All portfolio contents can be added to your personal portfolio page by, for example, pasting links to you blog entries on your page, and uploading files to the page. Your work will be publicly viewable.

If particular files can't be uploaded due to size, you can upload those file to MyWebSpace and post a link on your portfolio page.

Finally, if you prefer not to make your portfolio public, you may upload all files to the Learn@UW dropbox.

I. CAPSTONE ESSAY: Reflections on Writing, New Media, and Participatory Culture

Review all the work you’ve done from the term and compose an essay/multimedia object on some aspect of new media and/or participatory culture. For instance,we can see new media technologies as potentially enabling greater civic and community participation by allowing people to communicate and express ideas with a wider range of available means than in the past (e.g., image, sound, and text; Photoshop & Flash; sampling/appropriation); an ability to reach a wider (potentially, world-wide) audience; and the opportunity to connect with those sharing similar interests.

Also, Web 2.0 technologies are generally thought of as second generation of web-based technologies that allow for collaboration, sharing, and deliberation among users—for example, wikis, blogs and discussion forums (e.g., Wikipedia; the Survivor spoiler forum.

You might describe your experience writing in these spaces. If you have blogged or participated in forums and/or wikis in the past, what similarities and difference do you see these out-of-school experiences compared to our in-school uses? What, if any, value do you see in these sorts of spaces? What problems have you seen? What elements did you find the most interesting? Do you plan to continue to write a blog, contribute to wikis, and/or participate in forums after our class ends?Have your ideas about writing or what a writer is changed?What did you learn about yourself as a writer?

II. ASSEMBLING A PORTFOLIO

A portfolio is a representative collection of your work that documents your achievements over the course of time. Artists, architects, and many other professionals use portfolios because they supply a fuller sense of one’s capabilities and creativity than could any single example of work. Likewise, for writers, a portfolio serves as a better reflection of learning and potential than any single test or paper because it features a range of work—formal and informal—in response to a range of assignments—major and minor—over an extended period of time. Portfolios are often used to demonstrate one’s development as a thinker and writer, but most fundamentally, they should serve as an honest representation of one’s best self.

The Basics (Final Portfolio)

• Revised version of research paper
• Revised version of Wiki article (link to article)
• The Open Media Project (saved to MyWebSpace or Locker in Learn@UW)
• For at least one of those three major pieces, a paper trail of its chronological development—exploratory writing, notes on sources, all drafts, cover sheets, teacher and peer responses to drafts, and a final draft.
• Excerpts from your Process Log for each project
• 3 blog posts (give the URLs of these posts)
• The capstone essay