Nick Van Kley asks his writing 2/3 and 5 students to complete a holistic reflection on the term as their last meaningful engagement with the course. This reflections draw on and cite the material that students curate in their digital portfolio throughout the term. Here, the portfolio is an inward-looking space for reflection on learning.
Nick shares his portfolio assignment:
In this course, you will develop new strategies, explored new contexts, and created new knowledge. You will also re-used and adapt old knowledge and familiar strategies. All of this work will take place within multiple collaborative environments. You will work with your peers, with librarians, with RWIT tutors, and with me. And you will be encouraged to write about those experiences in informal reflective assignments throughout the term.
The end of the term affords you the chance to synthesize work and to gain a clearer perspective on your learning and your development as a writer. To this end, you'll assemble a course portfolio and reflect on that portfolio in writing.
You'll create a portfolio website early in the term, add to it it periodically during the term, and finalize it during finals period.
Creating Your Portfolio
You will build your portfolio using WordPress, an open-source Content Management System (in other words, a system you can use to build your own website). In fact, you already have a site; Dartmouth's DartWrite project created one for you before you arrived on campus. To access it and explore, visit journeys.dartmouth.edu and login.
You can also find information about the DartWrite project, as well as guidance on using WordPress: https://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/dartwrite.
Organizing Your Portfolio
Your portfolio will come pre-loaded with several sections; I'll ask you to interact with four of them.
Homepage: About Me. Your homepage should be a short, informational page that explains who you are as a student/writer. It should also explain the purpose of your site. Include images or media if you choose, and ensure your homepage includes working menus that direct visitors to the rest of your site.
Pre-College: If you haven't already, please upload a piece of writing you created before you came to Dartmouth. I'd love to read it and have a brief conversation about it with you at the start of term. My colleagues and I believe that it's crucial you build on the skills and knowledge you developed before you arrived. And recording evidence of that is an important step in that process.
First Course. This section will include your Portfolio Reflection. Note: You should write this piece last. Find directions for writing it below. Under this menu item, you should also link to Projects 1, 2, and 3.
Second Course: You can leave this section alone this term. You'll have a chance to take it up in your First-Year Seminar.
Reflection: You will use this page frequently this term during in-class reflection activities.
Drafting the Reflection - Writing Knowledge and Strategies
Review the feedback you received in this course; read what your peers said about your work and the feedback you received from me on Projects 1 and 2 and on the early draft of Project 3. Take a moment to think about what they say about your learning this term. Then, make a list of the writing knowledge and strategies your work in the term helped you create, revise, or formalize. This list might cover drafting processes that you plan to use in the future, definitions of written genres, theories of communication, or a host of other topics.
Then, choose a piece of writing knowledge or a strategy from that list, and examine the projects in your portfolio and the reflective posts you’ve completed during the term for evidence that you made use of it.
In a single area of the Portfolio website, record your list and, below that, write a ~900 word essay making the case that your chosen idea or strategy productively informed at least one piece of work in the course, citing evidence from the projects, feedback, or reflective posts. Think of these as your archive, the place you would find evidence to support claims about your learning process.
Sharing the Portfolio
I'll ask you to upload your portfolio URL to this assignment page at any time before the end of the class. If you adopt password protection to make some parts of your site more private, please submit that password as a comment to this assignment once you've submitted your URL. [note that you have to be viewing your site rather than editing it to get a clean URL.]