894 Response to Annotated Bibliographies

My reading, Zanzucchi & Truong (2013), focused on how faculty development initiatives could create and maintain an instructional culture based on eportfolios.  In terms of the levels within an activity system, as Spinuzzi (2003) describes, Zanzucchi & Truong focus on the macroscopic level.  

On the other hand, the two summaries written by my classmates both focused on the mesoscopic level, to use Spinuzzi’s schema.   (See, for example, Spinuzzi, 2003, p. 30.) Yancey et al (2013), summarized by Megan, looked at the need to develop a new vocabulary for assessing multimodal portfolios and investigated the approaches one might use for reading an eportfolio.  As part of their investigation, these authors read a simulated eportfolio and examined the various ways that one might “read” such a genre assemblage.  They also considered the ways in which an eportfolio is an “emerging genre” that will in part be defined by the students using it.  Wierszewski (2013), as summarized by Alex, also examined the mesoscopic level in a study of teacher comments on eportfolios.  By counting and classifying the comments, Wierszewski was able to gain an early impression of how teachers are transferring practices from previous paper-based assessment experiences and adapting to eportfolios.  Both of these articles were helpful for me in fleshing out what eportfolios are and how they might be assessed because they focused on the mesoscopic level, that is, by connecting an imagined instructor with a given set of eportfolios.  My article, on the other hand, looked at more extended parts of the activity system, namely, the program level, in which multiple instructors are connected to each other and to the instructional philosophy guiding the assessment outcomes of an entire program.  The fact that I was able to look at both levels gave me a richer understanding of eportfolios and the implications of using them as an individual instructor and within a program.  It also gave me a chance to notice how analyses can operate at different levels of scope.

References

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Wierszewski, E. (2013). “Something old, something new”: Evaluative criteria in teacher responses to student multimodal texts. In H. McKee & D. N. DeVoss (Eds.), Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/05_wierszewski.html

Yancey, K.B., McElroy, S.J., & Powers, E. (2013). Composing, networks, and electronic portfolios: Notes toward a theory of assessing eportfolios.  In H. McKee & D. N. DeVoss (Eds.), Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/08_yancey.html

Zanzucchi, A., & Truong, M. (2013).  Thinking like a program: How electronic portfolio assessment shapes faculty development practices. In H.A. McKee, & D.N. DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.), Digital writing assessment & evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/14_zanzucchi.html