Spring Forum 2003 - PETTT Exemplary Student Portfolios

Presentation by Jennifer Turns and Adam Wilson, Mark Farrelly moderates

Mark Farrelly: Next I'll introduce Jennifer Turns, who's faculty in technical communications and engineering - is that correct? Or is it - and engineering as well, and her student is Adam Wilson who is going to be showing us his portfolio and it's geared towards developing professional skills and demonstrating them.

Jennifer Turns: So, technical communications is in engineering and a lot of the students in technical communications say one of their biggest challenges is communicating to the students what technical communication is all about. I had originally brought my whole class, they're in the back row - I don't see them anymore, so - so I teach a class called the Computer - I'll explain why I brought them. I teach a class called the Computer and the Technical Communication Profession. The students in the class learn the kind of technologies that they're supposed to use as TC professionals, okay? This is a quasi-professional degree and they're going to go out and work as technical communicators and there are a lot of technologies that they'll need to use.

So the class teaches them the tools. It also prepares them to use the tools in future classes and out in the professional world. They do a bunch of assignments and when I inherited the class, it was really focused on using the technologies. I added design assignments so they didn't use the tools, but they designed with them. I added having them write design rationale, so why they designed the way they did, and a learning reflection - what did they learn about their software skills, about their design abilities from doing this.

I've been teaching it for two years - portfolio came out and I started using it last year so the portfolio tool behind the scenes was a great opportunity for me to have the students submitting the designed artifact, the design rationale and the learning reflection all in the same place. So before it used to be many different pieces. So what I've brought with me today is a student who was in the class in the fall - he used the portfolio tool to submit all the assignments, so that's one way of using the portfolio tool.

In this particular class I then pushed them further - we actually do all of the assignments in the first 8 weeks and then they have two weeks to build a professional portfolio. So this is how do you move beyond not just completing the things and trying to make a first pass at writing about them, but a second pass, and so what Adam is going to show you is a portfolio he built. So behind the scenes there was an E-portfolio portfolio where he submitted everything and then he went one step further and tried to build that professional portfolio that highlights his skills to someone else in the professional community. It might be a potential employer, somebody who would give him a research assistantship, somebody who he could have a private contract with, and so this is Adam Wilson, and I'll turn it over to him to talk about his portfolio.

Adam Wilson: Before I begin, I just want to mention, you know, I've been amazed at the variety of portfolios I've seen here today. If I had known that by creating portfolios I could increase my GPA by .3, I would have been creating portfolios all four years! (laughter) But unfortunately I didn't learn that until 20 minutes ago. Now, as Jennifer said, in our class we created both professional portfolios and a reflection portfolio, and this is the professional side and within the class we were kind of under this metaphor of we're working for a company, in my particular case it was Volkswagen and we were creating a technical communication department in that company and with that metaphor we then went forward and said, if we were trying to let our employers know and prospective employees, other companies, anything like that, know about our department, what would we do?

We would create a website or something similar that would tell them about our department and show them what we could do. And this website combines all the assignments that we completed from the quarter, all that you see on the left hand side here under services we provide, scroll down, are different assignments we completed and under each of those this website describes - it's hard to move a mouse on this - there we go. Under each of these services that are on the left hand side is a short description of what our team could do for the department. In this case it's word processing, we could - we were advertising that our department could create documents, could edit, could proofread - any of those types of things, and on the right hand side we've attached artifacts which are in fact different assignments that we completed throughout the quarter.

So these basically describe different technical abilities that we had as students and as a technical communication department for Volkswagen and one of the interesting things that I really took out of this portfolio assignment was the design factors that go into creating a portfolio. In this instance, since it was a professional portfolio intended for employers or different companies or departments, we were really focused on who our audience was and what they would want to know.

In order to do that, we created - went through an assignment in which we created personas . . . .so this is a copy of the persona, the completed persona that we created as a class and each of these persona are actually very specific. We created names, we created families, we created specific job positions, those types of things, and these are all fictitious people so don't worry, we're not invading anyone's privacy by doing this, but each of these persona really helped the design choices that we made for the portfolio and for the specific services in the design of the page.

And, as you can see, this particular persona here, Jennifer Williams - has no relation to Jennifer Turns whatsoever - if you notice this parenthetical remark here, she enjoys coffee, coffee and more coffee - my partner was drinking coffee at the time we were creating this persona, and so it was very difficult to get her to talk about anything other than coffee. So this is just in there for her. Each of these persona, though, really directed how we designed the website. For instance, for that persona, the Jennifer persona that we created was a busy professional who was very interested in seeing a quick overview of what a department could do, what services they could provide, but wasn't willing to read a lot of text or anything like that into the assignment. And so around that we created this navigation on the left hand side that highlights each of the services. And each of the text descriptions is very short, allowing that person who's in a hurry, who's in a rush, to see all of that on a quick glance and each of the other personas directed the design of the portfolio in the same way, directly affecting design issues that we faced in creating this portfolio.

So for me the portfolio really exposed me to how audiences, how do design issues come together when you're creating portfolios, when you're creating any kind of document, and from this I can take this portfolio now and show a prospective employer for myself and show them not only that I can use each of these individual technologies, but that I'm able to put together a portfolio, create a web based portfolio on my own and can do that for other people in their company.

So no matter whether I forget these individual assignments in the future, I can always come back to this portfolio and recall the design issues I faced when I entered, when I was creating the portfolio and use them further in my career. So it was a very, very beneficial experience for me. So I think that's all I have to say. Oh, the animation - does this have sound on it? We'll find out. This was, whenever you're in the class and it gets down to the final weeks, you get tired, you get ornery, and you try to have a little fun. And the last assignment that we did was using flash animation, which is a very difficult program to learn if you've never used any kind of animation program before, and - yeah, we had a week to do it, so we had to learn the technology and create this animation within a week.

This is what I came up with...this is supposedly supposed to show a new user of the Volkswagen website how to explore the website, it's very basic. So I'll run you through it - see if the sound works. Oh yes, very fancy. Can't hear it very well. So as I said, this was done in the wee hours of the night right before it was due. Very basic. To get to the last thing. This is the last part [traffic noise]. So if you ever want to do fun things with animation, take TC 310. So - yeah, there we go. That's all.

Jennifer Turns: So, the one thing I'd like to add is that what I'm really interested in seeing students do and it was already brought up in other themes, is seeing students in individual classes learn how to talk about the work they're doing in that class and connect it to their understanding of the profession that they're going into or the career they're interested in doing, so a lot of this portfolio was asking them to do that.

It's not only good enough to do the work, but can you describe the work, can you connect it to the themes or the profession that you're going into, and that's one of the things that the portfolio can do probably better than any other thing we could ask the students to do is to make that connection and then to make it public so employers could see it and possibly hire them because of that. Thank you (applause).

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