introduction | background | terms | webbing | samples | possibilities | acknowledgements Defining Terms But the hypertext portfolio as an assessment tool, as with any form of writing, needs to be conceived within the context of the situation. An electronic portfolio can serve many purposes: It can be a professional resume. It can be a personal narrative statement. It can also be a journal, a collection of unrelated essays (a writing sample in electronic form). But it can become static at the date of collection: an archive of work produced. The Web portfolio is more versatile, and can be added to by the student, the instructor (via comments) and by peers responding to the pages produced by the student "owner." This hypertext retains it archival capacity, but archives all reflective materials collected from a number of sources that can be revisited at a later date, either as the fulfillment of a two-semester core requirement, or throughout their academic career at colleges or universities where rising-junior or senior capstone writing courses are standard.            The record we have in this "Writer's Web" then becomes an archive reflecting growth as a writer through successive re-working of material as well as additions of new material in successive course work. It practices what we preach by allowing writing instructors to assess that which we value – students who are actively thinking about their particular writing needs and strengths, and then acting upon them. The usual problems noted by other presentations here and elsewhere apply. The first and worst is that "finished" look that hypertext has in common with the word-processed document. Others include inexperience with visual, aural, or video media. One method I have used (with limited success so far) in first-year writer's web is a metaphorization of their writing processes. Simply described, it is an adaptation of an off-line portfolio project: the "Artists Edition." In that assignment, students must choose a non-print symbol around with to build their Writer's Web. This symbol contextualizes the Web, supplies cohesion between assignments (or courses), and allows them to focus their commenting strategies. It also gives me as instructor more insight into each individual student's goals.            The other advantage I noticed in Writer's Web was the immediate shift in organizational strategies. What is less apparent in a paper-copy essay as organizationally unsound is more readily identifiable in hypertext. Lack of linking, rambling narrative, or artificial – non transitional – links become glaring, and peers will comment on organizational problems that they ordinarily either wouldn't notice, or would blame on their own reading skills or lack of subject-content knowledge. The significance of coherence and transition become clearer to them when they notice that webs employing different visual aspects, such as font types, sized, and colors on every page, tended to distract and spoil the reading experience. While comments on font, color, or links are not standard for a traditional text, they become an issue that needs addressing in Web writing.            Using a Web portfolio to its potential involves at minimum a semester-long commitment to the project, and the portfolio itself needs to be more than a reproduction of print. At its best, it can offer students all of the tools of multimedia to achieve their personal and academic writing aims. At worst, it can become a distraction, causing students to spend more time worrying about the "flash" instead of improving their textual communication skills, and thus creating the "trash." Garbage in/garbage out, as the saying goes. As with any other technology, it needs to be tempered by the instructor with clear assignments, aims, and goals for the semester. By its nature, a Web portfolio is particularly responsive to changes in the technological process and the production of text, can take situational variables into account, and can supply assessment If you're interested in additional perspectives, check this piece out. resources and tools. It can incorporate variable media, thus helping students to see more clearly changes in audience, purpose, and occasion. But its most promising attributes are its ability to highlight revision (and the reasons for it), and its ability to provide a place within itself for writer self-assessment. Students can explain in their own words how they envision the task or assignment, how and why they developed particular writing strategies, and how they assess her own progress. With write-to capability, it can also allow for more interactive peer responding and prompt better responses from peer and instructor evaluators. By linking later responses to the assignment to previous ones, students can see first hand whether or not their revision strategies were successful, or if the changes in one place prompt other changes or cloud the topic's issues further. Instructors or peers can demonstrate why some suggestions should be ignored and others taken. With the writer's original intentions available to them via the Webpage, peer responders and instructors can give better feedback for revisions on both first and second drafts.

 

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vol. 6 Iss. 2 Fall 2001