E-PORTFOLIOS AND THE CLASSROOM COMMUNITY
By Boria Sax, PhD
In traditional classes, students and instructors barely had time to bond, when their classroom community was disbanded. The result of so many transient relationships was not only a loneliness and insecurity that, notoriously, often pervaded college life, but also a waste of energy and accomplishments. If knowledge is socially constructed, as most models of e-learning maintain, learning must be held not only by isolated individuals but also collectively by communities, and e-portfolios can help preserve that knowledge by enabling those communities retain some cohesion after a semester ends.
Like Learning Management Systems, e-portfolios offer tools with which students can share ideas and work collaboratively. In addition, they also offer means by which that sharing and collaboration can be continued or renewed long after the semester is completed. This makes them adapted to programs of study that are extended over several courses or semesters, including competency-based curricula.
This presentation looks at e-portfolios as a semester-long project for a junior capstone course at Mercy College. Three sections of the class were assigned to do various assignments, based on the theme of "Animals, People, and their Stories," that would document proficiency in basic academic competencies. As a final task, students were assigned to create and publish a web page based on their work over the course of the term. This URL would showcase their proficiency and their accomplishments, as well as provide students with the means and impetus to continue their collaboration after the class was completed. The students would keep their e-portfolios at no cost for the remainder of their college career at the institution, and could retain them indefinitely if they chose to.
At the end of the semester, students filled out a questionnaire designed to evaluate the implications of e-portfolios for the classroom community. Asked whether e-portfolios encouraged collaboration, students responded as follows:
No................................3.45%
Perhaps..........................17.24%
Probably..........................6.90%
Yes, but only moderately.........20.69%
Definitely, it encouraged a strong spirit of sharing and collaboration................51.72%
When asked how they would use their e-portfolios, students responded as follows:
For professional networking......48.28%
For socializing..................37.93%
For applying to graduate school..44.83%
For applying for jobs............37.93%
For keeping records of work......55.17%
Other (Write-in Response)........6.90%
In addition to suggesting promising pedagogical techniques, this presentation is intended to explore an emerging model of the college community, which differs from both the traditional academic and the more recent corporate ones. The former tends to view knowledge as legacy to be passed on, while the latter sees it as a commodity to be bought and sold. Both these perspectives retain a partial validity, yet neither adequately describes the complex ways in which knowledge can be shared and retained in an abiding community. An institution of higher education becomes the hub of an intellectual network, where learning is communally generated, assessed, and disseminated.
