Helen Barrett's Electronic Portfolio
		Reflections on the Process
			In the absence of a blog, here are my reflections on the process of creating this electronic portfolio. In reality, this is the third tool I have used to publish my e-portfolio on the Web. The first version of my new e-portfolio was published using a portfolio system developed by the Maricopa Community Colleges. Below the line are some of the comments that I write in the blogging tool that is included in that system: The second version I developed used the Manila system in use by Fairleigh Dickinson University. I decided to use this Geocities account to set up a third version. It took me about five hours to finish all of the entries using the GeoCities PageBuilder, which was mostly a copy/paste job between the most recent version of this portfolio (on the FDU website) and my web browser. The Yahoo PageBuilder was very slow, froze many times, and I had to restart several times. Plus, I had to use a Windows laptop and download Firefox to be able to even begin the task. I think I should have created the files in Dreamweaver or Composer and upload the raw HTML files. It probably would have been faster. But I wanted to learn this system, to see how it works. If there is no other system available, and the user doesn't know HTML, it might be OK, but I realized how much I needed to draw on my understanding of  web page development to complete this version. ------------------------------------- I spent an evening going through my web pages and my hard drive (my digital archive) to select the specific artifacts that I wanted to use in my portfolio. I set up an Excel spreadsheet that let me list the artifacts (21 in all) and then create hyperlinks to each URL. Portfolio at a glance-Excel After creating the list with the URLs, I added comments in Excel to represent the captions for each artifact. I played around with converting the document into HTML, but spent too much time fighting the Microsoft style sheet codes. So I just converted the document into PDF, which I will use on the WWW. I uploaded the Excel spreadsheet to this portfolio as a document, but I might prefer using the PDF. Portfolio at a Glance (PDF) After selecting the artifacts, I tried to identify which competencies or skills each artifact demonstrates. I found five or six major categories right now, maybe more when I think about it. But the major categories have emerged. Now, all I have to do it create a collection for each grouping, and write an overall reflection plus record the captions. Since I had all of the artifacts on one of my websites, all I had to do was capture the URL. From start to finish this partn of the project has taken me an evening, and most of the time was spent in selecting the artifacts and writing the captions. Those aren't really technology issues...they are portfolio issues.