This project will represent the hands-on component of the workshop and should result in a digital product (a hypertext system, in fact).  While it is hoped participants will complete their projects in the Workshop period, the Mini-Portfolio can be handed in up to July 10.

The project is intended to accomplish several goals:

• Encourage purposeful reflection about learning and exploration of how reflection can be developed and supported through digital portfolio production
• Develop understanding of how artifacts may indicate performance competence
• Allow participants to become familiar, in a task-oriented context, with one set of common tools for producing digital portfolios
• Produce a sharable product reflecting the skills and understandings gained in the workshop

What the Mini-Portfolio Is

In a sense, this will be a microcosm of the larger projects that we may require of our students at the end of their English major career.   Just as we would ask them to look back on their work--representing learning over time--you are being asked to select a body of your recent work ("artifacts") that makes up part of your learning opus, and to reflect on how you have learned as a result of creating them.  These artifacts can include

• Essays, published or unpublished (or book chapters, proposals, etc.)
• Conference presentations or proposals
• Workshops, as participant or leader
• Grant proposals and reports
• Accountability reports (annual report, P&T Documentation)
• Teaching materials (syllabi, assignment narratives, content summaries, even written responses to student work)
• Testimonials
• Student and/or Peer Evaluations
• Multimedia representations of teaching/scholarship--photographs, recordings, video, etc.

The Mini-Port will require you to focus reflection in a core document in which you identify your recent learning, talk about textual or media details as components of this learning, and dynamically link to these artifacts.
 

Steps
 

1. Gather/ponder on recent learning or scholarship
2. Consider significant threads in your work
3. Identify artifacts which demonstrate these threads; maintain in digital form
4. Construct a master narrative about what you have learned and that "links" to artifact evidence
5. Construct master narrative and digital linking in chosen environment
6. Debug

Guidelines and Suggestions

One way to approach the composing of the master narrative might be to use your Individual Scholarship Plan as a base to work from.  You may already have gone through this process of reflection and have established threads of significance in your work. If you do not yet have a Scholarship Plan, this might be an excellent time to do one!  I offer my own Scholarship Plan as an example of a narrative that by its nature has built-in artifact-linking potential.

If you wish to construct a document from scratch, organize it so that is has at least three components:

I.  General introduction to yourself as a scholar

II. Individual discussion of at least three artifacts that represent your work, with explanations of how they are representative and dynamic links to them

III. Concluding section that takes a long perspective on where you are now and where you want to go as a learner

The master narrative should not have a rigid page minimum, but it may be difficult to demonstrate the reflection-linking process well in less than, say, 750 words

Digital Environment

You have several options for the digital environment with which to construct your Mini-Port; we will cover these during the Workshop sessions