Now the web sensible part of it, I will just comment on a couple of features there. A lot of people will say, “well it’s an electronic portfolio, isn’t it just a website?” And the answer is no; it’s not just a website. I would suggest that in temperament, it’s closer to a blog than it is to a website, but blogs just now are coming into their own, so it would have been harder to make that argument when I was developing the piece for
CCC. The second point I would make is that parts of a portfolio, especially the reflective piece, you don’t find on your run-of-the-mill website. That reflection is not an explicit part of it. And most people who are interested in portfolios, especially portfolios for learning, find that reflection is the centerpiece of what they are looking for. The third claim about the web sensible part I’d want to make is that a webpage, as opposed to a blog – it’s instructive in some ways to juxtapose those two, and juxtaposition is part of this, now I’m back to the gallery thing, that juxtaposition – that the arrangement here, within a web sensible portfolio is not intended to be linear. The kind of clarity of arrangement, and the kind of everything is within three-clicks kind of mantra, is not necessarily what you are looking for in a web sensible portfolio. I think a web sensible portfolio is much more open, in terms of both arrangement and delivery, but I also think that it’s incumbent upon the composer to be intentional about it, and that leads to some very interesting reflection as to the rationale for the kind of arrangement that’s plotted.
Now the last thing I want to say is that a website ordinarily is a finished product. Now you may understand that as one finished product that will actually be part of a succession of finished products. A portfolio, on the other hand, especially portfolios that show development, is not intended as a finished product. It’s really much more postmodern in it’s sensibility, so that’s part of what goes into the web sensible. The other part is the distinction I drew in the CCC's piece around web sensible. I was trying to contrast there an online assessment system, which is, and we had a conversation before this interview started, where I described systems that will neither reward nor penalize students for using them
-- where it’s not part of the curriculum, where it is just expected for some reason. It’s so at odds with what we know about human nature it’s astonishing.
And so, to illustrate, pun intended, there is a student on our campus who is an engineering major and a creative writing minor, and he created a portfolio in a first year composition class. One way we might speak about writing for the screen is to think in terms of scrolling or clicking. I think people who are more screen-oriented prefer clicking to scrolling. This student’s portfolio is a classic first generation portfolio: you got a couple
of clicking and a lot of scrolling. Why? Because he basically uploaded his Microsoft Word documents and he added a couple of images. He’s actually pretty clever, and he did some other interesting things, but is this a smart, screen delivered portfolio? No. But that wasn’t part of the curriculum, and I think that’s an unreasonable expectation. And once more, and we don’t know about the claim I’m going to make, there’s no research to support this yet, I think we will gather research that will show that this is a maturational process, like everything else. So even if there were screen sensibility, of a kind that there was not in this particular portfolio, I think that if we attended this over time and if we teach it, if this is part of the responsibility we assign ourselves, that that writing for the screen is going to become radically different over time, and that students will mature into this. But of course, if we don’t teach it, I’m not sure how much maturational process we can expect.
How do students approach portfolios having been used to seeing screen genres as finished products?
I’m going to come back to a truism. I think it might sound like a dodge, but it’s not from my point of view. In the first place, it’s all fundamentally rhetorical. Is the screen finished, is it not finished? I would say secondarily, what do we mean by finished? It seems to me that’s where you start. And I also think, finally, that’s where you end; it’s the alpha and the omega, if you will, because you want students to do this explaining to you and to me, right? And, by the way, to the other people they may be addressing. So that the portfolio that they create that’s going to be used to attain a job is going to be quite different than the portfolio they create inside the classroom to obtain a grade. Why? Because they have different purposes
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