How we did it! Making Student Web Portfolios

Kristin Koptiuch, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Arizona State University at the West Campus, Phoenix, Arizona

WHO: Collaboration between IT staff and faculty is the key to successful web portfolios.  Effectiveness in this teaching and technology venture is contingent upon the instructor's communication with Information Technology staff and collaboration in design of instructional expectations and materials.  Evidently the kids who grew up with joysticks in their hands and ingested computers along with their mother's milk have not yet hit ASU West--almost none of my students had ever produced a web page before, hence careful planning is a must!

• John Wilson led a Web Workshop in the basics of creating web pages using Microsoft FrontPage; through experience we improved our lesson plan for basic instruction, teaching students to build their site through creating a template page.

• John Wilson and Colleen Carmean led mini-lessons in the basics of working with images for the web using Adobe Photoshop Elements

• IT support staff Kathy Grimes, Dennis Marsollier, Alan Godwin, Colleen Carmean, Mark Koan all served in different semesters as much-appreciated roving experts to assist students in creating their web pages in initial web workshop and final web marathon.

WHAT: Multimedia technology unleashes exciting new dimensions to the conventional hard-copy portfolios widely used in higher education to present in reflective and integrative fashion the corpus of assignments created/written by a student in a particular course or internship.

• Accessibility to an audience beyond the classroom—Internet technology cultivated the students’ consciousness of an audience beyond the professor, beyond the classroom. The students' writing changed, took on greater purpose and responsibility as they strove to speak to the Phoenix metropolitan community and the wider world beyond.

• Incorporation of basic multimedia technologies—Students used digital cameras to document their research and fieldtrips. Digital photos and occasional mini-movies and audio interviews enhanced student web pages and enlivened their writings.

WHERE: ASU at the West campus computer labs.  One of my courses was already scheduled to meet in a lab.  For the other, I was able to request and obtain occasional computer lab use.  Demand for the lab classrooms has increased, however, so expectation of occasional lab use may no longer be realistic. We used only IT supported software that is standard in the campus computer labs (Microsoft FrontPage for web page production, and Adobe Photoshop Elements for image processing).The limitations of FrontPage may frustrate advanced web designers, but the learning curve for novices is not steep, thus permitting us to foreground course subject matter over technology and design.

WHEN: Conduct an instructional Web Workshop early in the semester, and a final “Web Marathon” at the end of the course.  We found it effective in the instructional web workshop to have students create blank web pages for specific assignments required for the portfolio, all linked to their home page (2.5 hrs). These web pages lie in wait for students until later on when they are ready to post their completed (ideally, revised and corrected!) assignments at the end of the course ( 5-6 hours).

HOW: Some of the lessons we learned in the past three years

1. Incorporate web portfolio requirement into the course syllabus and grade structure.
   
2. Design a lesson plan for web instruction workshop with realistic expected outcomes tailored to the specific course, in collaboration with IT staff experts. Students retain handouts with server mapping address and step-by-step tasks to be accomplished.
   
3. Instruct students to create a template web page and reproduce it to create a page for each of their assigned projects on their web site, all linked to their home page.  Use of a table design greatly helps students to organize and position text and images. Students can add additional pages later if they wish, as well as creatively experiment with their own design. Students quickly discover how to overcome the somewhat canned effect of the template by creative use of color, images, font, etc.
   
4. Convey a sense of collaboration in the class—each student’s individual work contributes to the larger, richer picture of a collaborative research adventure. Encourage a mix of individual and team projects, and links to each other’s pages. Web portfolios can easily accommodate team projects. Team members can develop a collaborative project and link its final product to each of their web portfolios (text-based, poster, or PowerPoint presentations converted to html).
   
5. Stress that the subject matter content and quality of students’ assignments is more important than the design of their web pages.  Allay students’ anxiety about the technology by assuring them that they will be able to complete their portfolios in the alloted in-class lab time.
   
6. Inclusion of a personal biography page in each student's portfolio both gives students a space to "play" (e.g. posting family photos, favorite web links) and informs their audience about the author of the portfolio projects.
   
7. Reinforce the reflective aspect of porfolio pedagogy by inclusion of a final assignment asking students to reflect on what they have learned in the course. I typically ask students to include in their porfolio an Open Letter, in which they offer for their readers' consideration selected key points of knowledge or understandings gained in their course experience.

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