Web Portfolios: Enhancing the Coherence of Students' Careers
| Although they use technology, web portfolios are not about technology; they are about habits of thinking and the practices that cultivate those habits. |
To promote reflection on the coherence of their academic careers, students completing individual majors maintain web portfolios of their work.
A web portfolio is collection of work that a student chooses in order to illustrate the unfolding meaning of their career. The work is stored and presented as a web site, with links that demonstrate how the student understands the relationships he or she has built among many individual achievements. These portfolios make the CIS interest in "making meaningful connections" concrete. Works of almost any imaginable kind (art, lab reports, film and audio clips, essays) can be included in a web portfolio.
Besides demonstrating a student's grasp of the central subject of their studies, web portfolios promote four goals of liberal learning: recognizing connections, being reflective about intellectual and personal growth, building intellectual community, and building bridges to communities outside the academy.
Excellent web portfolios are characterized by the meaningful coherence of the whole, the quality of the individual pages, the clarity and logic of the overall design, the creativity of the links and the degree to which the rationale for particular links is explicit and sensible, the critical judgment apparent in the selection of external sites, the extent of the portfolio, and the overall aesthetic quality of the portfolio.
The program of web portfolios is supported by the Mellon Foundation.
