e-portfolios?

Just got a newsletter today with some feature articles about portfolios as a way to encourage students' making their learning their own. We have this feature (e-portfolios) in our learning mgt system (LMS), although I've not used it before.

I like the 3-fold system: students select work that shows their learning; they explain how/why that is; and professors comment.

I like commenting with a pen on student papers (although I have excreble handwriting and sometimes students ask, "what does this say?"). But for longer papers for more advanced students, I also like writing comments on the computer, either as a markup to their papers (if problematic) or as a word document of general comments (if the papers are reasonably good) This only is productive if there aren't too many students. I use this for indep studies and also for the cultural presentation in my World Regional Geog course, in which there are maybe 2-3 student groups presenting every week. I comment less on grammar/typos and more on substantive critical issues. That's the nature of the medium, actually.

I am thinking of pioneering e-portfolios for my week-long study abroad course next spring. Paris! Mostly I do indep studies for this (having less than 5 students) and the course template is already set up well for portfolios, as students do a pre- and post-trip reflection, a project of their own devising, and some mapping and a "review" of a cultural attraction.

I have them read some stuff (I have LOTS of stuff for Paris) and explicitly try to integrate it into a paper. It's a bit artificial, but they HAVE to engage with the ideas of the pieces even if it's unnatural. Teacher-cop: "did you read what I assigned? Show me!" (Surprisingly-to-me this strategy was used in a couple of my doctoral grad seminars. The assignment was to write a reflection/analysis of some papers assigned for the week. If you didn't explicitly work in ALL of them in equal detail, and make them relate, you got marked down. Silly me: I wrote about what grabbed me and skim-wrote about the rest, not understanding that this assignment was about gatekeeping, not intellectual engagement.)

My diss advisor had a similar assignment in HIS seminar, but if you wrote an intelligent 5 pp about one article and ignored the other 3, he was fine with it. RIP. He's been gone just a little more than a year now. Seems like forever.