# Welcome to SMIRK Unit
7 - ePortfolios or
electronic portfolios

- What are they?
- Three levels of digital portfolios
- Collecting evidence
- Additional evidence
- Choosing the best evidence
- Coherence and continuity
- Reflect
- More points to consider
- Principles of portfolio design
- Navigability and simplicity
- Back to main index

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# What are they?

Many students are finding that online portfolios, or ePortfolios, are the best way to showcase a wide range of their work. An ePortfolio is a series of linked webpages (or a blog) uploaded and maintained by the student - pages that represent you both personally and professionally.

Most of the literature on eportfolios outlines a three-step process: collect, select, and reflect.

- collection involves gathering your evidence and beginning to publish it;
- selection means picking the best pieces from your evidence;
- reflection is your opportunity to ponder and explain the choices you made about your portfolio pieces and even your life choices.

As you publish your portfolio online, following some basic principles of design will help ensure that your work makes a splash. The result is an organized virtual space where you can showcase yourself to potential employers.

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# The three levels of
digital portfolios

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###### illustration http://langwitches.org/blog/2010/08/04/wrapping-my-mind-around-digital-portfolios/

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Collecting evidence

#### Gathering the Parts of Your ePortfolio

You’ve spent your time at university completing tasks such as: project design, research, writing assignments, composing a cv, group work, programming, designing products or computer games, and earning grades. All of these are candidates for your ePortfolio. You may have photos of sports participation or voluntary work, bookmarks of favorite websites, personal accomplishments, journal writings, society membership, awards, and hobbies. These are also candidates. Your collection process begins with you mentally cataloging each piece of evidence and deciding how to use it.

#### Where do I start?

- Your CV: include an updated cv, perhaps downloadable as a pdf file. You might begin your portfolio simply by uploading your cv just to get you started.
- Sample essays and reports: these are common standards by which all students are judged.

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Additional evidence

Additional evidence, pieces that show your skills as a communicator, a consultant, an engineer, or a designer. Think about:

- Designs for everything from a coffee mug to a battlebot
- A piece of software or a computer game that you have designed
- A good Powerpoint presentation
- Scanned copies of handwritten evaluations from a placement supervisor.

Thinking outside the box, you can show personal attributes as oral communication skills, reliability and aptitude for planning, creativity and innovation, level of community service, willingness to travel, quality of judgment, and even social responsibility. Some examples:

- Videos of you giving a talk or participating in a debate
- Tables that chart your module selection for each year of their course, listing the competencies you achieved.
- Photos of you that demonstrate those more personal assets that may interest employers, captions to define how they have developed intercultural awareness (“Here I am in a village in France, chatting with locals about. . .”), or why they believe in volunteerism (“This Habitat for Humanity project helped three families . . .”)

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Choosing the best
evidence

#### Privacy and suitability.

You should only upload material that you are happy to be associated with.

- Do you want to give out personal information such as a postal address or phone number? (giving out your e-mail address is pretty standard).
- Do you want to put photos of yourself online?. If this worries you, you can password protect your ePortfolio.
- Beware identity theft! Be careful not to give out private information that others could use, such as your social security number.
- Remember, privacy works both ways - you must respect the privacy of others. This means that you shouldn’t link to other people's pages without their permission, and you also must credit to any sources that you use, especially material from someone else’s website or copyrighted images. Failing to do this is plagiairism, not a good advert

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Coherence and
continuity

Try to think of all the material you select as pieces of evidence showing that you are an interesting person. Select material that inspires people to examine your work, and choose artifacts that will demonstrate your growth over time (like a paper from an introductory class as well as a senior thesis). Adopt an upbeat, welcoming tone (“In these pages, you’ll discover exactly what makes me tick”), but also maintain enough professionalism to keep an employer’s critical eye locked on your pages. Some common mistakes:

- Publishing potentially embarrassing photographs. This is not Facebook!
- Letting serious typos slip by (Bachelor of Sciwence in Engginerring)
- Revealing information that is too personal or leaves them open to judgment (“I’ve tried every beer on this list of 50 at least once, and some of them way too many times.”)

Some people say that you should only post something online if you’d be willing to show it to your granny! Though you don't need to go this far, perhaps a good benchmark is that you only post material that you can be proud of a year from now, especially if you intend to advertise the URL to employers.

Finally, when selecting material, recognize the value of piggybacking. In addition to posting pages such as your home page, your cv, essays and reports, project designs, and photos, keep in mind that you can readily link your pages to those that others have created. Where logical, provide relevant links to your course descriptions, organizations with which you’re affiliated, or pages that reflect your hobbies and personal interests.

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Reflect

#### Being True to Yourself while Considering How You Come Across to Others

Good reflective writing is about reviewing what you’ve accomplished and projecting value. Some students shy away from reflection, either out of unfamiliarity or because they hesitate to make private reflections public; yet reflective writing is standard and natural to most online portfolios. Smart students realize that the portfolio is the safest place for reflective writing. It’s inappropriate to make subjective, personal comments in a technical paper, cv, or cover letter, while it makes perfect sense in a portfolio. In an eportfolio, you have the space and opportunity to share your thoughts on everything from your personal passions to discussing how you performed in a particular course. The rules for reflection are flexible, but they do exist.

Be selective about where the reflection occurs, and how much of it you use. Don't reflect about coursework on your downloadable cv. Trying to reflect on every single course you’ve taken would be overwhelming both for you and your reader. However, creating a page that summarizes your experience and reflecting briefly on the value of each as you describe it makes perfect sense. (“I valued this job because it taught me how to analyze the network configuration needs of a small business" or “This class taught me to use cascading style sheets - something I will apply to my future web designs.”).

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# More points to consider

Good reflective writing should have a purpose both for you and your audience. Both of you should be interested in commentary about why you chose your particular major, relationships that you see between your coursework and experience, and what sets you apart from others in terms of both training and life choices. Give examples that show learning, change, empowerment, self-development, problem-solving, and results. Good examples are concrete, providing names, lists, scenarios, dates, definitions, and so on.

- One student wrote an essay reflecting on how her intercultural understanding had been shaped by a year abroad
- Another student wrote a few short poems defining his interest in engineering, and even created a sketch to accompany each poem
- A third student took an even bolder stroke - writing about lessons she’d learned about teamwork after being reprimanded by a groupwork supervisor for working too independently.

What they are doing is not only taking stock of their personal assessment of their growth, they’re also preparing themselves for hard interview questions. (“Tell me about the greatest challenge you’ve faced in life.” or “Argue to me how your education prepared you to work at our company.”) Ultimately, effective reflection online is about learning to speak well in the company of others.

Finally, look for opportunities to write reflective comments on any major portion of your portfolio, including the cv, papers and projects, photography, and so on. The bottom line: If it’s worth a menu-based category in your e-portfolio, it’s probably worth reflective commentary.

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Principles of
portfolio design

The best portfolios share three traits: unity, navigability, and simplicity.

Unity. The more unified the pages of your portfolio are, the more likely we are to stay there.

- Come up with a basic design and background that is repeated on all pages
- Keep associated items parallel with each other from one page to the next.
- Use headings for short blocks of text, and when you do need to use long blocks (like an essay or assignment), show clear links back to the root page.
- Set up your portfolio so that when we visit linked pages, they open in a new window - so that when we close them, we automatically return to the portfolio.

An example: The page is called “My Design Projects,” and it describes four projects. Each project has a short heading, written in bold red text, followed by a short project description (just 3 - 4 lines long, in black text), and at the end of each description is a link, “Visit the project page.” Between each description is a solid black line to enhance separation, and the background is white so that all text readily stands out. Also, at the left of each of these descriptions is a small screenshot (also clickable) of the project page. Once we go into a specific project page, we see a “Return to My Design Projects page” and a “Return to my homepage” link at the top of the page. This basic form is repeated on other pages, and so we have a strong sense of unity to your portfolio no matter what pages we are visiting.

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

# Navigability and
simplicity

Navigability. Some of the best ways to aid navigation are the simplest:

- Use icons and menus. We’re used to thinking of icons as clickable, and we intuitively use menus, whether they appear at the top or the left side of the page.
- Make sure the same clickable menu appears at the top of each page, with contents including simple, rapidly identifiable terms such as Home, CV, Major Projects, Coursework, Computer Skills, Work Experience, Interests.
- Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page,
- Avoid root pages that require a lot of scrolling,
- Make sure that there are clear links on every page.
- Avoid using frames as they create multiple scrollbars on the same page, which may be hard to navigate.
- If your portfolio is optimized for a particular version of a browser, you should tell your reader on your homepage, and provide a link where the software can be downloaded.

Simplicity. Finally, we’re all familiar with the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid!). Don't:

- Fill your pages with cute animations,
- Use too many different colors (called an “angry fruit salad” by web designers),
- Use slow-loading, distracting backgrounds.

This increases the odds that we’ll turn away from your pages. Ultimately, the best portfolios are those most artfully simple in design, welcoming us at a glance to sit back, relax, click, and spend some virtual time with you. Try to write in plain English! Remember, if you can't express it simply, you may not know what you are talking about! Good luck!

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SMIRK - ePortfolios or electronic portfolios by Joe Schall, The Pennsylvania State University modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.