Tag: ownership

As I was doing our weekly readings (I’ve read or seen them before, but didn’t really stick with me like the first) Andrew had some great ideas that got me thinking about true ownership. The idea about “assignments” got me thinking if I’m giving my students ownership or just assignments to complete? (Andrew Rickard, 2015) So that led me to questions like how do I get them to take ownership of their own work in my school setting? What would that look like?

Next thing I got to thinking is the audience and the “teacher with the red pen” statement. Again how do I get students interested in getting them to have authentic collaboration and discussions online? We’ve implemented our Schoology system but I usually find myself uploading resources for them to use.

I feel like I am constantly thinking about the class, program and keeping the end goal in mind, and I believe that true ownership is the key to making my portfolio a success not for future jobs, but for myself, and the COVA model has been eye-opening. The posts I’m writing are authentic and I look back at them, reread them, and I can see the growth I’ve made during it.

Thinking back to why I joined this class, I remembered that I wanted an authentic experience that put me in control of the learning and not at the mercy of the teacher and that’s what I have here. Although it gets a grade, we’re not worried about it because that pressure is not put on us to get a good grade, but have a product that you can continuously work on, shape and mold, and make it your own. It’s not a “one time” assignment that gets feedback or doesn’t get feedback and that’s it.

Dr. Harapnuik and I have had several conversations about improving my products and about just playing around with programs and see what works. I’ve enjoyed those learning experiences, but would’ve never done them if I never asked or if he never said. It’s important to get those authentic experiences and not just have them, but going back to last week, we have to reflect on them, not just have the experience and that’s what the eportfolio allows us to do, to authentically have the experience, share it, and reflect on it in a blog post.

Work Cited

Rickard, A. (2015) Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It? 

Harapnuik, D., Thibodeaux, T., & Cummings, C. (2018). Choice, Ownership, and Voice through Authentic Learning

 

I want to share a story about something similar to an eportfolio that I created back in my undergrad years. I took this class in journalism and it was a magazine/production class that taught me the in’s/out’s of creating our own magazine from scratch. We had to come up with a name, decide who our audience was, what we would display, who would be our advertisers etc. The class was one of my favorites because it allowed us to create something that we could show to others, and possibly to future employers.

Well one day I received an interview to work at a local Houston news company (although the job was for like a sales assistant, which was completely my fault) I assumed the role would be something for news production, or possibly lead to a role in the future. I took my magazine plan hoping to impress the inverviewee, and I must say that was far from it. She questioned me about certain aspects of the magazine plan that I wasn’t ready for, seemed to degrade my idea, and just brush it to the side like it was nothing. Now don’t feel too bad, again this may not have been my best work. I think she could have not critiqued me so harshly if the position wasn’t one in the writing field, and even when I asked her if I could possibly move into a different sector, she replied bluntly no.

Either way, I felt destroyed once the interview was over because although my product wasn’t that great, I thought it was something impressive to show this employer, and they couldn’t care about it at all. That experience makes me wonder if this eportfolio carries the same weight as my magazine plan that I created years ago. The other questions that come to mind is “have I updated any of the info” and “have I used that since, and improved the issues” and the answer is no. Subconsciously I feel that initial experience kept me from pursing other magazine careers, or was I just another recent grad trying to stuff their “magazine plan” down the throat of an employer? I don’t really know, but I feel the same fear that could come from this eportfolio. What makes this any different from what I did in my undergrad? Maybe it was the thinking aspect of it, and the fact that I have more time and have had more learning experiences to improve my product.

While I do believe an eportfolio is a great tool to have, I wonder if employers really do look at them and are wowed by what they display from the student standpoint. Now this shouldn’t be my only point for future employment, so I also believe that this tool is important for many other reasons as well. As I stated in last weeks discussion posts, reflection is something I’ve wanted and done recently in the classroom and in my own life. After I saw the readings, guess what popped up? Reflection! So this definitely clears up any confusion I have for “what else do I do with my eportfolio?” and reflections is the answer.

I’ve learned quite a bit of new information while working with WordPress, but I also learned quite a bit doing a recent internship where their platform is WordPress. I learned how to embbed images from Instagram and Twitter, how to break a post into pages, and add videos and external links as well. so when it came to choosing a platform, I choose WordPress thinking it’ll be easier to use, but I was wrong. There is so much more to explore about the platform, but that’s not bad. I got to enjoy spending time figuring out how to turn my posts into pages, how to add my own images from my Google account, how to add widgets that show others what I am learning and/or reading etc. , and it has been a great learning experience.

So going back to that initial story with the magazine plan, I must say that an eportfolio definitely has more benefits than the plan I presented. Employers can look for certain things, and ask questions about how to run a magazine because that the business they know. But when it comes to an eportfolio, the only reason they can ask is why and how. Why did I feel that way, why do I feel I learned these things? How did those experiences help me grow and learn? How did I learn to use multiple tools? How did I teach others and why did I do it? So to go back to the previous statements, I believe we all should use eportfolios because they are a real-life reflection into who we are and what we truly learned.