Portfolio Creation

Introduction

This is a key outcome from LINK - guidelines for the creation of portfolios. For more on the ideas behind portfolio assessment, see Assessment

Files

portfolio instructions (draft)

Making a Portfolio

The material that goes into the portfolio is selected from:

  • everything student contributes to the Internet on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd party websites. In other words, non-assessed material in the student's web presence constitutes part of the source of material for the portfolio.
  • everything the student provides by participating in activities, discussion and other tasks within the private learning environment of the units of study.

This perhaps is what makes the portfolio concept different that in some other contexts. We are combining, into a single collated, contextualised and reflectively analysed whole, selected elements from both the 'internal' learning processes which never circulate outside the learning community of students and teachers in the unit AND the 'external' publicly presented material (ranging from delicious entries, blog comments, external forum contributions, through students' own websites, all the way to published articles).

Schematic of relationship between portfolio and source material:
ALTC-model01.jpg

Portfolio as 'holder' for directly assessed work

It should be noted that a small number of these external publications will be assessed directly. However, because of the way Curtin is moving to restrict the number of formal assessment tasks (with a proposed limit of 3 per unit), it may become necessary to make a clear distinction between essays and reports (individual scholarly work submitted for assessment) and 'the portfolio' that contains everything else. In this case, everything 'published' (contributing to the Internet) and everything in the learning community (participating in the unit) because available for selection for inclusion.

In this situation, then, the creation of the portfolio might involve

  • true 'portfolio' items - selected, commented, reflected upon examples bound together into a portfolio which sums up the total contributions and participation in the unit; AND
  • more distinctive 'tasks' which are assigned to the portfolio for the purposes of managing the total number of assessments but which are assessed uniquely.

Example: a unit requires students to follow various blogs, comment, as well as create their own blog, and as part of that produce one large blog entry to demonstrate abilities in online writing. the unit also requires students to do an essay and bibliography. Because we can only have 3 assignments, and the essay and bibliography = 2, therefore the portfolio becomes the 3rd assignment, including some marks for the whole portfolio, plus specified marks for the single large blog post

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