In the absence of a blog, here are my reflections on the process of
creating this electronic portfolio. In reality, this is the second 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. These are some of the
comments that I write in the blogging tool that is included in that
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 in the
Manilla portfolio system,
which was mostly a copy/paste job between my first portfolio (on the
Maricopa website) and my web browser. Not too bad for 20+ entries. I
had to refresh my memory about how to make links to internal pages,
something I did not have to learn in the other system.
