| Tangential Lines: The third new direction |
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Portfolio
Contents Home The Background Guiding Questions Portfolios, Technologies, and the Composition Classroom EPortfolios Why Portfolios? Outlining Multimodal Composition The Cs Enhanced Writing Parallel Educational Tools First Parallel Second Parallel Third Parallel Fourth Parallel New Directions: Into Infinity (Expanding Ideas) Tangent Line 1 Tangent Line 2 Final Reflections References |
| Portfolio specific tangents Portfolios have been tauted as the perfect assessment tool. Though they can be the most appropriate way to assess student work, even portfolios can be used inappropriately. Although portfolios are assessment tools that draw on contextual arguments for validity, the particular type of portfolios that is most parallel with multimodal composition is a portfolio demonstrating process, growth, collaboration, and students’ use of rhetorical strategies. Therefore, portfolios that simply collect finished works or are used to showcase students’ best pieces are not going to be used as effectively with multimodal composition because they do not demonstrate the learning that has occurred throughout the duration of the class. For example, finished-works portfolios may not show the hard work one student puts in to composing a webtext because ultimately, the webtext does not look “finished.” In this example, the learning and movement from early to late writing stages is not seen—only the shabbily constructed webtext (which may have taken the student weeks to compose) is displayed. The portfolio that is not designed for a particular context will also not be an effective a learning tool for students or instructors, though they may work very well as assessment tools. In order to incorporate portfolios effectively into the classroom, teachers must scrutinize their purposes of using portfolios and critically develop portfolio requirements to reflect that purpose (Perry, 1997; Murphy, 1999). |
  Finished-works
portfolios may not show the hard work one student puts in to composing
a webtext because ultimately, the webtext does not look “finished.”
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