ePortfolio

The pinnacle of writing for the web is perhaps the personal or professional website and portfolio. In a Web 2.0 world it is no longer necessary to have one's own webhost or to code a website from scratch. Many people are now turning to blog tools as a web publishing platform that functions much like a website functioned for the last decade, and we're going to ride that wave this term. Each student will create an ePortfolio as a personal website extraordinaire!  We'll do the work in York College's ePortfolio platform, an internationally recognized open source blogging and content management platform called WordPress.  Once completed for this class, we can continue to build our ePortfolio in future terms, export the entire project to a file we can take with us and import into WordPress.com, or to any other place with a WordPress blog installation.  (Think customizability, portability, flexibility.) This project is a major one for us, and I strongly encourage us to push the boundaries of the platform.

Required Elements

  • Build a complete personal/professional website in the WordPress environment.
  • Choose a theme that permits considerable customization. Push that customization to explore and exploit the features of the platform to style the ePortfolio
  • Create a customized header graphic and insert it into the ePortfolio
  • Home Page
  • Major/Career Interests Page(s)
  • Courses Section, with material prepared in ENG 384 as well as some work samples from at least two other courses (go big)
  • A reflective statement that frames each work sample in the ePortfolio so that a reader "gets" the value of the sample as an illustration of your work and ability

Suggestion

Select a theme that offers much customizability when you first create your ePortfolio. Here are some:
  • Atahualpa (Pretty customizable)
  • Suffusion (Hugely customizable; I'm using this one for our class site)
  • Magazine Basic
  • Mandigo
Let me know if you find a theme "online" that we don't yet have in the York options. (There are 1000s of WordPress themes and we've installed only about 120 of them.)  I'll work to get your preferred theme installed so you can use it! Seriously.
© 2010 Michael J. Cripps, Ph.D. English 384 - Spring 2010
(Image in Header: Hand with Globe, by M.C. Escher)
Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha