reflection as an assessment tool by allowing me to insert directions for each and every requirement in the DRF. This structure trains students to see each individual requirement as its own mini-assignment, thus making the fact that there might be new assignments with new directions and expectations within perfectly natural and, for the most part, unsurprising. This solicitation of reflective writing at the end of an assignment sequence would be much more cumbersome, for example, if I were to take time in class to explain the new writing I wanted or post it on Blackboard as a separate assignment guideline. Frankly, the assignment itself is too small to merit that, but as one requirement among many in a DRF, it makes a lot more sense.

The occasional straggler does fall through the cracks, of course. In many ways a student who never reads directions on the chalkboard or on Blackboard’s course materials page is still not going to see the directions on TaskStream. Perhaps if a program like TaskStream were to build a screen — much like a user agreement pop up window — that would require students to at least scroll through the directions before uploading their work, this could be avoided all together.

Matt’s overview (What I told the writers.)

mnoonan — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:55:15 +0000

Here is the overview I provided the writers in the first-year writing course at the start of the term.

While planning for this course, I engaged in a practice all too common to most writers: procrastination. I spent the break reading books that had nothing to do with my teaching work—or so I thought. At first glance, the story of the devastating cholera outbreak of 1855 and a course designed around and enhanced by the creation of eportfolios could not be less related. And yet, reading Steven Johnson’s (2006) The ghost map: The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic—and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world, I started to see (invent) connections between the two. Here is a story of two amateurs, a physician (Dr. Snow) and a clergyman (Henry Whitehead), who upset the established “expert” understanding of a disease held by the medical community at that time and, in the process, who fundamentally changed how we live. The story is about challenging long-held beliefs. The story is about valuing the local knowledge of a community. These amateurs had two advantages: proximity to the problem (they both lived close to the neighborhood most directly affected) and distance from conventional ways of thinking.
The “problem” we will be investigating in this course also comes freighted with a conventional set of beliefs. There is a growing body of scholarly work on the value of eportfolios. This course is part of a wider pilot program within the writing programs at NU tasked to think through the use of eportfolios (in this case Taskstream) in the writing classroom. We are all amateurs in this endeavor, but, like Snow and Whitehead, we have the advantages of proximity and distance that may enable us to come up with some new ways to think about the problem.

The guiding questions that I have at this stage in the process revolve around the relationship between design/presentation/arrangement and understanding. I have been thinking about the following as it relates to the pilot: “When the principles of design replicate the principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight” (Tufte, 1997, p. 9). In what ways can we use the Taskstream platform to put this claim to the test? Each of you will, throughout the course, begin to frame your own questions. We will be following the Google work model. Google encourages their employees to spend 20% of their work time to work on projects that they are interested in, not projects assigned. These “Google days” will be a critical component of the course, allowing you the space to explore in writing concerns/questions/subjects that compel you as a reader/thinker/writer.

I expect this pilot project will add to an already packed agenda. As we work with this new platform, I anticipate a range of issues will arise—technological, logistical, and pedagogical (I’d rather spend our time on the final one). However, I also expect that these issues and challenges will prove to be useful opportunities for learning (as opposed to mere obstacles to be overcome)—true and unique benefits from our participation in the eportfolio/Taskstream pilot program.