The book Interactions for intersections is a great resource for Art Educators. Each chapter was very interesting me and focused on major changes, great ideas and up to date facts about technology not on in Art Eduction but in the world today. There are chapters on ideas for teaching, how the word is changing, how the changes have impacted students and teachers and the one that I decided to focus on; "Digital Journals: The Past, Present and Future of Electronic Portfolios for Visual Culture Learners by Shei Chau Wang.
In this chapter the author focuses on digital journals. This is my first digital journal and I am beginning to understand what the benefits of having this for a class is. It is easily, nature friends, allows others to learn for your postings, allows you to get feed back from others, and the list goes on. In the article he focuses on the benefits of having e- portfolios. Having an e-portfolio is all of those things, it also looks professional and is easy to update and change.
Although the benefits are obvious of having a digital portfolio there are down sides. Some listed in the book are educational, aesthetic taste and visual quality, identity and authorship, communication and language issues and technological issues. This section raises a good point, with e- portfolios there is the issue of forgetting why you have them (to analyze and critic), loosing aesthetic taste and making it all one medium viewing, using media to make your work better (but not in your own way), and communication may get tampered with as well. I'm not sure about everyone else but when I am online, I tend to not capitalize spell out made up or abbreviated words, and my language is not as clear. When using the internet as a means of communicating out english language may evolved into something that is not as efficient and cannot express as much as we would like.
This chapter has raised some pros and cons of using a e- portfolio to me. I believe that when I have the time I will try create a presentable one because it would be a great way to show employers your work. I also believe it is important to have another one besides online. As a teacher it will most likely be a method that I use in a class to critic and have discussions about students work. In other classes at UMD we have discussions and I believe they are beneficial.
http://fun-funzeela.blogspot.com
On this website there is a section that talks about how a English Classroom has used a e-portfolio to make work more accessable and easy to manage in the classroom. The following is a video from that class.
"English Speaker." English Speaker. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.
Sweeny, Robert W. Inter/actions/inter/sections: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture.
Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 2011. Print.
Glad you enjoyed the book! Although the blogs are hard to get used to you will hopefully be able to use it as a resource in the future. You now will always have the links, projects, and lesson plans ready for you whenever you need them.
I agree I think having online portfolios can be difficult. You can never trust the images, and you don't get that up close and personal look at the work. That said it is a great venue to have discussions and for older students it will be a good job training tool. Many jobs look at online portfolios first.