Random Thoughts

Yesterday morning I checked my email and found a message from a young man I did not know. He had looked at my old online portfolio and wanted to know how I had done different things because he had an assignment for a class to create an online portfolio and wanted to do something like mine. I hoped he was talking about my new portfolio because I couldn’t remember anything about my old one, but he really wanted to know about the old one. So I looked at it again and tried to remember how I had done things. Since I didn’t know very much when I created that one two years ago, it wasn’t hard to reconstruct what I had done.

So Gabriel and I spent the day yesterday exchanging emails, him asking questions and me trying to answer. In the end, he had a great looking portfolio ready for his instructor to look at this morning. I feel kind of like a proud mother!

This sharing of knowledge is what makes the world so different today. It isn’t about protecting what I know but about seeing how what I know complements what you know and what we can construct with our combined knowledge. It is about how we can learn from each other — whether we are teachers or students, parents or children, from this country or that. All those divisions are, in some ways at least, artificial.

So I thank Gabriel for asking me to share my knowledge. I learned as much as I taught.

Well, I am sure no one really cares, but I made some changes to my portfolio. I solved the problem of only having the Home link in the bottom by putting a link to it in the sidebar. That makes me happier. And I put a little note in the sidebar to explain the need to go to the home page to see the complete list. It isn’t elegant, but I think it will work for me.

I have played with the idea of comments, going back and forth several times. I think that I am content with this not being interactive and, therefore, not really a blog. It also isn’t chronologically posted — or rather I have forced the chronological order by changing the dates on things. For the time being, anyway, this is how it will stay. If anyone can convince me that I should have comments on it, I will make the changes.

So that is what I have now. I want to add come content, but I probably won’t get that done right away. At any rate, I am not embarrassed by it, and that is a good thing!

In a comment to my previous post, Aaron raised the issue of my teaching portfolio not being a blog anymore. And I guess I should be ashamed to admit it, but I don’t think that matters to me. I wouldn’t necessarily want anyone to comment on my portfolio in my portfolio.

But I think his suggestion that each document have a separate blogger account might be a good one. I guess I feel bad about opening so many accounts, but that is probably foolish. Blogger probably doesn’t care and might actually be happy to be able to boast of five more blogs. But it seems inefficient somehow.

What I was looking to do was set up something like Julie Lindsay has without my own website. I don’t know that I need such a thing, but I wanted to try to develop one. If nothing else, it gives me access to my CV, for instance, anywhere in the world at any time. It is conceivable to me that I might someday be glad for that. I move around a lot, and I probably won’t have the same ISP three months from now, so I can’t just upload files there and expect to access them next year. I need something extremely portable. A website of my own or a blog-turned-portfolio would allow me to have that stuff out there no matter where I am.

I also think that if I keep this portfolio basically the way it is, it needs to have another post on that main page that gives some instructions or I need to include them in the post that’s there. And I need to include some kind of contact information. I am, not done with this portfolio yet. Not by a long shot!

I decided the other day to set up an e-portfolio for myself. I am not exactly sure why, but it seemed like a good idea. What I have so far can be seen here. I am not totally happy with it, but I was surprised by how easy it was to make the changes that I wanted to the template – no comments, no dates, no “posted by”, etc. There are still some things I would like to change, though, and I am not sure how to do them.

First of all, the way it is set up now, when you click on Professional Writing, for instance, the sidebar only shows the previous posts, not the whole list. Can someone tell me if there is a way around that? I would like for all the entries to always be there.

Second, the nice little “home” link at the bottom of the posts. Can I put it at the top as well? I didn’t see the code, but maybe I gave up to easily.

So if anyone could help me out with these things or if you have any suggestions for the blog/portfolio itself, please let me know. I need all the help I can get!