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Rethinking the Purposes and Processes for Designing Digital Portfolios
Author(s) -
Hicks Troy,
Russo Anne,
Autrey Tara,
Gardner Rebecca,
Kabodian Aram,
Edington Cathy
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of adolescent and adult literacy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.73
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1936-2706
pISSN - 1081-3004
DOI - 10.1598/jaal.50.6.3
Subject(s) - portfolio , persona , pedagogy , set (abstract data type) , professional development , construct (python library) , teacher education , process (computing) , work (physics) , mathematics education , sociology , psychology , computer science , engineering , mechanical engineering , human–computer interaction , financial economics , economics , programming language , operating system
As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to provide evidence that a set of teacher education standards have been met for a course. In this article, the authors describe how they designed their digital portfolios as part of an inquiry‐based teacher research project and represented their own work—as well as that of their students—in these online spaces. They discuss a number of personal and professional concerns that they encountered while engaged in this process, from the ethics of editing students' work to the online personas the teachers themselves chose to adopt. Issues of audience, purpose, format, and content are framed in discussions of teacher research and portfolio design. Finally, the authors argue that keeping design‐based decisions about how and why to construct a digital portfolio in teachers' hands can contribute to lasting professional growth and change.