Ken Harbit’s Eportfolio
Table of Contents
Executive Summary 3
Introduction 3
Purpose 3
Primary Aim 3
Secondary Aim 4
Analysis 5
Purpose 5
Clients 5
Users 5
Prospective Learners 5
Prospective Employers 5
Prospective Volunteer Organizations 5
Personal Growth 5
Competitors 7
As Personal Development Tool 7
As Professional Development Tool 7
Design Rational 8
Pre-Design 8
Design Strategy 9
Usability Testing 10
Problems Found 10
Problems Fixed 10
Conclusion 11
Executive Summary
Introduction
Until recently the purpose of a professional electronic portfolio (eportfolio) was essentially to showcase one’s education, talents and proof of career growth by supplying examples. The eportfolio was for the most part, was an electronic hardcopy portfolio.
As time passed and multimedia started working better with the web and society changed a little bit. The world of hardcopy started shifting to multimedia on the web. Employers hold a major role in society; they started changing what they want to know about prospective employees. A resume may not be sufficient to get your foot in the door at many organizations today. Many employers want to know more than just names, dates, and roles played; they are more interested in career growth. They want to know your core beliefs and values as they pertain to the organization.
Several factors determine career growth; formal learning (classes, seminars), informal on-the-job learning, and how well you get along in and are a part of society (which involves learning about yourself and others). All three of these factors could be shown through reflection. In a similar manner, the same three things have a major effect on your core philosophical point of view (driven by your core beliefs and values).
Career growth and philosophical point of view are in a constant state of change and understood through self-examination and reflection. Reflective writing revels more about a person than a resume. Reflective writing articulates your beliefs, values, and outlook on work, family, politics and religion. Reflective writing can show your progress from intern, through journeyman to master. It will show not only accomplishments but also how you managed yourself and resources to arrive at the decisions you made in order to accomplish your tasks.
Reflective writing is also a tool for personal growth and development. Through self-assessment reflection a person can take a step back and look at an event, analyze his or her emotions and thoughts as they were during the event, examine meanings and interpretations, then look at what went well or revealed a need for additional learning, and relate what transpired to the rest of life.
Purpose
The purpose of my eportfolio differs slightly from the norm. I'm over 60 and retiring soon, I won't be looking for a job again, at least I hope not. The intent of my eportfolio is for personal growth, showcasing my talents for career development is secondary. At this point of my life I see career development as an aide to personal development. If I am employed in retirement it will be only on a temporary basis, most of my talent and knowledge will be shared through volunteer organizations, local groups and Internet groups. I see my eportfolio as showcasing my talents to gain new ones or to help someone else gain new talents through voluntary sharing of talents and knowledge. Either way there will be learning involved and growing on a personal level.
The primary aim of this eportfolio is to aide in my personal development through reflective writing of my experiences in life, work, study, and play; to aide in my professional development through writings about my achievements, showcasing my accomplishments, creating media rich views to share with potential volunteer organizations, potential learners, program coordinators and faculty of Lifelong Learning programs, and others with the same general interests.
Professional development will always be a part of my life. I’ve been an associated with technology throughout my career, technology does not stand still; in order to be of service to others and keep my relevancy to society I will need to keep my professional talents updated. This will involve refreshing old knowledge and acquiring new knowledge and possibly new talents.
A secondary aim of this eportfolio is to put me in charge of my own learning and help me create a plan of study for those things in life that I want to know more about. Retirement will allow me to pursue other interests. I would like to get away from building computers and communications systems and work more with how they affect us; what needs to be improved to aide in learning and why; why do different age groups use computers differently; and are today's young people really getting their mind rewired and what does that mean? Those are some of the things that I'm interested in that relate to my profession. I'm also interested in history and why I see the world differently than a 20 year old.
Analysis
Purpose
The primary purpose of this eportfolio is to aide in my personal development through reflective writing of my experiences in life, work, study, and play; to aide in my professional development through writings about my achievements, showcasing my accomplishments, creating media rich views to share with potential (part-time) employers, volunteer organizations, potential learners, program coordinators and faculty of Lifelong Learning programs, and others with the same general interests. A secondary purpose is to put me in charge of my own learning and help me create a plan of study for those things in life that I want to know more about.
Clients
I am the client. This is being produced to aide in my personal development, after retirement, through lifelong learning; both as a learner and as a learning facilitator.
Users
I have 4 types of users, prospective learners, prospective employers, prospective volunteer organizations, and me (lifelong learning).
Prospective learners are those who I may act as a learning facilitator for. These would be people over 50 years old, members of Lifelong Learning programs, Adult Education programs, Senior Education programs, or members of a Senior Center, Community Center, or other senior group. These people would be interested in my skill set. For example, if I was offering a class in Blogging, they would want to know about my blogging and Internet skills. Prospective Learners want to know more about my life experiences than my formal education. Specifically they want to know how much experience I have in applying what I would be teaching. They want to know the technology I will be using and how much experience I have in using that technology in a lifelong learning atmosphere (experience working with and teaching those 50+).
Prospective employers would be Lifelong Learning program coordinators, Adult Education program coordinators, Senior Center program coordinators, and other senior group program coordinators. Prospective employers are interested in my formal education and my experience in teaching both formal and lifelong learning classes. Because if employed, I would essentially be representing an organization or educational institution the employer would also want to know my personal beliefs and values and other organizations and institutions that I am affiliated with.
Prospective volunteer organizations are Churches, Red Cross, Salvation Army, Goodwill, Senior Centers, seniors groups, community centers, and schools. Prospective volunteer organizations are interested in my honesty, integrity, and how well I can work with people; along with know my personal beliefs and values and other organizations and institutions that I am affiliated with.
My personal growth through: self-examination and assessment; reflection; and personal and professional development. Because I am over 60 and will be retiring soon, I am more concerned with personal growth than professional growth. This eportfolio is a dynamic mirror of my life growing as I grow giving me a map of my education and experience foundations. It will be an aide in developing a ‘parts list’ for developing new experiences and gaining new knowledge in pursuit of my varied interests.
Competitors
As a personal development tool, I am my biggest competitor. Through self-examination and assessment, and personal reflection I will be challenging myself in pursuit of meaningful experiences and furthering my interests. I do not see it as having competitors I the normal sense.
As a tool for professional development, I still do not see competitors, I see challenges and challengers. Yes, there will be others that are trying to take the same position that I would like to have, either professionally or as a volunteer. My own personal reflection has taught me that looking at the situation as a challenge takes competition out of the picture. This eportfolio will help me to focus and reflect on life and various situations I might be placed in, turning a competition into a challenge. The distinction between challenge and competition is important. In a competition there is a clear winner and loser. If I challenge myself I may not reach my goal, but I will be a better person for it.
Design Rational
A point I should make here is that the site as a whole will be dynamic. At the present time I am a professional looking toward retirement in five years. Because of that, at the present the site will be mostly professional; as I go into retirement my personal interests will play a larger role, eventually overshadowing the professional aspects. Also, at this point I see the banner across the top with navigation down the right side with a large data area as being the norm for a while. As society goes digital and PCs (desk & laptop) start going away, the user interface should reflect the times and change to a ‘tablet’ style usable on both tablet PCs and mobile devices. The user interface reflecting the digital trends of society is very important. If it takes a use more than a few seconds to figure out how to navigate, they won’t likely be back.
Pre-Design
I started by looking at many eportfolios. Most of the time, the first page was sparse with just navigation, banner of some kind, a picture and short profile. Since this portfolio will be used by older folks, it has to be easy to navigate, nothing hidden, with controls always in the same position on every page. I needed a banner so folks won't forget who they are looking at. It also has to be easy on eyes because there is a lot of text. I also looked at a lot of sites that offer eportfolio building services and sites that let the user build a eportfolio.
I looked at two kinds of sites, personal and education or teacher portfolios. Most seem to be built from the same basic template, Banner on top stretching horizontally across the top with thin navigation column down the left side or tabs horizontal just under the banner, and a large data area to the right of the navigation column. Sometimes I found "breadcrumbs" horizontal under the banner or across the bottom of the page.
I talked to folks at local volunteer organizations that do the hiring about what they look for in a prospective volunteer. They helped me a lot in figuring out what to include. I also talked to folks contributing to open source Linux projects to find out what they look for in prospective contributors.
I also had to look at what I know I could produce now; some of the sites I looked at were not frames, they only looked that way. It's probably better way to go non-frame, but it is something I would have to learn, so to save time I used frames to create the site.
Design strategy
Keep it simple, keep it uncluttered, only the large data area should change, banner and navigation must stay the same always.
I picked the color scheme of eggshell-white background with kaki-green and maroon fonts mainly because it is easy on my eyes and I have been using it for blogging and for 4 blog sites I already have. I picked these because I'm familiar with them and all my blog readers like it. The maroon links against the eggshell-white stand out very well; there should be no doubt that the underlined maroon text is a link.
I decided on a home and back button over a link because I wanted them to stand out from the links. With one glance at the navigation column anyone will be able to find their way ‘Home’ or ‘Back’. I put them at the top of the navigation column because sites that did use them always put them at the top of the navigation column. Another reason for a top location was that if the navigation links became so numerous that the column would need to be scrolled, I do not want my users to have to scroll to find the Home or Back button.
Usability Testing
I employed a lot of my family in testing my site, 13 nieces and 14 nephews ranging in age from 18 to 52; I asked all to look for spelling and grammatical errors and to click all links and buttons.
Problems Found
One major fault was found, the 'Back' button on the navigation column did not work in Windows Explorer. Also, Google Chrome browser did not properly open pdf files, instead of opening in the data area; it opened in a pop-up window. This appears to be a function of the browser and not the website.
Having my family check the site brought up some unique problems that had nothing to do with the web site. A good part of my family speaks English only as a second language, even though they were very energetic in finding spelling and grammatical errors, I needed to recruit some American friends to check that part. I followed the lecture and presentations and recruited 5 American males and 5 American females. All 10 individuals were over 50 (same as my prospective users).
Another thing I ran into was the gap between knowledgeable internet users, mostly young, and the older novice users. This really brought home the idea if digital natives and digital immigrants. My young nieces and nephews (20-) had no problem navigating forward or backward. One of the older folks (70+) spent a lot of time staring at the screen, taking their hands completely away from the keyboard. They did not know what to do next. Problems Fixed
The problem with Explorer and the Back button was solved through research. One of the things I have learned from this exercise is that there is usually more than one way of doing something. After doing some searching I found another way to script the Back button. It now works properly with Explorer, and both Windows and Linux Firefox, Chrome, and Opera browsers. Chrome still has a problem opening pdf files. To help those who are not are not familiar with the Web I put “Site Navigation” at the top of the navigation column. This solved the problem only after a short lesson on the Web and how to get around.
Conclusion
It’s not easy building a web site. I’m not talking about the mechanical stuff of opening and closing tags and frames or no frames etc. I’m talking about the message and how you want to send it. That’s the hard part.
This is a beginning, I need to keep working at it, keep looking at not just eportfolios but at sites that accomplish the task that the owner wants to accomplish. As the digital society changes, and technology progresses, I need to keep my user interface up to date with web trends. As my life changes from work-day to retirement-play, I need to keep the content updated to reflect my position in society and new experiences I wish to have.
This eportfolio gives me a start on my post work life. In order to define what I wanted to make, what message I wanted to send, I needed to define and understand what I wanted to use it for. That was the hard part.
