As my time for UNE is coming to a close I thought I would give a final remark on how it has gone in the digital environment. I will be honest this was a bit difficult to write. Since I have had this platform, tool, resource for four years now, it is hard to recollect all the tasks that I have done on this. Before we divulge into what’s below, please read into my biography so we can get acquainted first.
I suppose that the proper place that I could start from should be the very beginning when I first got access to my account. In freshman year, back in 2016, we, everyone from the class, all thought that this e-portfolio was just some other thing that we had to use for our classes. Since e-Portfolios were new to everyone at this time, my and another class were apart of the trial classes to have in an e-portfolio. We had no idea that having an e-portfolio would be a completely different thing than Google Docs or Google Drive. Having an e-portfolio was a lot more than that, but it took us a while to figure that out.
The professors knew what they were talking about but, the students weren’t as up to speed with it as the professors were. I remember when I had my first experience with going in and personalizing my e-portfolio it was very similar to what my professor had for their e-portfolio. That is what I thought we needed it to look like so I decided time to make it, not into what I wanted, but, into what I thought I should have. Oh, how my perspective has changed.
Through the course of my semesters at UNE there were no distinct conversations I remember having of a professor telling me that this was my area, that I own it, and that they would have no control over what happens on it. If I had known that, my perspective of e-portfolio would have been changed entirely. I had always thought that e-portfolio was strictly for school work and that was it. Since there was no outside work that I thought was necessary to add to e-portfolio I hadn’t the thought of making this place my own to work with.
It had started off as just being my English class space to publish my work on the web. As my years went on at UNE it grew into a place where I felt was the place where my final publications needed to be located. In comparison to Google Docs, e-portfolio was a place where I knew that whatever I post on here will remain on the web forever, whereas Google Docs I have revision history after revision history as well as seeing many of my other college courses’ works all sprawled out onto one single website.
That being said I do still use Google Docs, but in a very different way. I use Google Docs to place my rough draft and first draft on them. When I was to put my material onto e-portfolio I knew, from taking all of the English classes that this is my area where people need to see my final products. I remember the professors would say don’t post anything on your e-portfolio that you wouldn’t want everyone to see, which changed most of a student’s perspective on what we needed the post and how we needed to post it.
