This is the gateway page to my course portfolios and related materials. A course portfolio is a new relatively experimental genre for reflecting on one's teaching. I am developing these course portfolios as a participant in the Course Portfolio study group that is part of the AAHE Peer Review of Teaching Initiative. (For a fuller description of course portfolios and their rationale, follow this link to About Course Portfolios.)

These course portfolios are hypertext course portfolios. They not only attempt to represent my reflections on teaching and student learning in my courses, but do so in an electronic hypertext (i.e. nonlinear) format. There are several rationale for my using hypertext as the medium for the course portfolios:

• the nature of hypertext allows me to represent the complexity that characterizes all teaching in progressive layers of connections and materials. The reader of these portfolios is able to begin with a focused set of statements and reflections and then follow connections to other materials if desired.
• the hypertext format helps solve one of the vexing problems that has confronted the course portfolio study group, which was how much and what kind of evidence of student learning do you actually put in the portfolio? The ability, in hypertext, to weave a certain amount of evidence into the narrative about the course and then create a direct link to the balance of the evidence, if the reader wishes to pursue it, goes a long way toward addressing the question of presenting evidence of student learning that is, in the words of Pat Hutchings, "fair, credible, and telling."
• finally, a hypertext course portfolio, in the case of my teaching, was absolutely essential, because most of my teaching materials, and an increasing amount of my students' work, is in electronic form. As more faculty include electronic spaces as integral parts of their course's architecture, not only will careful reflections on the meaning of that work be necessary, but it will need to be rendered in an electronic medium itself.

Course Portfolios

AMST203: American Civilization I

This course portfolio addresses the first semester of the American Civilization core course sequence which I will have taught five times by fall 1997. The primary focus of the portfolio is our investigation in this course of ways to incorporate new technologies into the teaching of an introductory interdisciplinary experience so that students are effectively exposed to the tools and methodologies for doing cultural inquiry. For the broader context of the American Civilization core, see the American Studies Program home page.

ENGL 143: American Literary Traditions

This course portfolio reflects on a new course that I taught for the first time in spring 1997. American Literary Traditions was the first literature course that I had taught with a significant computing component. Half of the of the classes for this course were held in a networked computing lab, with the other half being held in a traditional classroom. This course portfolio reviews the lessons learned from the first offering of this format, as well as a reflection the extensive electronic student work produced in the course. In particular, I am interested in asking what computer-based work adds to the traditional format for a literary traditions course. Follow this link to go direclty to the American Literary Traditions home page.

ENGL 511: A Bigger Place to Play: Text, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Electronic Age

This course portfolio addresses a graduate level course in electronic textuality and cultural knowledge that I have taught twice. The primary focus of this course portfolio is the continued refinement of a course model for a graduate level introduction to the theory, practice, and pedagogy of electronic textuality. Follow this link to go directly to the Bigger Place to Play course home page; or see also, the spring 1996 version of the syllabus. If you are interested in seeing the final student projects for the course, go here.

Related Materials and Links

• About Course Portfolios: my own description of the course portfolio genre and project.
• Evaluation of Faculty Work with Technology: an outline of issues related to the electronic representation of teaching and the evaluation of faculty work with information technologies in their teaching, research, and professional activity.
• A page of links to resources dealing with the issues of tenure, recognition, and technology, set up by one of the editors of Kairos.
• Special issue of the electronic journal, Kairos, on Tenure and Technology.