Curating Your Digital Identity: ePortfolios as a Process
Description/Abstract/Artist Statement
Advocates for ePortfolios often stress their ability to provide a vehicle for creating and curating learners’ academic and professional identities. Yet it is vital to recognize the rhetorical nature of such digital compositions. Hubert, Pickavance, and Hyberger claim, “When students compose e-portfolios…. they build the architecture of their ideas and make decisions about how they want to represent them hierarchically. Students make connections across various assignments and courses and, more importantly, decide how those connections ought to be displayed.” Yet scholarship tends to focus on the final, public facing product, obscuring the process that leads to a robust public portfolio. However, most students cannot produce a lasting, sophisticated identity in a multimedia, digital environment over night. In practice, ePortfolios are a process-driven genre; when done effectively, students are encouraged to constantly revisit and revise their presentation of self as represented in the ePortfolio. As such, this presentation will explore the scaffolded nature of ePortfolios, with students representing the spectrum of experience, from the nascent ePortfolio user beginning to develop an archive, to the intermediate ePortfolio creator beginning to hone her narrative of expertise, to the advanced ePortfolio author in the midst of restructuring her website to reflect her new graduate student identity. As a result, the audience will witness the ways in which ePortfolios can and should evolve over time, leading them to understand ePortfolios and digital identity as an on-going curation process.
Faculty Advisor/Mentor
Megan Mize
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Disciplines
Educational Methods | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Session Title
ePortfolio Panel Discussions
Location
Learning Commons @ Perry Library, Conference Room 1313
Start Date
2-2-2019 11:30 AM
End Date
2-2-2019 12:30 PM
Curating Your Digital Identity: ePortfolios as a Process
Learning Commons @ Perry Library, Conference Room 1313
Advocates for ePortfolios often stress their ability to provide a vehicle for creating and curating learners’ academic and professional identities. Yet it is vital to recognize the rhetorical nature of such digital compositions. Hubert, Pickavance, and Hyberger claim, “When students compose e-portfolios…. they build the architecture of their ideas and make decisions about how they want to represent them hierarchically. Students make connections across various assignments and courses and, more importantly, decide how those connections ought to be displayed.” Yet scholarship tends to focus on the final, public facing product, obscuring the process that leads to a robust public portfolio. However, most students cannot produce a lasting, sophisticated identity in a multimedia, digital environment over night. In practice, ePortfolios are a process-driven genre; when done effectively, students are encouraged to constantly revisit and revise their presentation of self as represented in the ePortfolio. As such, this presentation will explore the scaffolded nature of ePortfolios, with students representing the spectrum of experience, from the nascent ePortfolio user beginning to develop an archive, to the intermediate ePortfolio creator beginning to hone her narrative of expertise, to the advanced ePortfolio author in the midst of restructuring her website to reflect her new graduate student identity. As a result, the audience will witness the ways in which ePortfolios can and should evolve over time, leading them to understand ePortfolios and digital identity as an on-going curation process.