Description

Winter 2021 ePortfolio Instructions

Final ePortfolio: “Learning During a Pandemic” (1200 words with a variety of multimodal elements)

What is an ePortfolio? It is your work throughout the term collected, curated, and reflected upon. This term, however, “work throughout the term” has taken on new meaning as we all struggle to adapt to uncertain and often frightening circumstances. In that sense, school “work” isn’t easily distinguishable from other kinds of work, like getting up, getting dressed, and finding our way into the day. Through all of this, we have had many triumphs—completing schoolwork, often in very confined quarters (the pets! The siblings! The moms! The dads!), keeping our spirits up by encouraging each other, and allowing ourselves the space to feel afraid, tense, tired, and even angry while still insisting on our right to hope.

In that spirit, we will be constructing our final ePortfolio around the experiences of learning in these strange and troubled times

Learning During a Global Pandemic (and in Generally Challenging Times)

Some organizing questions/sections:

  1. Learning about pandemic: Take a look at this “visual history of pandemics” (Links to an external site.)and reflect on learning about Covid-19. What have you learned about infections disease? What have you learned about the word “pandemic”? What did you think about pandemics before Covid-19? What do you think about them now? Do you think this pandemic has changed the way you will think about your world? If not, why not? If so, how so? Anything else?
  1. Learning with pandemic: What has it been like to have “pandemic” on the mind while trying to study—at the beginning of the quarter? Midway through? Now? For this class? Other classes? In general?
  1. 39C and the pandemic: What has it been like to do a research project in which you had to think about a real world problem, one happening right now? Have you thought about that problem existing in the context of the pandemic? Have you thought about how that problem you’ve thought about for all these weeks might be affected by the pandemic? What has it been like to do research for this project—choose, read, summarize, and analyze sources? Compose an argument? But perhaps most importantly advocate for? Anything else you would like to add about working on this project during a pandemic?
  1. Spring term and the future: How do you feel about learning online moving forward? What concerns do you have? Do you anticipate any major changes? As we continue to fight the pandemic, how are you anticipating or planning for your learning experience during fall term?

Before you write, please gather all of the “sources” you will use to compose this multimodal project. You should gather assignments from your project as you did for the Midterm, but also look elsewhere to other things. While you don’t have to use this many in the actual eportfolio, try to collect between 10-12 elements to work with. It’s exactly the same principle as the annotated bibliography: better to have more sources that you can pick from than few sources that don’t help you gain a coherent picture.

**Sources can be:

  • short 2-3 min videos of you pondering a couple of these questions or some other related thing.
  • screenshots of newspaper or other kinds of headlines
  • photos of your study space at home, your family, images of your other classwork, any other photo or expressive element (text message, social media post, drawing, song/poem) that you want to share that connect us to your life away from school during this time.
  • Any elements that connect to this class and your project: from emails, to text messages, to sticky pad notes, to early drafts, to peer and instructor comments, to comments you gave to others, to before and afters of your work, to discoveries made, to work discarded, to bad news and good news, to lack of motivation, to light bulb moments.

**If the meaning or content of your image requires explanation, please provide a caption.