e-Portfolio: the process
The process of building the portfolio started with two tasks: 1. understand the requirements expressed by the language of each competency; 2. collect the artifacts which could be used as evidence for them.
The first task was approached by decomposing the sentence of each competency and creating a map that shows the logical connection amongst these elements of language (Figure 1.a).
The second task was accomplished by scrapping the folders of the classes’ materials at SLIS, the emails accounts at work and a site (powered by PbWorks) that this author has been developing as a container for the SLIS experience, which ultimately will encompass the entire gamut of this master’s program work.
The result of this gathering activity resulted in 96 items the title of which was then normalized to include course number and date and then collected into a single folder. A secondary folder within the previous one was created to contain the items that were used as evidence (Figure 1.b).
The third task was to address each competency specifically, which was done through: a reflection about what the competency meant to the writer; a re-reading of the possible evidences; and reading of supplementary articles or chapters of books that related to the meaning or context of the competency.
At the end of this part of the process there was sometimes the need to reconsider the appropriateness of the use of one or more of the evidences and perhaps look back at items that were initially excluded. Once the final determination was made, the list containing the selected items by evidence, was updated and the writing of either the Statement of Competency or the Evidence annotation was started. The selected items had then the evidence-code added to their title and the file was moved to the Used folder (Figure 2.b, the color of the file’s label denotes whether the Competency had been approved (blue). Items used for more than one evidence would have a white file’s label.)
Figure 2.b
The Competency approval process was monitored with a sort of white-board which has the competency map in the background. On this scratchpad the submission date was recorded and the competency was ticked off when the approval was received (Figure 2.a).
Figure 1.a
Figure 1.b
Figure 2.a