"5th Year Connections & Reflections" Guest Post by Lexie

Thanks to Lexie for attending and sharing her thoughts at the 5th Year Connections & Reflections COMM ePortfolio Event, and for sharing her re-cap below! See more of her work by clicking here.

Recap of ePortfolio Event

Written for COMM 495

Last week the Communication department at ODU held an ePortfolio event for faculty to share how different professors are incorporating their course work into ePortfolios. Dr. O'Hallarn was presenting how our class, Public Service Campaigns, is using ePortfolios to display the work that we do for our nonprofit partners. He invited me to come and show my ePortfolio as an example and I agreed not knowing what I was getting into. The event was set up like a sort of symposium where professors presented their class ePortfolios and others walked around asking them questions and sharing ideas about ePortfolios. Dr. O’Hallarn had me set up my laptop next to his presentation to answer questions about the process and anticipated outcomes of the project from a student perspective.

The event started off slow in our corner so Dr. O’Hallarn encouraged me to walk around to some of the other presenters. Since I plan on using this site to showcase my PR material to potential employers I was interested in learning how to best organize my work. I want to format my work in a way that is easy to understand for teachers grading my work and also for job recruiters interested in certain samples. I learned that I should have one projects tab with a drop down menu and a separate section for each class. Creating the drop down menu creates a cleaner look to the site. Having a separate drop down menu for specific kinds of work like social media or PR writing could better organize things for those viewing from outside of ODU. I also learned that having project and resume text on the webpage is great for someone just browsing, but someone who is interested in my work will want to have access to a file they can print out for reference. Having my resume as a PDF makes it accessible for a potential employer to print off as a hard copy reference.

I spent the second half of the event talking to others about my ePortfolio. I didn’t really know what questions to expect so I was grateful that my first inquiry was from familiar face, Professor Branch, who I had for PR writing. She was interested in the type of work that should be posted and if it should be edited and graded before putting it on the Internet. It got me thinking a little bit more about what potential employers would see and how the work that I present should represent the kinds of jobs that I will be going for. Seeing her also got me thinking about all of the great writing samples I have from her class that I could incorporate into my site.

Other professors who wanted to incorporate ePortfolios in their own classes stopped by to check out how Dr. O’Hallarn is having our class use them. After conversing with them he directed them to me to see my sites set up and to hear about the value of this project from a student perspective. We scrolled through my site and seeing people’s reactions to different aspects of the site helped me to see what was and was not working. They asked some questions in preparation for their future assignments like how long the initial creation process took and how difficult it was to create. Most of them asked me what I feel I gained from the process and how I designed it to work both for my classes and future job hunt. I thought about these things for my first blog post but talking through it so many times reinforced and expanded my ideas. I talked about the importance of having a digital record of my writing for future employers and of using visuals that grab a visitor scrolling through hundreds of other sites. I hadn't really understood the importance of visuals until so many people commented on them. Dr. O'Hallarn commented on how the visuals and design of the homepage could be the difference between someone clicking onto my next pages or just skipping onto the next job candidate.

Being asked so many questions also forced me to think about the different writing styles and samples being shown on this site. Having formal writings like projects and press releases on the same site as an informal style blog is a great way to show that I can write in a variety of styles successfully. Towards the end of my participation I spoke to Dr. Gary Beck and he answered some questions I had about my resume both on and off the site. He spoke about having everything converted into a PDF and having my web address written on my hardcopy resume. Having my work in one place allows interested parties to effortlessly view whatever work is most relevant to them. Talking to all of these different people and hearing similar questions being asked in different ways helped me to think critically about this entire process and really highlighted what the most important parts of this project are for me. Before this event I may not have used this site on my resume or added other classes work because I didn't fully grasp how great a took this was. Seeing so many highly educated and experienced people take an interest boosted my confidence about my site and changed my understanding about how valuable of a tool this is. So thanks COMM department for having me:)