In advance of Tuesday's workshop on the final portfolio, please do the following:
- Review the assignment sheet so that you can ask -- and get answered -- any questions you have about scope, content, or organization.
- Decide on an organizational plan, i.e., chronological, topical/thematic, or some other organization, and either storyboard or make a list of all its linked components, i.e., all the components you're hoping to include in your portfolio from major assignments to individual blog posts. I'm primarily asking you to do this because questions will arise as you begin to envision what it's like to have to accommodate certain items or links, and I'd like you to have a concrete sense of how much effort it will take to put your particular portfolio together. As well, your organization will help to determine the nature of reflection and the amount of explanation you'll need to provide to help an unfamiliar reader navigate the portfolio and understand the significance of all its components. Please bring that organizational scheme to Tuesday's workshop, in some form.
- Decide on a design theme, and this can be fairly simple (especially if you are using blogger's skins), but I'll ask you to give it some thought ahead of time so that you can -- again -- consider any complexities of organizing information in advance. This might be a good time to review Barton/Kalmbach/Lowe <“Rhetorics of Web Pages”>.
- Begin drafting the longer, critical analytical reflection. This piece will naturally take some time and some thought, since it is more than an off-the-cuff reflection. It is somewhat formal, but moreover, it needs to be the centerpiece that helps a reader understand your intellectual pathway through the course. As always, it asks you to synthesize some of our critical texts from the semester to help genuinely convey your own understanding of what you have gained, if you feel you have gained, and how your writing, editing, or understanding of discourse has changed. Please bring whatever you have drafted to Tuesday's workshop, in some form.
- One final thing: if you are going to be featuring some of your weekly blog posts and/or blog responses from throughout the semester, I'll ask you to quickly edit them for clarity and accuracy. There are only 6 of them, and yet for some of you, these reflected some very significant moments throughout the course, and some very good writing, so you'll want to take the time to correct typos, insert missing words, fix misdirected or broken hyperlinks, clean up the textual formatting and spacing, and generally do what you can to improve the look and readability of the posts. This will probably be the quickest revision task of the whole portfolio, so I'd rather you get it done earlier than later.
See you next week,
-Prof. Graban
