Could you talk a bit about how you became interested in digital portfolios?
I want to answer with a generalization. I’ve been interested in print portfolios for longer than I care to confess. And I’m interested in digital technologies, so it’s sort of a natural progression to put the digital technology and the portfolio in dialogue with each other. So that’s one answer. Another answer would be to say that we had some interest on my campus. In particular the provost was interested in developing electronic portfolios basically as an assessment measure and I initially partnered with someone who was an IT person and with Donna Winchell who was directing our first-year comp program at the time and we worked together to develop a pilot. Cindy Selfe and Dickie Selfe were involved too, but Cindy was part of the project, and we had a pilot to see how this might work so it was very small scale and it was prompted in part by the provost interest.
We didn’t want to use portfolios for assessment unless, by assessment, you mean a formative evaluation of work to enhance programs. If that’s what you mean and we are going to build in a faculty development component to it, I’m partly in favor of it.
We talked about it in those terms to the provost, and she was in favor of that view; in other words, she shifted her position from thinking of the portfolios as basically a test to understanding them as much more powerful vehicles for transforming teaching and learning, so program enhancement might be one purpose that we would put these. However, from my view, that was a secondary purpose. The first purpose was to bring the vehicle, which in this case is a portfolio, into alignment with the pedagogy. And the pedagogy, while not driven by digital technology, was certainly informed by it. Of course, there weren’t many resources but there were a few resources, and that makes it, as we know, more likely that you are going to go forward with a project.
You argue that digital, “web sensible” portfolios are more gallery-like than book like. Could you elaborate on this?
I’m not sure I could actually trace it. I’m very interested in architecture and the college my department is situated in is a college of art, architecture and humanities and while that doesn’t necessarily mean there be interaction between the ten departments in the college, in fact, there’s a fair amount of interaction between English and architecture, both rhetoric faculty and composition faculty. I’ve served on many graduate student committees, and I did a case study on some graduate students as they developed their theses, so part of my thinking has been influenced by that.
By the way, at least in our place, architecture students use all available spaces to design, to argue, and to reiterate, and I think it is a reiterative process more than it’s a revision process, and I think there is a key distinction there. So partly, my thinking was influenced by watching architecture students. It’s also the case that I was aware of what a student environment looked like in that discipline. Now a studio environment in architecture is really quite different than a studio environment in art, so part of my thinking was influenced by that.
I took some of this thinking into my classroom where I started using the walls as space. You know, it’s an untapped resource. It’s sitting right there, and we don’t do anything with it. I thought of it as a gallery more than a studio
.
So that’s a context. And then I started looking at portfolios, and I was aware that in my own practice, when I started using portfolios, a number of students used the arrangement of print. We all think in terms of print whether we are aware of it or not, especially those of us from my generation because that was all we had. So the students thought in terms of a table of contents which, I have to say, is a really wonderful organizing device for print and not a bad organizing device for the electronic. I’m not opposed to that. But juxtaposed to that, was another genre of portfolio if you will. I’m not sure if it’s a genre, but we’ll use it as a placeholder momentarily, and I could see that that set of portfolios was distinguished by the branching out and surprises that you often find in a gallery. And I would suggest to you that if you look at some of the reviews of the new Museum of Modern Art that just opened in November that you will find some critics who define it as a hypertext. And I went to visit there, actually in December, and it is a fascinating space, that in fact looks very much like a portfolio. Now there are some key differences there too, I don’t want to overstate the case, but that’s part of what my thinking is.
