[blog portfolio]

I've been thinking about other ways to use blogs in the classroom - other than as a way of getting students to participate, answer/ask questions, review books/lectures etc... I've just seen Kim Middleton's idea for a blog portfolio:

"The portfolio should consist of three parts:

1) A numbered list of all of your blog posts, with titles and dates of the post.

2) a numbered list of all of your comments with the title of the post on which you commented, the name of the person’s blog to whom it was posted, and the date.

3) A short (5-7 page) reflective essay based on your posts and comments.

What kind of a reflective essay, you ask? Your reflective essay assignment is designed to surface and articulate what you’ve learned over the course of the semester by looking back on and analyzing your own writing during this time. Your essay should answer the question: how have I learned to situate myself as a reader/writer/English student/literary type (pick one or more of these) in the information age?

To answer this, your primary texts should be the writing that you’ve done over the course of the semester—I’m particularly interested in your posts and comments, but your drafts, your expertise projects, etc. are fair game. With the above question in mind, read back over your writing and locate particular sentences and passages that attest to your learning. In your paper, you’ll quote these and analyze them. In what ways do they show what and how your ideas have changed? What terms, concepts, and phrases provide evidence of the complex ways that your thinking has progressed and shifted over the course of the semester? How do they provide evidence that you can use to answer the questions above? Essentially, you’re going to close read your own writing for evidence of how you’ve come to terms with the ideas we’ve discussed in class. I’m looking for a deep engagement with your own writing here.

You may, of course, use the “I” voice in your paper—in fact, you must! Please provide an introduction that contains your main idea(s)—you should be able to make an argument about where you are now and how you got there, with reference to particular terms that you see yourself working with throughout the course of the semester. You may feel free to use a chronological approach (ex., “when I first started this class, I thought digital culture was ____. My first blog post contains this comment: “______.” Here, you can see the ways that I was dedicated to x idea. All I could associate with that x idea was___. In a blog post three weeks later, however, there is a marked shift in my language and tone. “______.”). You may also choose a different kind of structure if it makes sense to you (you could arrange it by theme: “these three quotes show the ways that my thinking changed about digital culture. These two show the ways that I am a writer that needs a number of drafts to shape a complicated argument”.)"

Jeremy Hiebert's model of an e-portfolio though over two years old will serve an a helpful visual model of what students will be working on:

Why create an e-portfolio? Well it helps students:

1. document the journeys of preservice teachers

2. promote or market preservice teachers for employment

3. guide them toward meeting the requirements of certification programs.

(see New Literacies)