E-portfolios are increasingly used as a tool in education to enable students
to manage their own learning as effectively as possible. Keeping an e-portfolio
can offer many benefits. At its most basic level, an e-portfolio can provide
a personal online space where you can gather, organise and store study-related
material and access any resources that you need for your studies. More sophisticated
e-portfolios can allow you to create a Personal Development Plan (PDP), chart
your academic progression and showcase your work digitally.
In these activities you will explore some different uses of e-portfolios by
students and then start your own e-portfolio for the language you are studying.
Activity 1: What is an e-portfolio for?
In an educational context e-portfolios can be created and used for different
purposes. Teachers use them and so increasingly do students.
Read these comments made by students keeping e-portfolios
during their studies and identify the particular purpose of each.
Alice: I use mine as a kind of diary. I'm doing a degree
in modern languages and I've just begun learning Mandarin Chinese. Chinese
is quite different from European languages and I find it useful to record
my feelings about the experience. I use it as a way of thinking 'aloud' about
what I'm learning - I mean different aspects of the language and culture.
Students on many courses are required to reflect on aspects of their studies
in the form of a reflective journal and may even be asked to submit their
journals for assessment. This is quite a common requirement if you are studying
a language. A tutor may request that you gather course work and/or reflections
on your learning progress and submit them as a portfolio.
Even if it is not a mandatory part of your course you can certainly benefit
from the process of keeping a personal and reflective log of this kind,
particularly if it focuses on your learning. Useful documents and resources
can also be gathered and attached to reflections about study or training.
A particular advantage of an e-portfolio is that it allows you to store
and access work and/or resources created using different electronic media
in the same place.
Lawrence: I wanted to put together an e-portfolio of my
best work including technical projects that I've completed or been involved
with at university. As I'm in my final year I'm thinking more and more about
my future employment.
Another use of a portfolio is to 'showcase' your academic accomplishments.
This can be particularly useful if you wish to go on to further studies
or to demonstrate any projects or practical applications of work undertaken
during your studies to a prospective employer. Creating an e-portfolio of
such work as you study will save you much time when you reach the end of
your course. It also shows a professional approach that may help to impress
a future employer.
An e-portfolio of this kind, created during your studies, has the advantage
that it has the potential to be shared at a later date with prospective
employers simply by providing them with a link and enabling them to view
it.
Nancy: My tutor advised me to start a portfolio at the
start of my course. The kind of study that I need to do at university is very
different from what I've experienced before. It involves a lot of independent
study and huge amounts of research and reading. I'm gradually developing the
study skills I need for this but keeping an e-portfolio has helped me identify,
for example, ways of improving my time management skills.
Making the transition to the kind of study required for higher education
can be a challenge especially at first. Keeping a portfolio can help you
to manage this transition and reflect on what new skills you need to develop
in order to equip yourself with the wider range of learning skills needed
for academic success at this level.
Creating an e-portfolio also allows you to develop your information technology
skills at the same time. Being able to demonstrate skill in handling multimedia
technology may soon be a requisite for employability when you reach the
end of your studies.
You can see that e-portfolios can serve different purposes from these examples
of students who have kept one.
Go to these weblinks if you would like to find out more about the advantages
of using e-portfolios during your studies and see some examples of students'
e-portfolios:
Penn
state University: About e-Portfolios http://portfolio.psu.edu/about/index.html
[No responsibility is taken for content or information contained on external
web pages]
elearnspace:
Eportfolios www.elearnspace.org/Articles/eportfolios.htm
[No responsibility is taken for content or information contained on external
web pages]
Activity 2: Starting an e-portfolio
Keeping an E-portfolio can be a particularly useful activity for language
learners. As a language learner you can start an e-portfolio by answering
a set of focus questions designed to help you analyse your own needs and form
an action plan for your language studies.
Open the following preparation task for an e-portfolio,
which contains a needs analysis and action plan, and answer the questions
in relation to your own language studies. Take the time you need to familiarise
yourself with the resources available to you at your institution before filling
in your responses. Then save the document as part of your e-portfolio.
When you have completed this first step in the creation of a language learning
e-portfolio, create an appropriate folder and file structure for an e-portfolio
within your personal space online. Make a template for recording daily or
weekly entries for a language learning journal and include this too. Unless
your tutor gives you specific instructions, your learning log could be in
written or spoken form.
