The Portfolio Website
The Self-Assessment and Digital Portfolio Assignment is required for all composition courses at City College. This is for two reasons:
- Portfolios promote meta-cognition, awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking processes. They help us reflect on what we know and how we came to know it, and as a result, help us apply what we have learned to new contexts.
- Digital portfolios encourage us to incorporate digital literacy into writing classes.
Your Digital Portfolio will be composed on a WordPress site and housed securely on CUNY Academic Commons, a password-protected CUNY server.
Your Portfolio should include, at a minimum: the Introduction (described below); the three essays (narrative, metaphor, and critical lens); and all parts of the research project (invention, proposal, parts 1, 2, and 3, and annotated bibliography). But it can include much more! Anything from the topic section class, peer reviews, etc. Anything you refer to in the introduction should be included in the portfolio.
While the arrangement of the Portfolio is up to you, it should be easy to navigate. As with any Web site, you want viewers to be able to find what they’re looking for without any interference. This might mean scanning handwritten notes, taking screenshots of annotated Web sites, and turning your essays into pdfs.
The Introduction
For this assignment you should, literally, introduce and refer to the work included in the portfolio. You can imagine a specific audience to write to and describe your writing process and product. Where did you struggle and what are you proud of? Use your own work as evidence of struggle or success by quoting from your own essays and research.
Were there any significant events that had an impact on you–a certain assignment that you loved or hated, comments from peers and/or instructors, a great new way to find sources, trouble getting evidence, trouble putting your ideas into words, or structuring your work? Use those events as a way to shape your narrative.
Do you have any advice? Give your imagined audience (and yourself) some tips that might ease this process. Is there something you do in the process that’s unique and might be helpful for people to know? Or, is there a way for you to make things go better?
You don’t have to refer to every text in the portfolio, but you should include (and quote from) a few.
If you’re struggling with the vagueness of the assignment prompt, you could place your work in the context of the course learning outcomes on the syllabus. Describe how the course learning outcomes can be seen in your compositions.
The digital platform required for the portfolio submission allows for a creative presentation of your work and personality. Please feel free to design and customize the portfolio in any way you’d like. There are no limitations or requirements about how the portfolio should look (other than that all your work must be housed there). Text-design, multi-modal elements and media additions are encouraged.
Portfolio Requirements
- You must submit your portfolio url to the spreadsheet on Google Drive.
- Length of introduction: 750-1000 words.
- The introduction to your work should be on the “home page” of your portfolio (the url link you provide should be connected directly with the landing page).
- Content: You should include, at minimum, the three essays (narrative, metaphor, and critical lens), all parts of the research project (invention, proposal, parts 1, 2, and 3, and annotated bibliography) but can include much more–anything from the topic section class, peer reviews, etc. Anything you refer to in the introduction should be included in the portfolio.
- Genre, formatting, and voice: your choice. Use the genre you think will work best here. Formatting depends on genre. If you write a letter, it should look a like a letter. If you write an academic essay, format as you would an academic essay. Voice and register should match genre–a letter might be less formal and more personal than an academic essay.
- Sources: You need at least two, but you wrote them. You should treat your own compositions as sources for this assignment. You should refer directly to, quote, or paraphrase from your work.
- Accessibility: think about how audiences “read” web-based writing. Use links to layer content in your portfolio introduction. While reading your introduction, your audience might like an opportunity to view the composition as a whole. Providing that access is efficient web-writing practice.
- Appearance: The portfolio is academic and design should reflect the context. Images and widgets should be relevant to the content on the site (or be removed). Headers and titles should be edited to reflect content (or removed). Design choices (including color and text) should be uniform across all pages.
- Navigation: It should be easy to access all content on the site from the main menu. Maximum number of main menu tabs is six. Dropdowns can be used to categorize your work efficiently.
Due Dates
| First Draft: Monday 12/11 | In-class Workshopping: Monday 12/11 | Final Draft: Friday 12/15 |
