Here is an end-of-semester assignment to give students some ideas about how to modify the digital e-portfolio for organization, design, and aesthetics. Students choose from among the possibilities, guided by their own digital composing knowledge. The guide pushes the idea that the students are authors who should be actively engaged in how their work is presented to their audience. The key is to get them to think of their portfolio as a cohesive text, like a digital book about the course that they have written. Their readers want to be invited in, entertained, emotionally moved, and dramatically educated by their “book.”
Along with the design guide, I show them samples from former students or random samples from the digication directory. I also schedule a visit from the digication e-tern to show them how to do the fancy stuff.
It should be noted that this design guide is aimed at a course where students were asked to develop a process portfolio that includes all of their work from the semester. Such a portfolio emphasizes the writing process learning objective of English 101/201 by including drafts, pre-writing, peer edits etc.
Here’s the guide:
Teaching Writing at John Jay College 