I am a proponent of using portfolios as a major assessment method in writing classes. I believe that they are the best tools to determine progress made in writing classes when they are used as formative assessments. They show a progression of improvement and development through a course and give multiple opportunities for an instructor to provide feedback. While this method of assessment is labor intensive the first time it is implemented, my personal experience has shown me that through ingenuity and effort, portfolio assessments produce better, more confident writers and allow for grading to occur over the course of the semester instead of just packing in all the grading at the end. This is why I read Klein’s article, “The Social ePortfolio: Integrating Social Media in Academic ePortfolios.” I am not really a fan of the peer review process, even though I have learned how to improve my method in using this technique since returning to graduate school last September. However, if social media can provide the same formative assessment that I provide when grading the essays in a portfolio during the year, it may prove invaluable as a method of feedback.
This article was broader in its scope than just writing. It is a treasure trove of unexpected value, actually. Before discussing the ePortfolio concept, the article has a definition of social media that is one of the cleanest, most accurate definitions I have ever read. This is especially impressive considering this article seems to be written close to a decade ago. Klein states that “. . . social media denotes a set of Internet-enabled environments and practices through which people connect, communicate, collaborate, and share.” This definition allows for a broad range of environments from the virtual, mediated platforms like Twitter and Facebook, to real spaces in which people can congregate and work together using devices to connect to others off-site. Klein says that social media is composed of “modes of interaction . . . and . . . methods by which . . . content is produced.” According to Klein, social media can be recognized through three characteristics: the ability to create relationships with others, the ability to collaborate, and “. . . the egalitarian nature of the ideas and content . . . “ that social media produces. It’s a good, basic definition that comes in handy when discussing social media in any context.
The article then goes on to discuss the Macaulay ePortfolio Collection that was used in the fall of 2008 to incoming students to Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. Students were encouraged to create “a cabinet of curiosities” in the online social media environment set up by the school. The ePortfolios would contain research writing, but the students were also encouraged to put up and curate other artifacts of how they thought, what they were learning, and who they were. The artifacts could be essays, quotes, conversations, images, videos, and others; the students were also told they could organize and arrange the contents according to personal preference. To me, this sounded like a shared version of Microsoft OneNote, a program I use to store artifacts of the same nature for stories and projects that I am working on. In fact, the article discussed student created virtual collages that were starting points for conversations amongst the students involved in this process.
One of my favorite examples was from a collage created by a student who grew up in communist China. He included images of items from his elementary school education and included an image of the red scarf he wore as a symbol of affiliation to the Communist Party. He wrote an essay of why these items were significant to provide his classmates with the context of these items. Klein states that the comments section was filled with comments of praise for the collage. One Russian student actually empathized with the Chinese student as he grew up under similar circumstances. In fact, many of the interactions, according to Klein, were about establishing and growing relationships amongst the students. This goes beyond what I was expecting, as I thought this would be just formative critique, but I think that it provided something much more valuable. The students found common points of interest and background and could establish relationships from there, which would create an atmosphere of goodwill and collaboration. At the least, the students build a rapport with which to help one another on more formal assessments, like writing for other classes. At best, they make friends for life. Not bad.
“Safe Spaces” from February 2015
In that spirit, I am showing a collage I made in February of 2015. I enjoy collaging and scrapbooking. I usually use collage digitally as a way to put artifacts together to spark ideas for a story I am working on. This collage, however, is the only one I have ever created as an end unto itself. I made it after a particularly bad stretch of luck during one of the worst winters I can remember. When I moved out of my parents’ house in 2015, it was the first thing I hung up in my apartment. So as I close this post, you can comment on the collage or, if you’re feeling less adventurous, consider if there are any other positive or negative reasons on using social media in a portfolio assessment of writing. I’m especially interested in pitfalls I may have missed.
Work Cited
Klein, Lauren F. “The Social ePortfolio: Integrating Social Media and Models of Learning in Academic ePortfolios.” (2013). ePortfolio Performance Support Systems: Constructing, Presenting, and Assessing Portfolios. Katherine V. Wills & Rice, Rich, Eds. Perspectives on Writing. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2013.
27th March 2018 at 10:37 AM
Hi Mike,
Thanks for sharing the collage! I particularly liked how I could find artifacts (not unlike the digital collages from Klein’s article that you mention) embedding amongst photographs and paintings.
Do you think you’d enjoy implementing peer review with your students more by using ePortfolios and social media?
I guess one potential pitfall in using social media to assess portfolio writing may be the tone. As educators, we’d have to make clear that comments and discussions within these portfolio would need to remain academic and professional.
27th March 2018 at 11:05 AM
I agree about tone. I think setting ground rules down in the syllabus is helpful. I don’t think they should be overly restrictive but they set some expectations. I’m taking an online class right now for the first time and that’s exactly what the professor did. So far, the exchanges I’ve had with my fellow students have been professional and friendly.
6th April 2018 at 1:04 PM
One of the things about tone is reflection and thoughtfulness–which is indeed difficult to define and varies with context. I’m a playful writer, and one of the things I’ve tried to do is allow for a variation in tone in peer review, so that students can be who they are and free themselves to respond without fear. Carelessness and a lack of reflection seems to me at the heart of the tone issue, more than say word choice. Most people joke and cuss…what causes the tone issue? People spend too much time on word choice, diction, etc. and not enough on careful development of thought. One of the values of a site like Reddit, when it works well, is the fantastic variation in tone that conveys valuable thinking.