Boston 2014 Journey to my roots
Boston July 2014
It seems such a long time ago (it was circa 2002) that my FRINQ team, Cyborg Millenium, decided to go electronic and instruct our students to create only ePortfolios. In the beginning, and certainly when I arrived at PSU, all Freshman Inquiry portfolios were paper affairs. The very thought of making them electronic was traumatic for some faculty. Akin to Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Today, in 2014 I found myself at an international conference on ePortfolios held under the auspices of AAEEBL. My mission was to learn not just what we hope to achieve here at PSU, but what educators from all over the world are doing with ePortfolios. One thing I noticed relatively quickly was that you couldn't spit without hitting an English professor (not that I spent my time spitting mind you). My question was, why are there so many English professors involved in this endeavour? The answer seems ludicroisly obvious now. There are so many English professors because ePortfolios are at their core writing assignments. Not just any writing assignments, but assignments that ask students to reflect on their learning. In other words, students must come up with a narrative about their learning.
Being a German scholar I immediately thiought of the "Bildungsroman" or "novel of education" made famous by Wolfgang von Goethe in the Wilhelm Meister novels (1795-96). Wihelm Meister embarks on a journey of education and apprenticeship and in the process comes to understand who he is and what life might hold for him. Along the way he meets some unforgettable characters like the long suffering Mignon, whose laments are hauntingly familiar for anyone who has ever experienced love and longing..."Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, Weiß, was ich leide!" (Only one who knows longing, understands what I suffer)
So anyway, it occurs to me that we are asking our students to write their own Bildungsroman of sorts, one in which they are the main characters, one in which adventure, sorrow and many tests wait around every corner. With that in mind, I began to understand that we really need a different way of explaining the purpose of the whole ePortfolio endeavour. That new way of conceptualizing the ePortfolio has to do with narrative and the self as a work in progress.
