Stuart Selber’s new CCC article, “Institutional Dimensions of Academic Computing,” includes this analysis of “one particular endeavor — creating an electronic portfolio — to look more closely at institutional dimensions. Such a move also recasts the relationship between production and instruction, using other conceptual pairings that reveal different sorts of priorities and perspectives.”
“The bottom left-hand corner of Figure 2 contains specific resources that can be integrated into a process for creating electronic portfolios. [The point of Selber’s article, however, is that — at his institution — the resources are not integrated.] Here there are both student-oriented and teacher-oriented resources. For example, students can access a worksheet that asks them to construct a plan for gathering evidence they will need to support the claims of a portfolio. Teachers can access a research-based rationale for integrating portfolios into their classes as well as worksheets for establishing outcome statements and assessment methods. And there is a rubric that aligns stages of portfolio development with general institutional resources, creating a more specific portal into those resources that foregrounds process.”