Ambassadors with Portfolios:   Electronic portfolios and the improvement of
teaching

Daniel P. Tompkins

Why Portfolios?

"Portfolio" is a capacious term, describing any collection of "leaves" or papers, sometimes portable,  generally accessible, intended for display to others. Because they are so flexible and adaptable, because they provide more substantial evidence of teaching activity than other devices, and because they fulfill some current needs at American universities, Portfolios are being used increasingly by faculty in American higher education.

Faculty portfolios are collections of evidence intended to document the classroom practice of  a teacher and to allow various sorts of comment by colleagues or superiors.   Faculty portfolios generally fall into two categories: teaching and course portfolios.  Teaching portfolios collect evidence from a wide range of activities, often over a number of years. They can be used both "formatively" and "summatively," that is, either as tools to improve performance or as instruments of assessment prior to promotion, merit, or employment decisions.   (Seldin 1997, pp. 15-17)  The intended audience is often a mentor or superior. (Seldin, 1997, pp. 10-12, 20, 26)

Course portfolios, on the other hand, were developed to support the "formative" process of reflection, discussion and improvement.  Peers, not decision-makers, make up their usual audience.  These portfolios deal with a particular course, often posing a research question about that course:  as Mills Kelly remarks in the essay that follows, his portfolio sought to answer the question, "how was it that I knew using the web in my teaching was improving student understanding of the past?"  William Cerbin of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, credited with first proposing course-based portfolios of this sort, says, "In a nutshell, I am trying to understand how students come to ‘think with’ important disciplinary knowledge and not just ‘think about’ it." (Cerbin, "Interview,"  August 6, 2000).   Pat Hutchings and other authors in Hutchings’ seminal collection, The Course Portfolio (Hutchings, 1998a) touch on other functions of the portfolio:  among other things, it can be an "aid to memory," an escape from pedagogical isolation, a "way of bringing recognition,"  an argument for a certain teaching technique, a tool for evaluating the "scholarly work" of a teacher, or for helping to "sort through the teaching issues that currently consume" a professor.  (Hutchings, 1998b, pp. 17-18; Martsolf, 1998, p. 26; Huber 1998, p. 32; Langsam 1998, p. 58)   But the underlying theme in this volume, repeated in essay after essay, is purposeful inquiry.

Family Resemblances, Individual Differences.   Summative and formative portfolios can take different forms.  But a basic tripartite structure obtains with both genres:

Material from oneself

Materials from others

Products of teaching

It is possible to build a composite outline listing the sorts of content a portfolios of any sort might use, and I have constructed one below, using Seldin's discussion (pp. 4-9) and the electronic course portfolio of  Mills Kelly (Texas Tech):

a)  Material from oneself.

Executive summary.  Mills Kelly introduces the course, provides a detailed course design, mentions learning outcomes, the process of ‘unfolding’ the course, and his evaluation criteria, and summarizes the conclusions he reached by studying student performance and responses.  See:
http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/ExecSummary.htm:

Introduction or cover letter

Index of portfolio contents

Teaching responsibilities (important when reader desires a picture of your overall workload)

Statement of teaching philosophy: especially useful when matched with student work.

Teaching strategies and objectives; course design.  Kelly carefully lists both the skills and knowledge he expects students to acquire: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/Objectives.htm

Description of course materials

Efforts to improve teaching

Essays about the portfolio.  Kelly provides a set of reflective essays that grew out of this teaching experience:
http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/essays.htm

He also summarizes what he has learned from the portfolio:

http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/Conclusions.htm

b)  Materials from others:

Student ratings

Analysis and critique by colleagues, based on readings of syllabus, comparison with other courses, discussion of learning goals, class visits.  (Kelly provides a helpful response form that can be used by anyone reading his portfolio.)

Unsolicited student statements, letters, e-mails

c)  Products of teaching (evidence of student learning, with teacher's responses).    In both teaching and learning portfolios, it is essential to provide examples of student learning, which provide important information in award and promotion decisions and serve as evidence in  the "research" activity of course portfolios.  In her essay in this collection, Elizabeth Barkley states that the course portfolio "moved me beyond intuition and anecdote to a culture of evidence." Mills Kelly records samples of student work and comments on these:

http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/StudentWork.htm

Examinations

Classroom assessments.  Samples of the sorts of exercises found in Angelo and Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques (Angelo and Cross, 1995).

Overlapping Contexts. Teaching and course portfolios both came into prominence recently: the teaching portfolio with the first edition of Peter Seldin's book in 1991, the course portfolio in 1992, when William Cerbin  first proposed it.  (Hutchings, 1998, 15-16)   It is worthwhile to glance briefly at the intellectual tendencies that helped nurture what we might call  "the portfolio movement":  a loose alliance of university faculty who believe that portfolios can benefit their teaching.  On the one hand, the last two decades of the twentieth century brought a growing desire for evidence of achievement:  "accountability" was a leitmotif of the era.  Teaching portfolios answered this need by providing a wider-ranging and more nuanced basis for promotion decisions than ratings alone allowed.  (Seldin 1999, p. 16)   But "accountability" was hardly the only goal of the portfolio movement, which also advanced a new model of faculty improvement emphasizing peer collaboration and shared knowledge.    Donald Schon's advocacy of "reflective practice," Barr and Tagg’s article on the "learning paradigm," Ernest Boyer’s classification of teaching as a form of scholarship,  Cross and Steadman’s studies of classroom research, and Lee Shulman’s insistence on making teaching  "community property" all struck a chord among faculty who sensed that their solo activity, however diligent or polished, was affecting student learning less than it might.   (Barr and Tagg 1995;  Boyer 1990 ;  Cross and Steadman 1996; Schon 1984, 1990; Schon and Rein 1995;  Shulman 1993)

The portfolio movement brought a tool for reflective practice, an instrument for focusing on learning, a stimulus to communal work.  Faculty  were encouraged to study their classes, to gather student work, to treat the classroom as an arena for research activity.  As Mills Kelly’s  essay reveals, there were strikingly few ground rules for this activity: faculty truly did set out on their own to build research schemes.  (The lines between course and teaching portfolios in the early years blurred: some individuals worked in both realms; it was not unusual for provosts to embracecourse portfolios as a new tool for up-or-down assessment.)  Shulman’s appointment as president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1997 gave new force to what was now called the "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," in which portfolios play a major role.   Shulman remarks that all scholarship is public, "susceptible to critical review" by professional peers, and "acessible for exchange and use by others in the future,"   For examples, see the portfolios of Cerbin, Kelly and Elizabeth Barkley discussed in this essay, as well as those of Randy Bass and others on the Carnegie website, kml.carnegiefoundation.org.

These concurrent movements owed some of their credibility and momentum to even wider trends, especially to the movement toward "organizational learning" and "learning organizations" that Schon and his MIT colleagues were promoting.   Rooted in a Deweyan linkage of theory and practice, and marked by a taste for metaphor, the writings of the MIT school cut a wide swath in the 1990s.  Perhaps paradoxically, the language of organizational learning seems to have gained more traction in non-academic settings than within the university.  (Senge 1994; Argyris 1999)

The Advent of Electricity.   In the early years of the 1990’s, then, a confluence of forces converged to open pedagogical activity up to outsiders, whether for formative or summative purposes.   The latter half of the decade was marked by the rapid spread of the World Wide Web.

Portfolio writers quickly recognized that the flexible and often non-linear format of the website was congruent with the loose organization of many portfolios.  Information can be inserted at any place in the web portfolio with only minimal effect on its overall structure; comments can be invited; links can be written between any two items that seem to have a connection.  Faculty began to put work onto the web, using the web first to support and then to interrogate their classroom teaching. The examples from Mills Kelly’s portfolio above illustrate how congenial the portfolio structure is with the resources provided on the web.

In preparing this chapter, I conducted interviews with a number of scholars who have done important work on electronic portfolios .  I also read portfolios, and selected four for further discussion here.  Finally, I solicited essays from the portfolio authors.

Introduction to the Essays

In this section, four university teachers have written about their portfolios.   At first glance, these essays may seem to have little in common.  The academic "homes" of the authors could not be further apart (Texas, California, Alaska and Pennsylvania).   They represent four different academic disciplines; one teaches at a two-year institution, another has graduate students.  Some write their own HTML code throughout, others have built powerful partnerships with design teams.  But these differences are superficial compared to the vast differences in purpose and philosophy among the authors.

It is precisely this vastness that inspired the choices.  If the portfolio movement is to move forward and gather adherents, it is going to have to remain open to a range of approaches.  One could go on at length about the sometimes destructive debates between collaborative and cooperative educators, or between different approaches to student learning  communities, or many other contemporary pedagogical activities.   These debates often force participants to clarify their thinking, but perhaps equally often lead to a sectarianism that undermines common goals--especially when a movement is struggling to move beyond its current, relatively narrow band of adherents and win over colleagues and administrators.

Marc Stier:  Thinking about Teaching on the Web

Marc Stier, a political theorist, teaches in a program that introduces students at a large urban university to the western intellectual tradition.  He constructed his website on his own, and has refined it regularly over the years.

I have chosen this site (http://www.stier.net/teaching/teaching.htm) precisely because it does not conform to the definition of a portfolio.  It contains information about a number of courses.  The pages for "Intellectual Heritage 51" show that the teacher has thought carefully about each class in
the semester, provided students with a summary of these classes and notes on the readings, and in general made produced a thorough "public" statement about his course. He has not written a reflective statement or included examples of student work, although his essay shows that would have no trouble doing so.  (Note in this essay that he shares the interest of William Cerbin and others in helping students make the "conceptual leap" to a "new way of thinking.")

The web turns out to hold many documents like this.  My own favorites include Robert Wood’s impressive site for his sociology courses at Rutgers University-Camden (http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/~wood/) and at Temple, Robin
Mitchell-Boyask’s Greek mythology site (http://www.temple.edu/classics/) and Janice Siegel’s "Illustrated Guide To The Classical World" (http://nimbus.temple.edu/~jsiegel/IH/welcome.htm).  In each case, the teachers have deliberated about the shape of their courses.  After developing a calendar and syllabus, the teachers have gathered information to support student learning at each stage, gradually adding bibliography, hints, and mini-lectures to guide the student.  Often, they have gone on to develop review sheets for examinations, or detailed comments on paper-writing. Increasingly, professors accept, grade, and return papers online, sometimes using Blackboard or other course software as well as the tools in Microsoft Word.

Now, what is significant and promising is precisely this: none of these sites was developed under the guidance of the portfolio movement, yet the existence of the web has encouraged behavior that leads in the direction of portfolios.   These teachers have all gathered substantial
"material from themselves," and their websites have encouraged them to build incrementally on this material.  Course design, materials, and teaching strategies are all there.

In short, the web has encouraged these teachers, and others all over the country, to take their practice public. This is a crucial step, perhaps the crucial step.  Their work is "public, susceptible to critical review, and accessible for exchange and use," thus meeting Shulman’s three standards of scholarly work.  Stier, Wood, Mitchell-Boyask and Siegel all report receiving national and international correspondence from around the nation and from foreign countries, usually to acknowledge the assistance their sites provided.  Stier insists on the public quality of his course website and on its benefits for him while recognizing that it may upset others: "To make this process most useful, faculty members have to overcome their reluctance to expose their teaching to a wide audience. "

The authors I’ve just mentioned are skillful web practitioners and committed teachers.   They do not yet regard themselves as portfolio authors.  Could their proto-portfolios or potential portfolios become "full" portfolios?  They could, if the authors added reflective statements (as Stier now has), gathered student ratings and other comments, displayed student work and perhaps posed research questions.

Now we can turn to three examples of conscious portfolio construction, each with its own merits.  Helen Barrett has worked independently and creatively to develop a substantial source for portfolio developers.  Elizabeth Barkley used a portfolio to trace a change in the style and content of her teaching.   Mills Kelly concentrated on what was happening in a single course.

The technology of these three portfolios is as instructive as the authors’ comments on teaching. Helen Barrett and Mills Kelly were both self-taught. Elizabeth Barkley received substantial assistance from the staff at the Carnegie Foundation, which has developed an impressive set of portfolio displays.

Helen Barrett:  Portfolios for Teachers.

I decided that, after talking and writing about electronic portfolios, I had
better practice what I was preaching….  I decided to change my focus from
student portfolios to teaching portfolios: if we expected students to have
e-portfolios, teachers needed to model that activity, which they can then
share with their own students. Now,  when I make presentations on this
topic, the first portfolio I usually show is my own….  As I developed my
portfolio, I found that it fulfilled another purpose: validating my
professional growth over time.

       Interview, 7/20/00

This response to an interview question is significant.  Student portfolios and student electronic portfolios are fairly common in colleges of education, but extended reflections about portfolio creation seem relatively rare, and detailed instructions on portfolio development, carefully keyed to levels of technological sophistication, are even less common.   One influence on Professor Barrett’s work was the movement toward standards-based teaching, which seemed to support a greater emphasis on teaching portfolios:

I propose that a portfolio without standards is just a multimedia presentation or a fancy electronic resume or a digital scrapbook. There is a place for that type of format in classrooms or in employment searches, but a savvy administrator will look for evidence that the candidate meets the teaching standards that have been set for the district or state; a savvy teacher will look for evidence that a student's portfolio demonstrates achievement of at least one of the district/state/national standards. Without standards as the organizing basis for a portfolio, the collection becomes just that...a collection, haphazard and without
structure; the purpose is lost in the noise, glitz and hype. High technology disconnected from a focus on curriculum standards will only exacerbate the lack of meaningful
integration of technology into teaching and learning.  (Barrett 1998)

One merit of Professor Barrett’s essay and publications is to point to bodies of scholarship that are slightly different from those followed by the school of portfolio development begun by Cerbin and associated with Hutchings, Shulman, and the Carnegie Foundation.  Her website includes not only a lengthy bibliography of sources but over twenty articles and presentations of her own.    Her essay reviews a number of technical topics (such as the utility of PDF) that are not often mentioned in the literature about portfolio development, with careful guidance about each step of the process.

The two planes on which Professor Barrett  operates—her own portfolio development and that of the student teachers she trains—are both reflected in her essay.  One reason for including this essay is that it is far more deliberate about technology than other studies of electronic portfolios; another is that it reveals that student teachers have been more active in some forms of portfolio development than many university faculty.

Elizabeth Barkley:  A Record of Change

A Professor of  Music in a two-year institution, Elizabeth Barkley responded energetically to the changing tastes and declining interest of students, revising her curriculum and emphasizing active learning.  Her portfolio (http://kml.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery/ebarkley/), compiled with Toru Iiyoshi of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,  describes the transformation of this course, with an abundance of data in PDF files and substantial narrative material.  In her essay composed for this volume, Professor Barkley reflects on that transformation and on the power of the portfolio to describe this change: "I believe that a portfolio offered the fullest and most nuanced way to share this transformation with other teachers, disciplines, and institutions."   This is an essay of discovery:  At moments, Elizabeth Barkley resembles and explorer in a forest, seemingly surprised by the emerging benefits of her portfolio experience.  Interestingly, both she and Mills Kelly now plan to write portfolios for all the courses they teach.

T.  Mills Kelly:   In Search of  Historical Thinking

I wanted to better understand how the introduction of hypermedia into the survey course changed student understanding of course content, whether hypermedia improved or detracted from students’ ability to acquire a greater facility with historical methods, and whether using hypermedia might give students new or different insights into something we historians like to call "historical thinking."

       Essay for this volume

Mills Kelly, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University,  compiled his electronic portfolio on his own.  What is fascinating about both his portfolio (which can be found either at
http://kml.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery/mkelly/mkelly.html or at http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/welcome.htm) is that we see a historian at work, posing a research question, using evaluations and "instructional diagnoses."  In this portfolio, we see a historian at work.  The "Conclusions" section lists a set of  intriguing, evidence-based findings (I retain Kelly’s use of upper-case letters):

1.   Students Who Access Learning Resources on the Web Display a Higher
Level of Recursive Reading.

2.   The Hypermedia Revolution Signals the Doom of Conventional History
Survey Course.

3. The Web Does Encourage Independent Investigation, But Not As Much As We
Would Like.

The first finding confirms that web-based research involved students in an activity the author considers essential to historical work:  when students used the web, they were far more likely than others to return repeatedly to a central text while constructing an argument. The second finding reflects Kelly’s conviction that students using the web will do more recursive and "self-directed" research than others, thus undermining the "coverage-oriented" bias of traditional survey courses.  Finally, finding 3 reports that contrary to the grand claims made for web-based learning, "less than half (44%) actually ever left the class website to go poking around on the web, despite being encouraged to do so" and that "students in my courses, … remain disinclined to apply any sort of critical analysis to the sites they visit."

Kelly’s essay for this volume reveals that his historian’s inquisitiveness remains keen:  he is planning new projects that will involve his students even more extensively in use of the web.

Criticism of Portfolios

The portfolio movement comes at a particularly tense moment in the history of higher education.  On the one hand, concern with student learning is growing.  On the other, the burgeoning of short-term non-tenured contracts, along with occasional frontal assaults on the institution of tenure, have contributed to faculty feelings of powerlessness:  Gary Rhoades' term, 'managed professionals' captures these anxieties nicely.  (Rhoades, 1995)   In this context, any evaluation of teaching may seem threatening.  Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, has run its share of attacks on student ratings but was also the source of a negative appraisal of the entire portfolio movement. The most revealing feature of this attack was its assured binarism:  noting a correlation between teacher enthusiasm and student ratings, the author concluded that teaching is most effectively improved through consultations on  "key teaching characteristics, such as enthusiasm and clarity….,"  while portfolios are both wasteful and dangerous, since they provide administrators with information that might be used against professors. (Burns)

If teaching improvement were really, as Burns avers, a matter of behavior modification and learned enthusiasm, the way to pedagogical improvement would be smooth, without the dark nights of the soul so many of us experience.  One function of portfolios is to facilitate extended reflection and collegial discussion of how we teach.  The teacher ratings Burns prizes figure importantly in most portfolios, but they become objects of analysis, used as practitioners explore the relationship between ratings, student learning and other topics, or as they discuss the tensions between local experience and meta-analytic claims about ratings.   The virtue of portfolios is to re-frame confident statements--"enthusiasm improves learning"--as research questions: what has raised learning in my own setting, and why?

More measured concerns about the administrative use of portfolios can be found in other quarters.  In the interviews conducted as background for this chapter, several faculty criticized summative portfolios as unreliable and spotty.  Some disagreement exists as to whether it is wise to be frank and open about one’s teaching in a public setting like the web.   Interestingly, several interviewees mentioned that colleagues (not administrators) have sometimes sought to use portfolio information against them in promotion cases.   Each of these demurrers, however, is balanced by a report  that  the portfolio experience was successful and deeply meaningful:

I had to think much more deeply about my own discipline,
about what the scholarship of teaching and learning is or is becoming, and
about the multiple audiences for my work and how it might resonate with
them.  In other words, I faced a series of decisions that overlapped with
those we all face when we prepare to publish the results of our disciplinary
research, but which also included many new questions I had not considered
previously.

    Mills Kelly, essay in this volume

The Current Status of Electronic Faculty Portfolios

Faculty portfolios are now being used in a wide range of academic fields, as we can see from the multiple contributors to the second edition of Seldin's book and the six electronic portfolios (each from  a different discipline) at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (Seldin, 1999; kml.carnegiefoundation.org)   Electronic portfolios are also gaining a foothold within some disciplines, such as the American Historial Association, which published William Cutler's portfolio in the "Teaching" section of its  website in 1999 and will publish Mills Kelly’s during 2000. (Cutler, 1999)

Is this activity matched by equivalent depth on the campuses?  Or is the electronic portfolio movement a "religion of the highways" with only a few outposts at important sites?  The answer, for both summative and formative portfolios, remains unclear.  In the thousands of postsecondary institutions in the United States,  teaching is treated with varied degrees of seriousness, and "student learning" is only sometimes included in the evaluation of teaching.  When we turn to the use of portfolios for teaching, we find a huge variety of usages.  Teaching portfolios for promotion and tenure seem to be relatively widely accepted, while formative portfolio development remains somewhat marginal and electronic portfolios of both sorts—summative and formative—are even rarer.   Without attempting to quantify the degree of electronic portfolio usage, it is clear from interviews, surveys and personal experience, that formative electronic portfolios  remain a new thing, and that an interested but skeptical audience is waiting to see evidence that portfolio construction won’t exhaust the creator, that portfolios help to improve teaching, and that they will lead to rewards.

Conclusion:  Positive and Problematic Features of Electronic Portfolios

What we Gain from Electronic Portfolios.   The potential gain that web use provides portfolio builders is impressive, though attaining it requires some work.  Often, educational presentations  (including portfolios) on the web begin by simply putting reports, syllabi, or other documents into HTML format and placing them on websites.  This is a natural first step, the best many of us are capable of at the outset.  But, like the stage mannerisms that early screen actors refused to shed, "uploaded paper"  barely begins to exploit the potential of the new medium.  Faculty interested in building portfolios will be interested in any efforts to exploit the medium further.  One starting-point is a short 1997 article by Devorah Lieberman and John Rueter, who suggested links to other websites, samples of electronic materials, and animations.  (Lieberman and Rueter, pp. 46-48)

Here are some other features that distinguish electronic from paper portfolios:

* A major strength of electronic portfolios is their nonlinearity.  Faculty regularly praise this feature, which enables links of all sorts:  we are no longer locked into linear organization.  If intelligence works by association, so can a website.
* Direct and unmediated contact with evidence: sometimes this is called "transparency," though the term has more than one meaning.  By "transparency" I mean access to information on the university computers or other local sites without an intermediary.  An example in a university would be the ability to check on a faculty member’s enrollments, records of students dropping a class, and similar questions. Similar immediacy is available in some educational settings.  The California State University "University Portfolio" directs us to a sample department, Sociology, and summarizes student comments on the department's success, providing percentage figures. (http://www.csus.edu/soc/portfolio/goalsdata.html)  It is not absurd to imagine portfolio pages that directly access university computers, automatically adjusting the data from day to day, as if student ratings were baseball standings.   Institutions and individuals will have to struggle with the issues of publicity, access, and mediation that direct access generates.
* Interactivity is easy to achieve from the web .  A website can be set up with e-mail communication devices permitting direct connections to a chair or program director, facilitating and speeding communication.  In the examples in this section both Kelly and Barkley used such a tool. (Barkley with characteristic flare called hers an "issue bin.")
* Electronic portfolios can give learning a face and a voice, by integrating audio and video displays.  As William Cerbin says, "It is now possible to show (not just describe or explain) teaching and learning by integrating audio and video with text." (Interview, August 6, 2000)
* Once they are on the web, electronic portfolios are far more "portable" and accessible than paper.
* The sheer volume of data available on the web, or capable of being stored on the web, dwarfs most other media.  In this sense, the web is simply a more powerful tool than competitors.

Some potential problems:
* Paper and electronic portfolios alike invite faculty to pile data on a problem. If we do not take care in editing, we risk producing a volume so thick and unselective as to lose its readership.
* Electronic media also provide a fertile ground for flashy but unproductive use of electronic media: frames, blinking lights, streaming and so on become meaningless unless accompanied by substance.

Conclusion

At this point, it is worthwhile to consider how much the web has opened up for us.   One indication of this may be a wholly worthwhile phrase found at various pedagogical sites:  "capture and document the scholarship of teaching."  Web-based work brings a linguistic and conceptual shift: when portfolios become interactive and transparent, our relationship moves from that of the predator ("capture") viewing the prey, to that of partner, engaged in a dialogue in process--perhaps across continents--aimed at pedagogical improvement.  In a sense, web-based work enables us to move from "capturing and documenting" to  "sharing, collaborating, and benefiting," from viewing to partipating.  Consider the language of Mills Kelly's opening statement:

An essential element of all published course portfolios is that they open up
the author's teaching to public scrutiny and the possibility of formal or
informal peer review.  Whether you want to engage me in a more extended
discussion of my project, my conclusions, or my course,  or if you simply
want to offer a comment (or criticism), I hope you will contact me.  I have
included a comment form as part of this site.   E-mail is also a very
efficient way to reach me, and good old snail mail works just as well.

 http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Pew/Portfolio/welcome.htm

Note the pronouns:  it is worth considering whether this "I-thou"  relationship could have been established before the web.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Essays

Marc Stier

Teaching Great Books on the Web

Introduction

      The web is a wonderful tool for teachers. But if we are to use it
properly, we have to think through the connection between what appears on
our web sites and what we do in class.  So the first half of this brief essay is not about the web at all but, rather, about what I teach and my assumptions about how this material should be
taught. Then I turn to an account of my own way of using the web in the two
great books courses that I teach in the Temple University Intellectual
Heritage Program.

Teaching Great Books

Intellectual Heritage is a two semester sequence of courses that is required
of all undergraduates at Temple University. The first semester begins with
Thucydides, Sophocles, and Plato and includes texts drawn from the Hebrew
Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an as well as works by Galileo,
Machiavelli and Shakespeare. The second semester begins with  John Locke and
romantic poetry, continues on  to Marx, Darwin, and Freud and concludes with
Gandhi and a contemporary novel.

The central assumption of my way of teaching these courses is that all
learning that transforms the way we think and understand ourselves is,
somewhat paradoxically, rote learning. The greatest mistake beginning
teachers make—the greatest mistake I used to make—is to assume that one
teaches students by telling them something. When I teach about the
various ways in which power can be centralized and decentralized in a
legislative body, and the political consequences of these different forms of
organization, I can not simply tell them. To understand the importance of
different distributions of power, students have to take a conceptual leap.
They have to develop a new way of thinking and acquire a new vocabulary.

What is true for studying power in a legislative body is even more true for
studying great books. To understand each text, our students must come to
think in a new way. They have to address problems they have not considered
with ways of thought that are foreign to them. Learning this material is not
so much an accumulation of information as it is a second acculturation. My Intellectual
Heritage students learn a new way of talking and writing, by
repeatedly hearing and then using a new set of concepts and ideas.

Critics of rote learning forget that students do not learn to use new ideas and concepts in one step. Most of our students come to use new ideas in small and halting steps with
frequent, and necessary, backsliding and detours.  A new concept or idea is
but one element in a network.  Students slowly come to grasp the interconnections of these
different elements criss-crossing from one part of the
network to another many times and from different directions. As Wittgenstein
once put it, learning a new way of thought is like learning one’s way around
a city. Only when we have come to the same intersection from many different
routes will we confidently know how to make our way through it to our
destination.

Socratic Dialogue and Its Limits

In most ways, I am a very traditional teacher. I am convinced that the best
way for me to teach students classic texts is through Socratic discussion.
My class sessions consist almost entirely of discussions in which our aim is
to interpret some text.. I ask my students to focus on questions that are meant to elucidate the meaning or meanings of particular passages. As time goes by, we try to put these
passages together.  This involves considerable re-thinking
and reevaluation of the conclusions we have already reached.

Socratic discussion has many advantages. I can lead students step by step
into new ideas. I can model new forms of thought. By responding to my questions, students can beginto think in a new way.  But it  creates difficulties as well.  Some students get entirely lost. Even after a good class, most students have to do work on their own to master the material. Most students feel that, even though they have followed the discussion from beginning to end, they
will have difficulty in putting the material together as a whole. They can
answer narrow questions but cannot begin to give a coherent account of
the central ideas of the text we are studying.
 

How the Web Helps

My solution to all these difficulties is to use the web to provide a variety
of aids for my students that help them to review the material we discuss in
class and to make it their own. I provide students with:

Introductions to assignments. Before every class I try to provide a brief
review of where we have gone and an introduction to the topics for the next
day. These remarks largely replace in-class summaries of the material

Notes on the texts. This is, I think, the most valuable material for my
students. I provide them with very detailed and highly structured notes on
the text.

Overviews of the course. In addition to notes on specific texts, I provide
my students with an overview of each course. In these notes I try to
emphasize broader themes and help students see key points of comparison and
contrast between the texts.

Paper topics and examination questions

On-line discussion.

Grading Student Papers. For the last few years I have required students to hand in their
papers in electronic form. I then grade them using the revision marks and
footnote functions in Microsoft Word.

Students very much enjoy having all of this material available to them. In
effect, by providing it, I am more than doubling the time I spend with them.
The notes and overviews on the web are essentially the lectures I would give
if I taught Intellectual Heritage as a lecture course. Rather than resenting
the material on the web because it makes additional demands on them, most
students are eager to have help in working through our class discussions. At
the same time, students very much value those discussions because they can
ask questions, express their own take on the texts, and actively learn how
to think in the ways demanded by the texts.

About eighty-five percent of my students use the material on the web; probably sixty-five percent use it extensively.   I have no doubt that students who use this material receive higher grades and enjoy the course more.  As my web site has expanded, there has been a steady improvement
in the quality of student work.

I have used the web largely as a means of helping my own students. But, as
the amount and variety of material on my web site grows, other kinds of uses
becomes possible. I shall mention just one: it enables teachers in the Intellectual Heritage Program to  look more closely at the different approaches of our fellow teachers

Possible Problems and Solutions

There are two possible dangers of providing students so much material on the
web. One is that students will rely on the material on the web and not come
to class or read the texts. So I explain that  taking part in class is a common good
that is only available to us if we all do our part in providing it. Moreover, because my notes are written at a fairly high level, students have difficulty understanding  them if they have not read the text or come to class.  For this and other reasons, students cannot succeed using my web notes alone.

A second possible difficulty posed by the volume of material I put on the
web is that students will simply repeat what they find there in their own
examinations and papers. Somewhat to my own surprise, I have not found this
to be a problem at all.

It takes a great deal of effort to make all the material I put on the web
available to my students. But it is not an overwhelming task since I can reuse much of this material from one semester to another and since the web helps so much in preparing my
introductions to texts, notes, and overviews.  I could not work so close to
deadline if it were not possible for me to post material to the web in the
evening before each class.

So, for this traditional teacher of a traditional course, the web has proven
to be an extremely useful tool, one that reinforces but does not replace my
efforts in class.

To make this process most useful, faculty members have to overcome their reluctance to expose their teaching to a wide audience.

Helen Barrett:

 Electronic Portfolios = Multimedia Development + Portfolio Development
The Electronic Portfolio Development Process

c 1999, 2000, Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.

This essay is intended to be more practical than philosophical, drawing on
my own experiences as well as my students,’ focusing on the questions often
asked about electronic portfolios: Where do I start? What software should I
use? What strategies seem to work well? I view portfolios as a process
rather than a product--a concrete representation of critical thinking and
reflection used to set goals for ongoing professional development.

An electronic portfolio constructed for this purpose includes technologies
that allow the portfolio developer to collect and organize artifacts in many
formats (audio, video, graphics, and text). A standards-based electronic
portfolio uses hypertext links to organize the material, connecting
artifacts to appropriate goals or standards. Often, the terms "electronic
portfolio" and "digital portfolio" are used interchangeably.  However, I
make a distinction: an electronic portfolio contains artifacts that may be
in analog (e.g., videotape) or computer-readable form. In a digital
portfolio, all artifacts have been transformed into computer-readable form.
(Barrett, 2000)

I derive a framework for electronic portfolio development from two bodies of
literature: portfolio development in K-12 education and the multimedia or
instructional design process.  These complementary processes are both
essential for effective electronic portfolio development.  Understanding how
these processes fit together and how standards or goals contribute to
electronic portfolio development, faculty gain a powerful tool for
demonstrating growth over time.

The multimedia development process usually covers the following stages
(Ivers & Barron, 1998):

1. Decide/Assess:  the initial effort to determine the needs, goals, and audience for the presentation
2. Design/Plan:   at this stage, the presenter determines the content and sequence of the presentation
3. Develop:  gathering and organization of  multimedia materials to include in the presentation
4. Implement :  giving the presentation
5. Evaluate:  evaluating the presentation's effectiveness

The portfolio development process covers the following stages (Danielson &
Abrutyn, 1997)

1. Collection:  the teacher  saves artifacts that represent the day-to-day results of teaching and learning
2. Selection:   the stage for reviewing and evaluating the artifacts saved, and identifing those that demonstrate achievement of specific standards or goals.
3. Reflection:  reflection on the significance of the artifacts chosen for the portfolio in relationship to specific learning goals.
4. Projection (or Direction):  aligning the reflections against the standards or goals and performance indicators; revision of learning goals for the future.
5. Presentation:  sharing the portfolio with peers, receiving feedback.

There are three types of faculty portfolios: Formative Portfolios, usually employed on an ongoing basis to supporting professional development; Summative Portfolios for formal evaluation; and Marketing Portfolios, which are used for seeking employment (Hartnell-Young & Morriss, 1999).

The Electronic Portfolio Development Process: Five Stages and Five Levels

Differentiating the levels of Electronic Portfolio Implementation

In addition to the stages of portfolio development, there appear to be at
least five levels of electronic portfolio development, each with its own
levels of expectation.  These levels are closely aligned with the technology
skills of the student or teacher portfolio developer:

0. No digital artifacts. Some videotape artifacts.
1. Word processing or other commonly-used files stored in electronic folders on a hard drive, floppy diskette or LAN server.
2. Databases, hypermedia [(e.g., HyperStudio)] or slide shows (e.g., PowerPoint), stored on a hard drive, Zip, floppy diskette or LAN server.
3. Portable Document Format (Adobe Acrobat PDF files), stored on a hard drive, Zip, Jaz, CD-R/W, or LAN server.
4. HTML-based web pages, created with a web authoring program and posted to a WWW server.
5. Multimedia authoring program, such as Macromedia Authorware or Director, pressed to CD-R/W or posted to WWW in streaming format.

The Stages of Electronic Portfolio Development: Matching Tasks and Tools

One of the participants in my dissertation research stated, "When learning new tools, use familiar tasks; and when learning new tasks, use familiar tools."  Creating an electonic portfolio can seem daunting, but it becomes less arduous if viewed as a series of stages, each with its own goals and
activities, and requiring different types of software.  Here is an attempt to align these goals, activities and tools:

Stage 1: Defining the Portfolio Context

Multimedia Development: Decide/Assess
Portfolio Development: Purpose &Audience

In this first stage of the electronic portfolio development process, the primary tasks are to identify the assessment context, including the purpose of the portfolio, then  Identify the goals to be addressed in the portfolio:if the portfolio is summative, these should follow from university standards for promotion and tenure and from standards set by relevant professional associations. This important step sets the assessment context and helps frame the rest of the portfolio development process.   Knowing the primary audience for the portfolio will help decide the format and storage of the formal or presentation portfolio.

Before making any decisions about the development software, identify the resources available for electronic portfolio development. What hardware and software do you have? What technology skills do you have or want to develop?

Stage 2: The Working Portfolio

Multimedia Development: Design/Plan
Portfolio Development: Collect

This stage of the electronic portfolio development process occupies the longest span of time and is the stage I call, "Becoming a Digital Packrat!"  Knowing which goals or standards you are trying to demonstrate should help determine the types of portfolio artifacts to be collected and then selected.

Select the software development tools most appropriate for the portfolio context and the resources available. Just as McLuhan said, "The medium is the message," the software used to create the electronic portfolio will control, restrict, or enhance the portfolio development process. Form should follow function as well, and the electronic portfolio software should match the vision and style of the portfolio developer.

Use whatever software tools are currently available to collect artifacts, storing them on a hard drive, a server, or videotape. Set up electronic folders for each standard to organize the artifacts (any type of electronic document) and use a word processor, database, hypermedia software or slide
show to articulate the goals/standards to be demonstrated in the portfolio and to organize the artifacts.

Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat and WWW pages created with HTML editors are the most common software packages used in my field for electronic portfolio development.  The primary advantage of Word and Acrobat is ease of use, and Acrobat files can be created from any application. Creating a portfolio in HTML, even with the many tools available, has a higher cost in terms of effort to convert documents and organization of the large number of files usually generated. Creating a portfolio in PowerPoint can emphasize the portfolio as "multimedia presentation," rather than as reflective tool.

Identify the storage and presentation medium most appropriate for the situation.

Gather the multimedia materials that represent your achievement. You will want to collect artifacts from different points of time to demonstrate growth and learning that has taken place. Write short reflective statements with each artifact stored, to capture its significance at the time it is created. You might convert significant documents into Adobe Acrobat format, attach electronic "sticky notes" with your immediate reflections.

Use word processing, slide shows, hypermedia, or database programs to list and organize the artifacts that are placed in the Working Portfolio.

Convert your work into digital format

Add style and individuality to your portfolio by using the multimedia you find appropriate.  Save your work in a format that can be easily used.  Throughout the year, I convert a variety of files in my own Working Portfolio into Adobe Acrobat format, (attaching electronic "sticky notes" with my reflection) and store them in a "new items" folder for later use.  This includes word processing files, web pages I create, e-mail messages I might want to include, all stored for use in later stages. Use a scanner, microphone and video camera as called for to prepare artifacts.

Stage 3: The Reflective Portfolio
Multimedia Development: Develop
Portfolio Development: Select, Reflect, Direct

This is a stage in the development of portfolios for evaluation or employment applications. In the formative portfolio reflections are typically added throughout the learning process. Reflection on one's work is requisite if the portfolio owner is to learn from the process:  as John Dewey said, "We don't learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience."   One challenge in the development of summative and marketing portfolios will be the need to keep these reflections confidential. The personal, private reflections of the learner need to be guarded, and not published in a public medium, such as the World Wide Web.

Record feedback on work and achievement of goals. Strategies that I have found useful with my students' portfolios include:
* Review the reflective statements written for each artifact as it was stored, elaborating on its meaning and value and why you are selecting it for your presentation portfolio.
* Refer back to the goals or standards identified in Stage 1 and write general reflective statements on your related achievement.
* Select the artifacts that represent achievement of the standards or goals.
* From the reflections and feedback, set learning goals for the future.

Three simple questions clarify this reflective process:

1. "What?"
2. "So what?"
3. "Now what?"

 Campbell, Melenyzer, Nettles, & Wyman, [2000],  p.22

This process of setting future learning goals turns electronic portfolio
development into a powerful tool for professional development.  That is why
the "Now What?" question becomes important.  As Kay Burke (1996) insists, quoting Kenneth Wolf (1996), a professional portfolio system invites "teachers to become the architects of
their own professional development." (p.37)

Stage 4: The Connected Portfolio

Multimedia Development: Implement
Portfolio Development: Inspect, Perfect, Connect

To some degree this stage is unique to the electronic portfolio, because of the capability of the software to create hypertext links between documents, either locally or on the Internet. At this stage, if you haven't done so, convert word processing, database or slide show documents into either PDF or HTML and create hypertext links between goals, work samples, rubrics, and
reflections. Insert appropriate multimedia artifacts. Create a table of contents to structure the portfolio; I recommend using the outlining capabilities of either Word or PowerPoint, or the graphical organizing and outlining capabilities of Inspiration.
 

The process of creating a portfolio with hypertext links contributes to the summative assessment process. When using the portfolio for assessment, the transformation from "artifacts" to "evidence" is not always clear. Linking reflections to artifacts makes this thinking process more explicit. The
ability to create links from multiple perspectives (and multiple goals) also overcomes the linearity of two-dimensional paper portfolios, permitting a single artifact to demonstrate multiple standards (i.e., national technology standards, our state's teaching standards).

Use the portfolio evidence to make instruction/learning or professional development decisions. This process effectively brings together instruction and assessment, portfolio development and professional development.

Stage 5: The Presentation Portfolio

Multimedia Development: Present, Publish, Evaluate
Portfolio Development: Respect (Celebrate)

At this stage, record the portfolio to an appropriate presentation and storage medium. This will be different for a working portfolio and a formal or presentation portfolio.

Present the portfolio before an audience (real or virtual) and celebrate the accomplishments represented. This will be a very individual strategy, depending on the context, and an opportunity for professionals to share their teaching portfolios with colleagues for meaningful feedback and
collaboration in self-assessment. This "public commitment" provides motivation to carry out the professional development plan of a formative portfolio.

Evaluate the portfolio's effectiveness in light of its purpose and the assessment context. In an environment of continuous improvement, a portfolio should be viewed as an ongoing learning tool, and its effectiveness should be reviewed on a regular basis to be sure that it is meeting the goals set.

Post the portfolio to WWW server, or write the portfolio to CD-ROM, or record the portfolio to videotape.

Skills for Developing an Acrobat portfolio.

I find Acrobat to be the best tool for publishing my portfolio because this software most closely emulates the 3-ring binder most often used in paper-based portfolios. In my opinion, PDF files are the ideal universal container for digital portfolios. In fact, here is how John Warnock, Co-founder and CEO of Adobe Systems, Inc. defined the Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format:
"PDF is an extensible form of paper, a hypermedia that is device independent, platform independent, color consistent and it is the best universal transmission medium  for creative and intellectual assets."

What else is a portfolio but a container for our creative and intellectual efforts? If Adobe Acrobat is chosen as the development software, here are the skills I consider important:

1. Convert files from any application to PDF using PDFWriter or Acrobat Distiller
2. Scan/capture and edit graphic images
3. Digitize and edit sound files
4. Digitize and edit video files (VCR -> computer)
5. Organize portfolio artifacts with Acrobat Exchange, creating links & buttons
6. Organize multimedia files and pre-mastering CD-ROM using Jaz disks
7. Write CD-Recordable disc using appropriate CD mastering software

Conclusions

Many tools can be used to develop electronic portfolios.   The value added from creation of an electronic portfolio should exceed the efforts expended, and faculty members should approach their use of technology conservatively.  Keep the process simple by using familiar software as you begin the process. (My students have created very creative, reflective portfolios, complete with hyperlinks to their digital artifacts, with nothing more complicated than Microsoft Word.)  Above all else, the electronic portfolio should showcase your achievements, and your growing capabilities in using technology to support your own lifelong professional development.

References:

Barrett, Helen. April, 2000a. "Create Your Own Electronic Portfolio." Learning &
Leading with Technology.
Barrett, Helen. 2000b " Electronic Teaching Portfolios: Multimedia Skills +
Portfolio Development = Powerful Professional Development." Proceedings of
the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Training (SITE) Annual
Conference.
Burke, Kay (ed.) 1996. Professional Portfolios. Palatine, Illinois:
IRI/SkyLight Training & Publishing
Burke, Kay; Fogarty, Robin; Belgrad, Susan 1994. The Mindful School: The
Portfolio Connection. Palatine: IRI/Skylight Training & Publishing
Campbell, Melenyzer, Nettles & Wyman 2000. Portfolio and Performance
Assessment in Teacher Education. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Danielson, Charlotte; Abrutyn, Leslye 1997 An Introduction to Using
Portfolios in the Classroom.
Hartnell-Young, Elizabeth and Morriss, Maureen 1999. Digital Professional
Portfolios for Change. Arlington Heights: Skylight Professional Development
Ivers, Karen, and Barron, Ann E. 1998 Multimedia Projects in Education.
Englewood, Co.: Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

Elizabeth F. Barkley

From Bach to Tupac:  Using An Electronic Course Portfolio to
Analyze a Curricular Transformation

 "Sometimes I feel like a partner in an unholy alliance," commented a
colleague, "I pretend to teach, and my students pretend to learn." Recalling
my own early experience teaching a general education course in music
history, I smiled at his understatement: in my course, the handful of
students sitting in front of me weren't even pretending to learn!  They
stared at me with bored, apathetic faces as I struggled to engage them in a
lively discussion on the structural nuances of a Beethoven symphony.
Beethoven?  Their music heroes were Tupac and Nine Inch Nails.  This
curricular crisis was the catalyst for a 5-year transformation out of which
I created an entirely new course. My efforts paid off. Annual enrollment
increased from 45 to 782, filling my course with enthusiastic students who
had enrolled on the advice of friends.  Students testified not only to how
much they loved the course, but to how much they had learned. This course
transformation created considerable attention and it was on an exhilarating
wave of success that I was selected as a Carnegie Scholar.

 As a Carnegie Scholar, I was challenged to design, implement, and report on
a research project that would contribute to the scholarship of teaching and
learning in my discipline of music. Like many of my Carnegie Scholar
colleagues, I anguished over what to do.  Suspicious of educational
jargon, I was skeptical that I could design a research project that would
tell me anything I really didn’t already know.  Or, if it did reveal
something new and significant, I worried that the methodology would not
withstand scholarly scrutiny.  After considering various project ideas and
conversing with other Carnegie Scholars who were also struggling with the
challenge of documenting teaching and learning, I decided to construct a
course portfolio in which I analyzed and documented the transformation of
that general education music course.

Why a course portfolio?

 Course portfolios were developed as a mechanism to help faculty investigate
and document what they know and do as teachers in ways that will contribute
to more powerful student learning. I decided upon a course portfolio for
three reasons.  First, course portfolios seemed to manifest the essential
characteristics of scholarship:  they could be made public, they were
susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and they could be used and
built upon by others.  Thus course portfolios provided me with an almost
ready-made template for delving into this (for me) new territory called "the
scholarship of teaching and learning." Second, course portfolios seemed to
allow for the messy complexity that I knew characterized teaching and
learning. I hoped that a course portfolio might help me capture the subtle
but important aspects of teaching and learning that crisper methodologies
might miss. Third, I chose to do a course portfolio because I knew, deep in
my heart, that over that period of five years and prior to any conscious
concern about "the scholarship of teaching and learning," I had used my
intuitive sense and natural talent as a teacher to transform that music
course in very deep and meaningful ways. I believe that a portfolio offered
the fullest and most nuanced way to share this transformation with other
teachers, disciplines, and institutions.

 Once I decided to construct a course portfolio it did not take long to move
to the next step and make it an "electronic" course portfolio.  Electronic
course portfolios offered several advantages over their paper counterparts:
much of my own and my students’ work was already in electronic format; an
electronic portfolio could be easily accessed and disseminated; it could be
layered to include multiple points of entry and ways to navigate through the
information; it could incorporate multimedia; and it had the potential for
integrating interactivity.

What did I learn from the analysis of the course transformation?

The foundation of my course portfolio was the analysis of the course
transformation, and this analysis was extremely instructive.  Knowing that
teachers are justifiably suspicious of huge enrollments, one of the first
things I wanted to determine was if the course’s popularity was due to its
being "easy."  I decided to define "easy" in two ways:  light workload or
ease of achieving a high grade. Students soon assured me that the workload
was not light   For example, one very high achieving mature student
complained in caps, which is the electronic equivalent of shouting, "THIS
COURSE IS TOO D#$@%NED MUCH WORK." And one of the student investigators
wrote, "I have never, ever heard anyone say that this was an easy course."
Analysis of final grades revealed that the average grade was a C with a
fairly standard bell curve distribution on either side of both higher and
lower grades. So if it was not because the course was easy, why was it so
popular?  Self-reflection combined with analysis of student comments
revealed four curricular themes:

* Content:  The earlier version of this course was based on European
classical music.  Although this curriculum remains the higher education
standard, it simply does not engage a large percentage of contemporary
students who listen to popular music and have grown up in an increasingly
diverse multicultural society. The transformed course uses ethnicity as a
central organizing principle to trace the development of popular musics such
as blues, jazz, country, Tejano, Cajun, etc. from their roots in the ethnic
traditions of a specific immigrant group to their development into a
uniquely American music.

* Empowering Students as Architects of Their Own Learning:  The baseline
course had been taught in the sequential, passive, pyramidal approach of
traditional higher education.  The transformed course allows students to
select from a variety of activities to construct their own learning in ways
that meet their individual learning styles and personal interests. Although
all students do core readings and worksheets, they build upon this common
foundation by choosing activities from a varied menu that includes concert
reports, museum and historical site visits, cultural event attendance, Web
Quests, film observations, book reports, independent research, interviews,
and participating in on-line academic forums.

* Multimedia Instruction (Including Online):  The baseline course had been
taught in the traditional lecture faceto face format.  The transformed course
uses blended delivery where students select on an on-going and flexible
basis where they want to be on a continuum from traditional face to face
learning activities to entirely web-based activities.

* Authentic Assessment:  The baseline course had used traditional, objective
and subjective in-class testing.  The transformed course uses a point
accrual system where, within clearly articulated guidelines for both
quantity and quality, students earn their final grades by submitting
multiple and varied artifacts demonstrating their learning.

 I investigated these themes using both quantitative and qualitative
research methodologies.  Quantitative data included enrollment trends,
demographic characteristics, and student success and retention rates over a
six-year period. To generate qualitative data, I conducted
surveys, used various classroom assessment techniques, and enlisted 15
"student investigators" selected through a controlled random selection
process to probe deeper into the learning process.  The data I collected has
been a gold mine of information that I continue to excavate and that leads
to new course strategies. For example, one of the most interesting pieces of
information was the increasingly large percentage of students of color in
comparison with white students.  In Fall, 1995, white students comprised 66%
of the class while students of color comprised 33%.  By Fall, 1999, the
ratio had inverted and students of color constituted 67%.  I was thrilled
with this statistic until I pulled apart the various race/ethnicities to
find that there was a slight but steady downward trend in Black students.
Additionally, Black students were at highest risk for not completing the
course (only 46% success, while Black students had a 76% success rate
college-wide).

 I surmised that a contributing factor was probably the discomfort and
resentment Black students may be feeling hearing a white woman discuss Black
history, music, and social experience.  As a solution, I engaged as a teaching
partner a Black professor who specializes in African American music
and the historical context in which that music developed. I am going to
track this trend to see if it will make a difference, but from the
qualitative data, it seems to be working.  For example I had one African
American student write, "There was so much going on in my life right now
that I hated all of my classes, but not this one…this was the only class
that I wanted to go to every day."

What did I learn from the creation of the course portfolio?

The greatest challenge for me was figuring out how best to organize and
present the information.  Ultimately (and after many different drafts) I
decided to organize the portfolio into four major sections.  "The Project"
section provides an overview and contains answers to the questions "who,
what, where, why, when and how" of the course portfolio.  "The Data" section
consists of a series of linked Portable Document Files (PDFs) so that
readers can access and download information such as syllabi, tests, student
comments, and enrollment trends.   The "Summary" section provides a brief
narrative of the project with essential information and results.  And the
final "Transformation Themes" section organizes the analysis into the four
curricular themes identified earlier (content, empowering students,
multimedia, and assessment) and then addresses these themes in four stages:
baseline course, analysis, transformed course, and significant research and
findings.  Towards the end I added an additional "Issue Bin" component in
which I identified enduring concerns associated with that section and
provide an interactive opportunity for portfolio readers to contribute their
comments.

How did the "electronic" aspects of the course portfolio hinder or help
success?

 There were several ways going "electronic" made the course portfolio more
difficult.  For example to make it electronic, every document needed first
to be created in a word or graphics file and then converted to html and
positioned in a series of linked web pages.  This process of creation and conversion was very time consuming and I’m sure at least doubled the work.  I was very fortunate to have had
Toru Iioyshi, director of the Carnegie Foundation Knowledge Media Lab,
provide guidance on the content and be responsible for turning the materials
into the web version. Once created, an electronic site requires constant
maintenance and updating if it is to remain viable. All of this not only
requires knowledge of new technologies and significant time commitment but,
for someone such as myself who already spends a considerable amount of time
on the computer and suffers from technology-based repetitive stress
syndrome, it is also physically hazardous.
 

Electronic course portfolio construction poses other challenges.  I am accustomed to thinking in the linear mode of print media.  Because of the multi-layering and navigational options of the web, constructing documents suitable for this environment
forced me to think in a non-linear manner. It also required brevity:  there
is only "so much" information that fits on a single web page, and one needs
to minimize the number of linked web pages because the portfolio reader’s
computer must go back to the server to retrieve them.  This back and forth process interrupts,
slows down, and potentially aggravates the reader.  And there is the gnawing
fear that this constant distilling for almost "sound byte" simplicity
sacrifices significant depth, accuracy and nuance.  Finally, web-site
construction requires attention to visual appeal in order to sustain reader
interest.  To create an appealing site requires visual literacy that
includes not only aesthetics but making good choices as to what verbal
information is most effectively replaced by graphics.  For example although
Toru and I had together created an informative site, initial readers felt
that the entry page was too verbal, confusing and uninviting. At this stage,
having input from a professional web designer was extremely helpful to
improve the design of the website’s welcoming page.

 Certainly many of the negatives identified above have their flip side.  For
Example, I suspect that logical, linear thinking can only be enhanced and
enriched by the creative connections and "genius solution" flashes of insight that come
from non-linear thinking.  In this era of information overload, it may be
important to keep distilling information to its essentials. If we wish to
continue to communicate effectively in the contemporary environment
(especially with our students who have come of age in a visual and digital
milieu), we may need to constantly update our visual literacy and our
technological knowledge.

The electronic portfolio has other benefits.  First,
"the web" has emerged as the current communication
medium of choice. By creating my portfolio online, I had the glorious
self-satisfaction that I was up-to-date with contemporary trends.  Second,
the multimedia capabilities provide a much richer
and more complete picture of the course because graphics and video and audio
clips allow nuances probably impossible to achieve through conventional
print media. In addition, through PDF’s (Portable Digital Files), I could
make accessible to the reader an extensive amount and variety of documents
that would have been much too cumbersome as print attachments. Third, through the
multi-layered and navigational qualities of the web readers can customize and hence pursue efficiently those aspects of my
course portfolio in which they are specifically interested. Finally, the
web-based electronic portfolio allows me an exportability and interactivity
that paper portfolios simply cannot possess.  The portfolio for this course
has already attracted attention all over the country.  I no longer need to
say, "I’ll mail you information."  Because of the electronic portfolio and
its location on the world wide web, readers can investigate numerous aspects of
my course at any time they wish and with minimum additional effort on my
part.

How has the course portfolio helped students?

 Again, I need to separate the course portfolio from the electronic course
portfolio.  There is no question in my mind that the thoughtful and
reflective analysis of my course was, and continues to be, highly beneficial
to my students. But I was already doing that during the five years of course
transformation that antedated the portfolio. The added value the course
portfolio provided was that it moved me beyond intuition and anecdote to a
culture of evidence. For example, now when skeptical colleagues challenge
that my course’s popularity is due to its being "easy," I have an informed
response. The course portfolio also created a framework that organized the
investigation in such a way that I was forced to gather data that DID teach
me things that I did not know.  Although I had a general sense
that enrollment  was growing and that racial and ethnic diversity was
increasing, I did not know the specifics until the portfolio framework
required I investigate this. Students have been helped because as a result
of this information,  I have identified new interventions that I hope will
improve instruction.

The electronic aspect of the course portfolio is less obvious, but I can
see at least three advantages for students.  First, constructing the
web-based portfolio has forced me to learn to think in the digital and
visual ways that I believe dominate many of my students’ ways of seeing and
knowing.  Narrowing the gap between us must certainly help clarify
communication and enrich their learning.  Second, I plan to use the
web-based portfolio to provide students with an easily accessible and a much
richer "picture" of my course than I can currently provide them with the
conventional paper course syllabus.  Third, the public nature of the course
portfolio has put me in touch with teachers of similar courses, enabling us
to share materials and strategies that strengthen and enrich all of our
courses.

Conclusion

 Would I do it again?  Absolutely.  When I was finished, I felt that the
portfolio really did provide a framework to analyze, capture and represent
the reality of the course transformation.  And, like all good research, it
raised issues that pointed me towards additional research. For example in
the Fall of 2000 I am taking much of the information that I learned from
this course portfolio and applying it to a resurrected version of my old
course on Western European classical music.  I am going to investigate to
what extent the three non-content curricular interventions (empowering
students, multimedia delivery, and more authentic assessment) will affect
student enrollment and engagement in the original baseline course. I intend
to construct another electronic course portfolio to document and analyze
this process.  An issue that is still being explored is the capacity of the
portfolio to communicate clearly and significantly with readers.  I feel
hopeful that the portfolio is effective in this area, although this is
something that I will be able to assess only after I have shared the
portfolio with different audiences.

One thing remains clear:  six years ago I found myself wondering if trying
to teach today’s students had become my worst nightmare. Most of the
students were not only different from me but they were different from each
other—in race and ethnicity, in their preparation for college education, in
the music that they listened to, in their whole world view.  Transforming my course into one that bridged the gaps while not compromising academic
integrity seemed an impossible dream. Too young to retire, however, I
began the process of change. My electronic course portfolio attempted to
analyze and document that transformation.  The analysis has perhaps raised
as many questions as it has answered, but I believe that I am moving in the
right direction. Teaching no longer feels like an "unholy alliance," but
rather a healthy and invigorating partnership in which my students,
colleagues and I work together to achieve more powerful learning.

Note:  The course portfolio is located at
http://kml.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery/ebarkley/index.html.  It was
developed as a project for Carnegie Scholar Elizabeth Barkley as part of her
work with the Higher Education Program of the Carnegie Academy for the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). Elizabeth was responsible for
conceiving of the project, conducting the research, compiling the documents
and writing the web site text. Toru Iiyoshi, director of the  Knowledge
Media Laboratory of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
provided guidance on the content and was responsible for turning the
materials into the web version. Carnegie Senior Scholars Tom Hatch and Pat
Hutchings gave important feedback in the later stages of the process. From
Foothill College, Kurt Hueg, Robin Reynolds, Janet Covey, Mike Sult, and
Paul Aguilar provided assistance in acquiring digital materials and in
aspects of site design.
 
 
 
 

 T. Mills Kelly
Wired for Trouble?
Creating a Hypermedia Course Portfolio

My course portfolio is a direct outgrowth of, and therefore inextricably
linked to, the research project I conducted during the 1999-2000 academic
year during my tenure as a Carnegie Fellow.   That project is an
investigation of the influence of hypermedia learning resources on student
learning in introductory history courses.  When I began the project, I
wanted to better understand how the introduction of hypermedia into the
survey course changed student understanding of course content, whether
hypermedia improved or detracted from students’ ability to acquire a greater
facility with historical methods, and whether using hypermedia might give
students new or different insights into something we historians like to call
"historical thinking."

When I first conceptualized the research project that the portfolio
describes, I had never heard of course portfolios, nor of the scholarship of
teaching and learning for that matter.  Instead, I hoped to answer a
question that began to vex me in the spring of 1998.  That question was
posed to me by my colleague at Grinnell College, Dan Kaiser, who asked me
one day how it was that I knew using the web in my teaching was improving
student understanding of the past.  In retrospect Dan’s question was an
obvious one, but one which I simply had not asked when I began migrating my
courses onto the web the year before. Given the amount of time and effort
being consumed by the "ramping up" of my courses, I suddenly began to worry
that I might be spending many, many  hours creating hypermedia for my
courses to no avail, or worse, my students might actually be learning less,
or at least not as well, when they encountered the past in my courses via
hypermedia.

Because I did not know the answer to Dan’s question, I did what any good
historian would do—I went to the library and began to search for answers to
my question.  When I began that search I assumed that historians had already
spent a fair amount of time thinking through these matters and that at least
a few of us would have published something.  Instead what I found was that,
with the exception of Samuel S. Wineburg, an educational researcher at the
University of Washington who has spent his career thinking about and writing
about how students understand history, not only did historians not know
anything about how hypermedia might influence student learning in our
courses, we do not know very much about how students learn in those courses
at all.  To be sure, there is an extensive literature on history teaching,
but that literature falls almost entirely into two categories—musings on
what ought to be taught in history courses, or extended discussions of "best
practices" in the teaching of history.  Only Wineburg has investigated how
students acquire a deeper understanding of the past and one of his more
interesting conclusions is that historical thinking is a fundamentally
"unnatural act."

Needless to say, when confronted with this lacuna in the literature, I
became somewhat depressed, especially because it seemed to me that if I was
going to answer my question, I could not do so within the framework of some
larger discussion about historical learning.  The following year I was
fortunate enough to become a Carnegie Fellow and, with the assistance and
encouragement of the Foundation and my colleagues in the Carnegie Fellows
program, I learned a tremendous amount about how students learn and how
scholars who are not educational researchers or cognitive psychologists by
training can pursue answers to questions like mine.   At the same time, I
learned about course portfolios as a means of representing the scholarship
of teaching to a broader audience, so I decided to create a portfolio.   Because my project is all about hypermedia, it was only natural that my portfolio would be a hypermedia
document.

What problems emerged?

The first problem I faced when I began to think about how I might create a
course portfolio was figuring out exactly what mine might look and feel
like.  Because those of us creating course portfolios are still defining the
parameters of an emerging genre, it is still unclear what a
course portfolio ought to look like, what it ought to include, and how one
might go about creating one.  Of course, this lack of clarity is an
advantage in one sense, because it means that there is no wrong way to
create a course portfolio.  However, this same freedom comes at a price,
because it means that I had to make my own decisions about what ought to be
in included in mine without any sense of where the limits might be, of what
might be appropriate to include and what was better omitted.
A second difficulty I faced was determining how best to present the
information I was collecting to my most important audience—other
historians.  As a group we historians are a skeptical bunch, obsessing as
much about what we do not find in an archive as we do about what we actually
locate.  For this reason,  I knew that if my portfolio was going to resonate
with my colleagues, I had to provide them with
everything I learned, including the data I had collected,  without cluttering up the
portfolio site.   If I required readers to plow through several hundred pages of text to find out about my research, the project was doomed.
Here at least, the web offers possibilities that a more linear text does
not, because with hypertext it is possible for the reader to move easily
between various portions of a site, following his or her own path through
the material.  Any visitor to my site can read it either way—as a linear
text or as a hypertext.

My decision to provide the visitor with everything from my course—syllabus,
assignments, the samples of student work I analyzed, every student survey,
evaluation and comment—also required me to consider certain risks.  Teaching
is normally a very private activity, closed off from our peers not only by
the four walls of our classrooms, but also often jealously guarded behind
the wall of academic freedom.  A course portfolio like mine that exposes the
entire course to public view tears down those walls and invites the entire
world to pass judgement on my teaching.  Because not everyone is in a professional
situation like mine which makes it possible to be quite so open about what
is happening in their classroom, the level of disclosure evident in
my portfolio is not for everyone.

Finally, I faced the difficulty that everyone who is not a web designer by
training faces when creating a relatively large and complex website, namely
the dual constraints of time and ignorance.  Everything I know about web
design I have learned through the brute force method, that is, by picking up
a manual and puzzling out for myself how to get the html to do what I want
it to do.  Because website creation requires one to be author, editor,
designer and publisher all at once, my lack of formal training in site
design meant that it was going to take me longer to create my portfolio as a
hypermedia site than it would if I simply sat down and wrote it out as a
linear text.  Moreover, because at this writing the scholarship of teaching
and learning is still an emerging discipline, it was not clear to me how the
finished product was going to "count" in my department’s calculations about
tenure and promotion, and so I had to be mindful of the trade-offs between
time spent on the portfolio and time spent on my more conventional
disciplinary scholarship.

What did you learn from it?

The creation  of my course portfolio has been one of the more professionally
enriching activities I have engaged in over the past few years for several
reasons.  The decision to represent the results of my investigations into
student learning in a hypermedia course portfolio forced me to concentrate
my attention not only on technical questions about how the portfolio would
look and feel when it was complete, but more importantly on the very nature
of hypermedia.  Prior to this effort my most important concern when creating
course materials had been how to make them easily accessible and visually
pleasing.  But as I began this project, which centers on how hypermedia
influence learning, I had to think about how my course site and the
portfolio site would interact with one another as part of a larger whole.
This issue, which might seem on the surface to be a question of design, is
actually more than that, because thinking about it forced me to consider not
only how my students were thinking in the class, but also how my colleagues
who might visit the website would think about the class, about my research,
and about the scholarship of teaching and learning as an emerging
discipline.  I had to make many decisions about look and feel, about
navigation, about inclusion or exclusion of information, and about which
media to use to make a certain point.  As I worked my way through each of
these questions, I had to think much more deeply about my own discipline,
about what the scholarship of teaching and learning is or is becoming, and
about the multiple audiences for my work and how it might resonate with
them.  In other words, I faced a series of decisions that overlapped with
those we all face when we prepare to publish the results of our disciplinary
research, but which also included many new questions I had not considered
previously.

A second lesson I learned from the creation of my portfolio is the importance of
transparency in moving the scholarship of teaching and learning from its emerging field status to become something like an established
discipline.  Not that long ago something called "women’s studies" began to
emerge on campuses across the country, but at the time few people were
convinced it would ever become an established discipline.  Today, of course,
there are women’s studies departments at most major universities as well as
at many more smaller institutions, and when someone says "women’s studies"
we have a ready made image of what that discipline looks like.  For the
scholarship of teaching and learning to be as successful, its practitioners
must open up the private space of their classrooms, in ways that are mindful
of the ethical considerations where students are concerned, and the course
portfolio is one of several ideal vehicles for creating that sort of
transparency.  My research project includes among its conclusions a
prediction of the demise of the traditional history survey course in the
very near future—certainly a conclusion that a number of my colleagues will
disagree with.  For me to predict such a substantive change in the way
introductory history courses are taught at most college and university
campuses without full transparency would be no better than the generally
shallow polemicizing of the punditocracy that rules Sunday morning
television.  By contrast, my course portfolio offers those who want to
engage the questions I raise a means to investigate my research, to read the
data I collected from their own perspective, and to draw their own
conclusions which may be quite different from my own.  Such alternate
readings of my research offer the possibility of opening up a discussion
about the nature of the survey course that is based on research into student
learning, not simply opinion about what seems to offer the greatest
potential to improve student learning.   I hope that such a discussion will
convince at least a few of my colleagues to conduct similar research along
lines they think are equally or more promising than mine.  If they do, we
will know a great deal more than we do right now about the issues I raise in
the portfolio.
A third lesson I learned in my portfolio creation experience is that there
truly is no right or wrong way to create a course portfolio.  The objectives
of my research project are rather more grandiose than what I expect most
practitioners to have,  so it is
very important to be mindful of the what the final product might look like
before one even embarks on such an endeavor.  Were I simply hoping to
document a teaching practice, or to think more critically about one aspect
of a course, my portfolio would be much less complex, although I suspect it
would still retain a number of the elements it currently includes.  Because
I spent a fair amount of time at the front end of the project thinking
carefully about what I expected the portfolio to look like, I think that in
the end it was easier to create than I had expected it to be.

Where do you want to go from here?
Now that I have been through the process of portfolio creation I expect to
write portfolios for all the courses that I teach.  Because I hope to
continue my research on the influence of hypermedia on student learning,
each portfolio will include at least some attention to this question and
will therefore become part of some as yet undefined hypertext that weaves
all of my portfolios together.  At the same time, these future portfolios
will concentrate on other questions that vex me, such as how the use of film
in teaching the history of modern East Central Europe influences student
learning in that course.  Certainly, I do not expect future portfolios to be
as large or complex as the one I have just completed, in part because I
believe it is possible for more limited projects to make important
contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning, but also because
the questions I hope to address in future iterations of my course portfolios
strike me as less complex than the one that is at the heart of my current
project.
I also hope to expand my Carnegie research project to include an
investigation of student interaction with hypermedia in history classes at
other institutions, but such an expansion of my research is entirely
dependent upon the success of various grant applications floating around the
country at the moment.  For the scholarship of teaching and learning to
emerge as a discipline, such funding is absolutely essential, not just for
me of course, but for the growing body of scholars engaged in research on
teaching and learning.  Significant scholarship rarely takes place late in
the evening and on weekends—only when the scholar has the time to think
through the implications of her project, to develop sufficient data, and to
engage in thoughtful reflection on those data, will we see significant
advances in the scholarship of teaching and learning.  One way that I am
attempting to deal with the time consuming nature of course portfolio
creation is by exploring new ways to feed student work into a portfolio
template more seamlessly so that my own task load declines.  Otherwise, I
will not be able to continue to provide the high level of documentation that
my current portfolio is built upon.  It simply takes too much time to post
all the text I deal with as an historian onto a website.
Finally, beginning this fall 2000 I will engage students in an honors
section of Western Civilization in the creation of the course portfolio for
the course they are taking.  I want to know whether and how participation in
portfolio creation might enhance their learning.  As I write this essay I
have not worked my way through all of the ethical and practical
considerations of this new effort and so I cannot say with certainty exactly
what that student created portfolio might look like, nor can I say whether I should retain parts of the process for myself.  Today I
have more questions than answers, but I think the prospect of student
participation in course portfolio (as opposed to learning portfolio) writing
is an exciting one.  No matter what happens, course portfolios have become
and will continue to be an essential part of my teaching practice and my
scholarship in the field of teaching and learning.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Bibliography

Angelo, Thomas A. and Patricia Cross. 1994.   Classroom Assessment Techniques : A Handbook for College Teachers.  Jossey-Bass.

Argyris, Chris.  1999  .  On Organizational Learning. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Barr, R. B. & Tagg, J. 1995. " From teaching to learning--a new paradigm for undergraduate education."  Change 27 (6): 12-25.

Barrett, Helen.  1998.  "Electronic Portfolios and Standards."
http://transition.alaska.edu/www/portfolios/TelEd98Abstract.html

Barkley,  Elizabeth, Helen Barrett, William Cerbin, William Cutler, and Mills Kelly.   2000.  Responses to an online interview conducted by Daniel P. Tompkins, June-August, 2000.

Bass, Randall. "Discipline and Publish:  Faculty Work, Technology, and
Accountability."  http://georgetown.edu/bassr/disc&publ.html

Boyer, Ernest.  1990.  Scholarship Reconsidered:  Priorities of the Professoriate.  Princeton, New Jersey: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Burns, Candace W.   "Another Perspective.  Are Teaching Portfolios a Scam?
They’re Time-Consuming to Put Together, and We Don’t Know if They Improve
Teaching" Academe January-February 2000, 44-47.

Cerbin, William.  1996.  "Inventing a New Genre: The Course Portfolio at the
University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse."  In Hutchings,  1996, pp. 52-56.

Cross, K. Patricia and Mimi Harris Steadman.  1996.  Classroom Research : Implementing the Scholarship of Teaching.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cutler, William.  1999.  "History 67.  A Course Portfolio 1996 and 1997"
http://www.theaha.org/teaching/aahe/portfol1.html

Huber, Mary Taylor. 1998. "Why Now?  Course Portfolios in Context."  In Hutchings, 1998, pp. 29-34.

Hutchings, Pat, Editor.  1996 Making Teaching Community Property: A Menu for Peer
Collaboration and Peer Review.   Washington, DC:  AAHE..

_________________.  1998a.  The Course Portfolio.  How Faculty Can Examine Their
Teaching to Advance Practice and Improve Student Learning.  Washington, DC:
AAHE.

_________________.  1998b.  "Defining Features and Significant Functions of the Course Portfolio."  In Hutchings 1998a.  Pp. 13-18.

Langsam, Deborah M. 1998 "A course Portfolio for Midyear Reflection."  In Hutchings, 1998, pp. 57-63.

Lieberman, Devorah, and John Rueter.  1997.  "The Electronically Augmented
Teaching Portfolio."  In Seldin (1997), pp. 46-58.

Martsolf, Donna.  1998  "A Course Portfolio for a Graduate Nursing Course."   In Hutchings 1998a, pp. 26-28.

Massy

Rhoades, Gary. 1998  Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring
Academic Labor.  Albany: State University of New York Press.

Schon, Donald.  1984  The Reflective Practitioner : How Professionals Think in
Action.  New York:  Basic Books.

____________.  1990 Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.

Schon, Donald and Martin Rein. 1995 Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of
Intractable Policy Controversies.   New York:  Basic Books.

Seldin, Peter.  The Teaching Portfolio : A Practical Guide to Improved
Performance and Promotion Tenure Decisions.  First Edition.  Bolton,
Massachusetts:  Anker, 1991.

_________. The Teaching Portfolio : A Practical Guide to Improved
Performance and Promotion Tenure Decisions.  Second Edition.  Bolton,
Massachusetts:  Anker, 1999.

Senge, Peter M.  1994.  The Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization.  New York:  Doubleday.

Shulman, Lee S. November/December 1993.  "Teaching as Community Property: Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude."  Change 25(6): 6-7.

__________.   1998  "Course Anatomy: The Dissection and Analysis of Knowledge Through Teaching."  In Hutchings 1998a, pp. 5-12.
 

Wineburg, Samuel S. and S. M. Wilson.  1993  "Wrinkles in Time: Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers." American Educational Research Journal 30 (1993), pp. 729-769.

Wineburg, Samuel S. and  J. Fournier.  1994 "Contextualized Thinking in History."  In Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences.  M. Carretero and J. Voss, editors. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.  285-308.

Wineburg, Samuel S. 1994  "Out of Our Past and into Our Future: The Teaching and Learning of History." Educational Psychologist 29 (1994), pp. 57-60.
 
 
 

Overlapping contexts from pp. 1-2?
 

Basic Goals.  Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered (1990),  a series of influential essays and addresses in the past decade by Lee Shulman (like Boyer, a president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) have spurred interest over the past decade in the nature of faculty work.  Boyer’s bold proposal to treat teaching as a form of scholarship was followed by Shulman’s repeated reference to "the scholarship of teaching and learning`

If Boyer was oracular, Shulman has been a committed missionary, working with school teachers (the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards),  with college professors  and professional associations to involve a nationwide network of teachers in the scholarly study of teaching and learning.  The current activities of the Carnegie Foundation include a Teaching Academy composed of institutions active in this area.

Course portfolios play a major role in the activity of analysis and dissemination that Shulman, along with his colleague Pat Hutchings, a Senior Scholar at Carnegie, has helped to inspire.  From a Carnegie perspective, portfolios meet the standards of public access, critical review, and general use that Shulman has promulgated.  As the portfolios described in this book reveal, they can be powerful tools for understanding and communicating what happens within a particular course.

Thus described, portfolios may seem mundane and innocuous: after all, don't we regularly apply this definitional triad to scholarly books and articles, which must be published, reviewed, and used?  Quite so, Shulman likes to reply, adding that this is exactly his point:  we often fail to subject our
pedagogy to the powerful tools of analysis that we routinely employ with the products of our research.
---
Barrett:

Hartnell-Young & Morriss also point out one of the many outcomes of portfolios:

Many people discover that one of the most important and long-lasting
outcomes of producing a portfolio is the self-esteem that comes from
recording and reflecting on achievements and career success. Experienced
teachers and administrators are finding that the benefits of developing a
portfolio include the opportunity for professional renewal through mapping
new goals and planning for future growth. (pp. 9-10)

Barrett ON ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO DEV.  Almost identical with just preceding multimedia portfolio dev.

Barrett Sidebar:
 

Issues of posting Electronic Portfolios to the World Wide Web
 

As educators develop web-based portfolios, it is worthwhile to have a dialogue about publication of truly reflective portfolios on the public Internet.  Here are some of my concerns.
-- Security and access - What information in a portfolio should remain confidential? What happens when the private becomes public?
-- What elements differentiate an electronic portfolio from a web page or a multimedia presentation or a digital scrapbook? What makes a web page a portfolio?
-- Do "real" portfolios belong on the public Internet?
-- What happens to intellectual property rights when portfolio artifacts are posted online? Has anyone developed a release form for students to sign related to publishing their portfolios online?
-- Research on metacognition in preservice portfolio development has shown that faculty and students see different purposes for portfolios (Breault, 2000): Students see portfolios as marketing tools whereas, faculty see portfolios as assessment and formative evaluation tools. This confusion of purpose can create dissonance.
-- The move to "high stakes performance" portfolios may undermine the transformative nature of reflective portfolios.
Publishing a reflective portfolio in a public environment may inhibit the  quality of the reflection.

The more honest the reflections, especially about weaknesses (or, as I prefer to call them, opportunities for growth) the greater the fear that these reflections can be used negatively. In my own latest review, comments were taken out of context by one reviewer and used in a critical way. This is part of my concern about reflections in portfolios having no business on the public Internet, and one of the reasons that I don't see many truly reflectiveportfolios online.