“Going Public” with electronic portfolios: Audience, community, and the terms of student ownership

• Published in: Computers and composition 1996, Vol.13 (2), p.207-217
• Main Authors: Wall, Beverly C., Peltier, Robert F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Audience Awareness; audience bulletin board system communication; Classroom Techniques; Computer Mediated Communication; computer-mediated community document exchange online dialogue portfolio portfolio; Electronic Portfolios; electronic student ownership student responsibility writing with computers; Electronic Text; Higher Education; Online Systems; Peer Evaluation; Portfolios (Background Materials); Student Evaluation; Writing Evaluation
• ISSN: 8755-4615; 1873-2011
• DOI: 10.1016/S8755-4615(96)90010-9

This article presents accounts of two teachers using electronic portfolios to encourage students to take more responsibility for their own learning. The first account relates how moving peer reviews and explanatory papers from manila folders to electronic portfolios helped students become more aware of peers as audience, as well as create their own public community of writers. The second account describes the unsettling, but ultimately exciting, effect of students who, given real responsibility, chose to invest their energy in dynamic online dialogues rather than in the traditional display texts created for teachers. By “going public” with electronic portfolios, the students transformed their school-bound ideas of audience, fostered their own sense of community extending beyond the classroom, and renegotiated the traditional terms of ownership of student writing.