Digital Portfolios

As an instructor of first year writing, I am very interested in the idea of digital portfolios. I can see the potential for how efficient they can be - no more towering stacks of papers and rifling through pages getting pencil and ink smudges all over my hands - instead, I can just click to where it is hosted online or open the file and even provide feedback to the student using features like "comment" and "track changes" in Microsoft Word. I am gearing up to teach English 102 next semester and one of my classes is meeting in a computer lab classroom, so I've really been thinking about how to use the easy access to technology to my advantage. Submitting unit projects electronically and compiling a digital portfolio have been on my mind, so I was very excited to see that this topic was addressed in our course readings for the week.

In "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," Clark explores ways in which writing instruction can change to meet the students in the digital worlds they are a part of every day. Section three of this article addresses digital portfolios or portfolios specifically. Clark states that "ePortfolios serve as an ideal bridge between traditional, essayistic literacy pedagogies and emerging digital rhetoric pedagogies because they embody both the old and the new" (29). Some students and instructors are quite apprehensive about incorporating technology in to the classroom, so starting with aspects of digital composition that are modeled after traditional paper and ink forms could help to alleviate some of those tensions. Not only are these digital formats easier to carry around and respond to for instructors, but they offer more opportunities for students to incorporate visual and auditory elements in to their work.

Creating portfolios in a digital format also causes students to consider other elements that would not be present in a traditional paper and ink format. By publishing their portfolios online, students become more aware of ideas such as ownership and explore who is considered an author in the digital world we live in. They have to consider a wider audience than ever before and "use their portfolios to demonstrate an authority over their own lives and educational trajectories and to establish online identities built on the quality, content, and character of their own work" (Clark 30). These ideas are the impetus to rich and meaningful conversations within the composition classroom, and beyond, as many young users of the web "have yet to fully understand the implications of living a publicly accessible life" (Clark 31). I can only think of an incident that happened this weekend involving one of the girls I advise in my youth organization and her Facebook - if those implications were more widely known and understood, I wouldn't have had an uncomfortable conversation with her.

My question, then, is what do these digital or ePortfolios look like? Here are a few samples that I've found of all shapes and sizes:
Paul's ePortfolio
Cyborg Hotties
Elizabeth Barkley
Mieko Swartz
JC Domingo

Most of these are fairly straightforward. Paul's ePortfolio looks like it was created using a basic website. JC Domingo's portfolio was created using eFolioWorld, which is a subscription service, but could easily be recreated in a basic website service as well. Cyborg Hotties and Mieko Swartz are more complex and were probably designed using a subscription service or a program like Dreamweaver. The same for Elizabeth Barkley's portfolio - it has quite a few bells and whistles, with rollover features and a pop-up window menu.

If I were to use digital or ePortfolios in my composition classroom, I would point my students in the direction of a free website service such as Webs.com, Weebly.com, or for those who want a flashier portfolio, Wix.com. I would create some general criteria for the information that needs to be included in their portfolio and what I expect overall.

Has anyone used digital or ePortfolios in their class before? (Or done one as a student?)