An Exercise in Absence . . .

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An Exercise in Absence . . .

1/12/2006

Notes on the Past and Future of Digital Portfolios and Student Learning

By Kathleen Yancey
Florida State University

During the academic year 2002-2003, as I attempted to keep track of developments in electronic portfolios, I wasn't quite frantic. Given the widespread distribution of portfolios-in classrooms, in academic programs, in extracurricular programs, for employment-this was no easy task, and at the end of that year, I concluded that my search to keep up wasn't probably successful after all, unless of course we measure success by exhaustion. In terms of that metric, I did well indeed.

Upon reflection, much as a student in the midst of a term, I understood that caught up in the process of keeping up, I had some difficulty making sense of the object of my pursuit. On one hand, it seemed that ePortfolios were everywhere and on their way to becoming ubiquitous. Nearly all my colleagues across the country, and their colleagues too, were in medias res: considering using portfolios; planning the use of portfolios; or implementing some version of ePortfolios. On the other hand and at the risk of sounding heretical, all this busy-ness about and around ePortfolios sometimes seemed like sound and fury signifying . . . well, to continue my Shakespeare allusions, there's the rub. I wasn't certain at all what it was signifying.

Location isn't everything, but as Einstein pointed out, it frames what one sees. This term, I'm in the midst of making a transition to Florida State University, where I'm directing a graduate program in rhetoric and composition, which also means that for the first time in several years, I'm focusing on graduate education and not on general education. And for me right now relative to ePortfolios, there's a quiet: I'm not using them in a class; I'm not conducting a case study; I'm not working with in-service teachers who want to use them in their own teaching; I'm not advising another program on my own campus about how they might design and implement their own models. Inside that void, I have the opportunity to reflect on digital portfolios, on why I was attracted to them in the first place, and on what I'd like to do with them when I return to them, as I will in the spring semester.

My morphing to digital portfolios occurred rather "naturally." An experienced practitioner and researcher of portfolios in print, I have been teaching in computer classrooms and labs since the early 1990's, so morphing to digital portfolios was a "natural" move to make. (In fact, given that context, I often wonder why it took me so long to morph.) At the same time, like others, I have certain assumptions about portfolios, chief among them that a "good" portfolio model enhances learning. Now I think this for many reasons, two of which I'd like to mention here. One is that as a faculty member, I want my curriculum, pedagogy and assessment aligned. Teaching composing with computers, and teaching about composing with many different technologies, I found that digital portfolios provided the culminating piece for student learning and performance. Two is that portfolios do function as a vehicle for assessment, and the best thinking about assessment is that it should enhance learning: portfolios can do this.