When an artist is asked about her work, she can dig into an oversized folder and slap down photographs or sketches that she feels best represent her artistic prowess. When a teacher is seeking a job, he can trot out, in paper form, his evaluations from student teaching, his lesson plans, and his written philosophy about education.
By comparison, how can a scientist or engineer, equipped with an armload of skills and bucketfuls of experience, effectively present this background to a potential employer in a way that is personal, relevant, interesting, and cohesive? Answer: an online portfolio.
Fields such as fine arts and education enjoy a long-standing tradition of portable portfolios as vehicles to showcase a student’s best work. Now, thanks to the lightning-fast information age, where details can be zipped across virtual space and both text and graphics can be rendered in neat, downloadable packages, all students can readily create online portfolios that they feel best represent their work and their lives. Essentially, an online portfolio is a series of linked webpages uploaded and maintained by the student—pages that represent the student both personally and professionally. An online portfolio is your chance to work with cache—a storage buffer in a computer’s CPU—and to create cachet—a personal insignia representing your individuality and quality.
Publishing an online portfolio isn’t just fun and creative—it’s quickly becoming common practice for the best students in a program. Schools are now coaxing students to start creating portfolios as early as their first year of study, and they’re hiring support staff and posting pages to be certain students have the tools they need to publish their work online. As described in most literature on the subject, preparing an online portfolio boils down to a three-step process: Collect, Select, and Reflect. Collection involves amassing your evidence and beginning to launch it into cyberspace; selection means culling the best pieces from your evidence; reflection is your opportunity to ponder and explain the choices you made about your portfolio pieces and even your life choices. And as you publish your portfolio online, following some basic principles of design will help ensure that your work makes an effective splash. The result is an organized virtual space where friends, family, and employers can gaze through a public window to catch intriguing glimpses of your online world.
Collect: Gathering the Parts of Your Portfolio
Think of your college experiences as a living mosaic. You’ve spent years completing diverse tasks or creating "snapshots" of your work: fine-tuning a project design, performing research, writing papers or memos, composing a resume, participating in group work, writing co-op reports, learning graphics packages, and earning grades. All of these experiences make for worthy candidates for your portfolio. You’ve also spent years gathering more personal "snapshots": IM sports participation, photographs of friends and pets, bookmarks of favorite websites, personal accomplishments, inspiring quotations, journal writings, society membership, awards, and hobbies. These are equally worthy candidates for a portfolio. Your collection process begins with you mentally cataloging each piece of the mosaic and deciding how to use it.
Most students begin to collect material for their portfolios by thinking of the work they’ve done as a printed product. With the professional resume being the most common and efficient standard of printable evidence available, almost all portfolios include an updated resume, perhaps downloadable as a PDF file. In fact, you might begin your portfolio simply by uploading your resume just to get you started, since the resume tends to be a critical cornerstone to the whole package. Portfolio writers also typically upload sample essays or reports they’ve written—again, these are common standards by which all students are judged. However, more creative students think about additional pieces of "printable" evidence for their portfolios—pieces that stress the student’s skills as a communicator, a consultant, an engineer, or a designer. Among the online portfolios I’ve seen, students have presented their Excel-based designs for everything from a coffee mug to a BattleBot; a copy of a PowerPoint presentation or an effective letter they wrote to the campus newspaper editor; the daily construction site logs they kept while completing an internship; scanned copies of handwritten evaluations they received from their co-op supervisor; and even a sample family newsletter that they edited. Such pieces of evidence are usually presented essentially as they would look in a hard copy, thus inviting the viewer to print them off or read them right in the browser.
For those willing to think even further outside the box, portfolio contents can reflect such personal attributes as oral communication skills, reliability, aptitude for planning, creativity and innovation, level of community service, willingness to travel, quality of judgment, and even social responsibility. Some students create videos of themselves giving a speech or participating in a debate; others present tables that chart their course selection for each school year as a kind of "planning matrix," listing the competencies they achieved as part of those particular courses. Still others offer pictures of themselves that they think will demonstrate those more personal assets that all employers are interested in, using photograph captions to define how they have developed intercultural awareness ("Here I am in a village in France, chatting with locals about. . ."), or why they believe in volunteerism ("This Habitat for Humanity project helped three families . . ."), or showing they have a sense of humor ("This is me, last Halloween, as Austin Powers.") In one portfolio I found online, the student included the gutsy invitation, "Click here if you dare to experience my singing voice," linked to an MP3 of him crooning away in his dorm room. (He had a pretty good voice, actually.)
Select: Choosing the Best Evidence
When selecting material to include in your portfolio, the first principle you should consider is privacy and suitability. You should only upload material that you would like to be directly associated with your name, and you must carefully consider whether you want to give out personal information such as a mailing address or phone number (giving out your e-mail address is, of course, pretty standard). Some portfolio writers are even hesitant to put photos of themselves online (though others bravely display their prom pictures, no matter how cheesy the tux or how high the hairdo). If you’re especially concerned about privacy, you could cloak your portfolio contents by keeping the material password protected, and you must always be careful not to give out highly private information that others could use, such as your social security number. A final point about privacy is that it works both ways—you must respect the privacy of others as well. This means that you shouldn’t link to the pages of other individuals you know without their permission, and you also must attribute credit to any sources that you use, especially when borrowing material from someone else’s website or posting copyrighted images.
Secondly, to give your portfolio coherence and continuity, try to think of all the material you select as pieces of unified evidence arguing the case that you’re worth taking an interest in. Essentially, select material that inspires people to read and browse through your work, and choose artifacts that will demonstrate your growth over time (e.g., a paper from an introductory class as well as a senior thesis). Adopt an upbeat, welcoming tone ("In these pages, you’ll discover exactly what makes me tick"), but also maintain enough professionalism to keep an employer’s critical eye locked on your pages. Among the many portfolios I’ve browsed through, I’ve seen students take foolish risks such as publishing potentially embarrassing photographs ("Here I am, mooning my roommates"), letting serious typos slip by ("Bachelor of Sciwence in Engginerring"), or revealing information that is too personal or leaves them open to judgment ("I’ve tried every beer on this list of 50 at least once, and some of them far too many times."). To emphasize the point of suitability, I’ve heard one instructor comment that you should only post something online if you’d be willing to show it to your grandmother. Though most students wouldn’t go this far (and presumably most grandmothers would be pretty forgiving anyway), perhaps a good benchmark is that you only post material that you can be proud of a year from now, especially if you intend to advertise the URL to employers.
Finally, when selecting material, recognize the value of piggybacking. In addition to posting pages such as your home page, your resume, essays and reports, project designs, and photos, keep in mind that you can readily link your pages to those that others have created. Where logical, provide relevant links to your program or course descriptions, personal organizations with which you’re affiliated, or pages that reflect your hobbies and personal interests.
Reflect: Being True to Yourself while Considering How You Come Across to Others
Good reflective writing is about reviewing what you’ve accomplished (or even what you’d like to accomplish someday) and projecting value. Students in technical fields often shy away from the concept of reflective writing, either out of unfamiliarity or because they hesitate to make private reflections public; yet reflective writing is standard and natural to most online portfolios. In fact, smart students realize that the portfolio is the safest place for reflective writing, in that it’s inappropriate to make subjective, personal comments in a technical paper, resume, or cover letter, while it makes perfect sense in a portfolio. In an online portfolio, you have the space and opportunity to share your thoughts on everything from your personal passions to discussing how you performed in a particular course. The rules for such reflection are flexible, but there are some rules nevertheless.
The first rule I recommend is being selective about where the reflection occurs and how much of it you use. Reflecting about coursework right on your downloadable resume is neither conventional nor efficient, while trying to reflect on every single course you’ve taken as a student would be overwhelming both for you and your reader. However, creating a page that summarizes your experience and reflecting briefly on the value of each experience as you describe it makes perfect sense. ("I valued this job because it taught me how to analyze the network configuration needs of a small business." "This class taught me to use cascading style sheets—something I will apply to my future web designs.")
A second rule for good reflective writing is that it has a purpose both for you and your audience. Both you and your audience should be interested in commentary about why you chose your particular major, relationships (or the lack of them) that you see between your coursework and experience, and what sets you apart from others in terms of both training and life choices. In giving examples, especially related to your education, offer those that will demonstrate learning, change, empowerment, self-development, problem-solving, and results. Good examples are concrete, providing names, lists, scenarios, dates, definitions, etc. In the portfolios that I’ve reviewed, one student wrote an essay reflecting on how her intercultural understanding had been shaped by a year abroad, while another student wrote a few short poems defining his interest in engineering and even created a sketch to accompany each poem. Still another student took an even bolder stroke—writing about lessons she’d learned about teamwork after being reprimanded by a co-op supervisor for working too independently. What these students are doing in the process of reflection is not only taking stock of their personal assessment of their growth; they’re also preparing themselves for the toughest of interview questions. ("Tell me about the greatest challenge you’ve faced in life." "Argue to me how your education prepared you to work at our company.") Ultimately, effective reflection online is about learning to speak well in the company of others.
Finally, search for opportunities to write reflective comments on any major portion of your portfolio, including the resume, papers and projects, photography, etc. The bottom line: If it’s worth a menu-based category in your e-portfolio, it’s probably worth reflective commentary.
Principles of Portfolio Design
Although the design of online portfolios can vary greatly, especially depending on the computer skills of the creator, I’ve found that the best portfolios share three traits: unity, navigability, and simplicity.
The more unified the pages of your portfolio are, the more likely we are to dwell there. Come up with a basic design and background for each page that is repeated on other pages, and keep associated items parallel with each other from one page to the next. Use headings for short blocks of text, and when you do need to use long blocks of text, such as in a complete essay, provide a ready means for us to return to the root pages of your portfolio. If you’re handy with Dreamweaver or FrontPage, you can set up your portfolio so that when we exit to visit outside pages that you’ve linked to, these pages will open in a separate new window—thus, when we click them closed, we automatically return to your portfolio.
With these principles in mind, a unified design for one set of pages might go something like this: The page is entitled "My Design Projects," and it describes four projects you were involved in as part of your classwork and work experience. Each project has a short heading, written in boldfaced red text, followed by a short project description (just 3-4 lines long, in black text), and at the end of each description is the clickable line, "Click here to visit the project page." Between each description is a solid black line to enhance separation, and the background is white so that all text readily stands out. Also, to the left of each of these descriptions is a small screenshot (also clickable) of the page we’d visit to find out more about the associated project. Once we click to go into a specific project page, we see a "Click here to return to My Design Projects page" and a "Click here to return to my homepage" link at the top of the page. This basic form is repeated on other associated pages, and thus we have a strong sense of unity to your portfolio regardless of what pages we are visiting.
Assuming a unified portfolio, one of the best ways to aid users in navigation is also the simplest—use icons and menus. We’re used to thinking of icons as clickable, and we intuitively use menus—whether they appear at the top of the page or on the left side—to help us quickly drive through cyberspace. Many portfolio writers make sure the same clickable menu appears at the top of each portfolio page, with typical menu contents including simple, rapidly identifiable terms such as "Home," "Resume," "Major," "Projects," "Coursework," Computer Skills," "Work Experience," "Interests."
Beyond a menu or icon-driven strategy, you make your pages easier to navigate by creating a clear visual hierarchy on each page, by avoiding root pages that require a large amount of scrolling, and making sure that we have clickable links readily available on every page. Most portfolio designers also avoid using frames, in that they create multiple scrollbars on the same page, and you run the risk of having your viewer miss one of the scrollbars or become confused about how the frames are related. Also, if your portfolio is optimized for a particular version of Netscape, Explorer, or Firefox, you should make your reader aware of that fact right on your homepage and perhaps even provide a clickable link where the appropriate software can be downloaded.
Finally, you’ve probably come across Thoreau’s edict to "simplify, simplify," and we’re all familiar with the KISS principle. Many portfolio creators violate that basic principle to "keep it simple, stupid." Too many are tempted by the trappings of the web, filling their pages with cute but tiresome animations, too many different blaring colors (called an "angry fruit salad" by web designers), and slow-loading, distracting backgrounds. Such tactics merely increase the odds that we’ll turn away from your pages. Ultimately, the best portfolios are those most artfully simple in design, welcoming us at a glance to sit back, relax, click, and spend some virtual time with you.
Self-Study
In creating and designing an online portfolio, you are never alone. Visit these websites for design ideas and samples:
Resources for creating e-portfolios from Penn State
Creating an ePortfolio using WordPress (13:36)
Transcript: Creating an ePortfolio using WordPress (13:36)
Hi everyone, my name is Trisha Harris and welcome to the video tutorial on setting up your e portfolio.
So the first thing you're going to do is go to wordpress.com and then click the get started button. Then you're going to put in your email address, give a username and password, and then create a blog address, and then we're going to click create blog on the free version.
Once you've signed up for your blog you'll be taken through a series of steps, so you can just click next to all of these. These are options anyway that you can change at a later stage. So what we're going to do is click into my blogs along the top of the screen here. So this brings you to your list of your blogs, so you'll probably have just one here. So you're just going to click on blog admin.
Now this brings you to the dashboard of your site, so this is where all your settings are and where you'll be working from. The first thing that we're going to do is take a look at the privacy settings of your site. So we're going to go down to settings and into reading, and if you scroll down the screen you can see under site visibility that you have the option to allow search engines to index this site, discourage search engines from indexing the site, or I would like my site to be private visible only to users I choose.
So this gives you more control over who can view your site, but obviously later down the line if you choose you can go back and make the site public again. So this is what we're going to select for now. So then we're just going to scroll down the page and click save changes.
Then the next step is we're going to go into users and click invite new. So you can input in my email address into here. The role we're going to leave at viewer and then just click send invitation.
The next thing we're going to do is set up individual pages for each of your modules. So just click on pages on the left hand column here, and then we're going to click add new here at the top. So we're just going to give each one a title. So I'm just going to call this ELD for the effective learning development module. And then I'm just going to scroll down and untick the comments and the likes and shares.
Now before we add any content here we're just going to do a preview of our page. We're just going to click on preview over here on the right hand side, and you can see the title of our blog and then title of our page here. But you can see that the ELD isn't appearing here along the top in our menus. So I'm just going to close out at this one.
And the reason for that is that it's still in a draft mode, okay, so we haven't yet published it. So if I just click on publish and then I click preview changes, you can see now we have our ELD appearing along the top here. Okay, so if you don't have any of your pages appearing here it might be to do with the theme that you've actually chosen, and I'll show you later on how you'll actually change your themes.
So I'm just going to close out with this again and we're going to go back to pages and add new again. Okay, so you're just going to set one up for each of your modules. So set one up for programming again, untick comments likes and shares, and then click publish.
So add new again. We've created a page for each of our modules. So if we click on, if we want to see a preview of the page, just click on the title here at the left hand side, and then we can see we have all our modules appearing along the top here.
Now to add content to your page you just go to the edit option, and this just brings us back to where we were. So this is your text window here. So you can just type directly in here or you can copy and paste directly from a Word document.
If you want to add in an image onto your page you click on add media and then click select files, and then you just click on the image that you want and click open. You can add in a caption to appear under the image here, alt text and description, or change the size of it here. Then we're just going to click insert into page.
We're going to click preview changes and we can see our image here. Now if I want to edit this image I just click on it once. This is to delete the image and then the other icon is to edit the image. So if I want to reduce the size of it I can select it here. If I want to change the alignment make it centered. I want to give it a title.
Another important thing you can do here is that you can link the URL to an outside web page. Okay, I'm just going to put in for example gcd.ie and click update. Okay, you can see the size has decreased, it centered it, and if we go preview changes again and if I click on it now it'll bring me to gcd web page.
So that's a nice way of adding images into your page and also by using the images then as links to other pages, that can be an interesting way of doing things. Just going to close out of that.
The other thing you can add in, we'll just add media there, just go to upload files again, select files. Let's click on that one. Say if you want to create a gallery of images, so instead of just inserting the image on its own click create gallery. You select all the images that you want include in the gallery and click create new gallery.
And then here you can decide on the type of gallery that you want. So say if we want a slideshow we click insert gallery, preview changes. So now you can see it appears as a gallery of images.
You can also add an attachment directly to your site. So again click add media, upload files. This time we'll select a PDF file and insert into page. So we'll just click on preview and we can see then it gives you a link. You click into this and it links directly to your PDF, okay, where somebody can then save it or print it directly from there.
Also in the add media you can link directly to a YouTube video. So you can just search YouTube technology and education and insert in and preview, and then it'll embed the video directly onto your page. Or if you want to embed a video in from Vimeo you can just copy and paste the link in here.
There's also a quick editing option. So if we click on quick edit you can password protect a specific page. You can set the order for a page. So at the moment they're all set at zero so they just display in the order that they're written. So if we just change this to instance one and click update, and we'll just change this to two, then we'll just preview our page.
So because all these were set to zero they're appearing first, then we have one and two. So if I change this one to three, preview again, you see now we have one two three. So you can place them in order that you want them to appear.
Also under the quick edit if you don't have the option to untick comments in the main edit you might have to come in here to untick it. You can also change the status of your page from draft to published, and then if you change any settings here just click update.
Now other things that you may want to look at under the settings, if we go back to general, this is where you can change the site title. So you would have set this at the beginning. So this where you'd probably have your e portfolio, your name or whatever site title you want to give the site.
Then you have a tagline. So this is the line that appears underneath your title and it just explains what your site is about. So you can just say that it's an e portfolio for part-time ELD course or whatever you want to use to explain it.
Now you could have a look through all different settings here just to see what other options you have available as you're setting up your portfolio. The other thing you may want to look at is the themes, so how the site will actually look. And you'll see on these ones there's certain ones that you have to pay for, so you're obviously going to go for free versions.
So if you want to just see what they look like you can just do a live preview. So you can see on this one we have bigger tabs here along the top. Then you can either, if you want to use this one, you click activate or else you can click cancel. Okay, and you can flick through them like that.
You will notice that the homepage that we have here actually doesn't display as one of the pages. So where that is is actually it's the posts section. So you click into posts, we're just going to add new, publish. So that's how you edit the homepage.
So this is the framework of your e portfolio set up. Now it's up to you to add in the content that you're working on in each of the modules. So again just uploading images of work or examples of work that you're doing.
The other important thing about an e portfolio is that it does include reflections on the work that you're doing. So it's all about the development of your own learning, and it doesn't need to be finished pieces that you put up. Could be pieces that you're working on or just showing the work in progress or how you're actually progressing through your year.
So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about what you need to add to this portfolio. Feel free to add in extra tabs along the top here. So it could be other areas of interest or skills or examples of work that you've done outside of the college that relates the course.
And remember that this is a space for you to build examples of your work and your experiences. And then you can send the link of your e portfolio to maybe prospective employers in future and show all the work that you've done in college and what you've been working on maybe outside of college as well.
And it really is just an area for you to show your commitment to learning and to show how you're developing as you're going through the course. So that gives you a good idea of how to say set up your e portfolio.