Reflection on the Process
In the absence of a blog, here are my reflections on the process of
creating this electronic portfolio. In reality, this is the fourth tool
I have used to publish my e-portfolio on the Web. The first
version of my new e-portfolio was published using a portfolio system
developed by the Maricopa Community Colleges. The second was completed
using the system in place at Fairleigh Dickinson University. These are
some of the
comments that I write in the blogging tool that is included in the
Maricopa
system:I spent an evening going through my web
pages and my hard drive (my
digital archive) to select the specific artifacts that I wanted to use
in my portfolio. I set up an Excel spreadsheet that let me list the
artifacts (21 in all) and then create hyperlinks to each URL.
After creating the list with the URLs, I added comments in Excel to represent the captions for each artifact. I played around with converting the document into HTML, but spent too much time fighting the Microsoft style sheet codes. So I just converted the document into PDF, which I will use on the WWW. I uploaded the Excel spreadsheet to this portfolio as a document, but I might prefer using the PDF.
After selecting the artifacts, I tried to identify which competencies or skills each artifact demonstrates. I found five or six major categories right now, maybe more when I think about it. But the major categories have emerged. Now, all I have to do it create a collection for each grouping, and write an overall reflection plus record the captions. Since I had all of the artifacts on one of my websites, all I had to do was capture the URL.
From start to finish this project has taken me an evening, and most of the time was spent in selecting the artifacts and writing the captions. Those aren't really technology issues...they are portfolio issues.
It took me about two hours to finish all of the entries using Mozilla Composer, which was mostly a copy/paste job between my FDU portfolio and Composer. Not too bad for 20+ entries. It even transferred the hyperlinks. I only had to change the relative link to the documents within the portfolio, not the links to the artifacts on the web.
Updated 9/13/04