Showing posts with label online_portfolio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online_portfolio. Show all posts
Friday, 12 April 2019
Five curricular changes to consider when teaching visual arts e-portfolios
Written for visual arts and design teachers who teach their students e-portfolio curation.
'Young black women curate visual arts e-portfolios: negotiating digital disciplined identities, infrastructural inequality and public visibility' was recently accepted subject to changes for a special issue of the Learning Media and Technology journal. Contributions whose perspectives challenge 'universal technological solutionism' were invited for the forthcoming 'Global technologies, Local Practices: redefining digital education with marginalised voices'.
My contribution foregrounded the key challenges that three young black women faced in creatively appropriating online portfolio software for showcase e-portfolio production. Each student had to negotiate (i) cultural and technical forms of exclusion, (ii) visibility versus privacy concerns and (iii) different forms of digital infrastructural inequalities. To reach the journal's 6,000 word limit for articles, I cut mine's initial visual arts e-portfolio curriculum recommendations, but cited this post. I trust its readers will find the recommendations below helpful, whether for reworking the visual arts showcase e-portfolio curriculum or refining similar curricula. Such changes may better accommodate young visual artists’ varied circumstances and creative aspirations:
Recommended changes when teaching visual arts e-portfolios
+1 > Provide examples of privacy protection that can address visibility risks
+2 > Accommodate the roles in creative industry and digital identities that young people explore
Taken together, the case studies suggested a broader need for a more inclusive visual arts syllabus. South African visual arts pedagogy largely ignores the many and varied types of genres in visual culture that students may participate in. Despite affinity spaces in youth-, do-it-yourself and ethnic cultures potentially being valuable resources for young people's e-portfolio personas and projects, students reported exercising self-presentation strategies that hid participation in "unofficial", "illegitimate" genres. There was a missed pedagogical opportunity for challenging cultural exclusion and supporting greater e-portfolio differentiation by including teens' informal cultural interests.
I trust these five suggestions will help teachers of visual creative e-portfolios to better accommodate young people’s different circumstances, repertoires and creative aspirations.
'Young black women curate visual arts e-portfolios: negotiating digital disciplined identities, infrastructural inequality and public visibility' was recently accepted subject to changes for a special issue of the Learning Media and Technology journal. Contributions whose perspectives challenge 'universal technological solutionism' were invited for the forthcoming 'Global technologies, Local Practices: redefining digital education with marginalised voices'.
My contribution foregrounded the key challenges that three young black women faced in creatively appropriating online portfolio software for showcase e-portfolio production. Each student had to negotiate (i) cultural and technical forms of exclusion, (ii) visibility versus privacy concerns and (iii) different forms of digital infrastructural inequalities. To reach the journal's 6,000 word limit for articles, I cut mine's initial visual arts e-portfolio curriculum recommendations, but cited this post. I trust its readers will find the recommendations below helpful, whether for reworking the visual arts showcase e-portfolio curriculum or refining similar curricula. Such changes may better accommodate young visual artists’ varied circumstances and creative aspirations:
Recommended changes when teaching visual arts e-portfolios
+1 > Provide examples of privacy protection that can address visibility risks
"Lesley Ann", "Melissa" and "Dina" all chose not to use their full first and last names for minimising risks of sexual harassment. Such measures were often not sufficient, since their full names were shown in their email addresses. E-portfolio curricula must guide students appropriately on how to protect their privacy by not sharing genuine identities. For example, a curriculum could include reflection of the potential negative consequence of presenting one's legal identity online, versus assuming that using one's genuine identity and legal name, as "the ('Modern gallery') artist" must be the norm. Alternative self-presentation strategies should be taught, particularly where vulnerable individuals would benefit from privacy protection.
+2 > Accommodate the roles in creative industry and digital identities that young people explore
Taken together, the case studies suggested a broader need for a more inclusive visual arts syllabus. South African visual arts pedagogy largely ignores the many and varied types of genres in visual culture that students may participate in. Despite affinity spaces in youth-, do-it-yourself and ethnic cultures potentially being valuable resources for young people's e-portfolio personas and projects, students reported exercising self-presentation strategies that hid participation in "unofficial", "illegitimate" genres. There was a missed pedagogical opportunity for challenging cultural exclusion and supporting greater e-portfolio differentiation by including teens' informal cultural interests.
Educators could explore potential continuities between youth’s extra-mural affinities and the visual arts syllabus. This may better engage students’ interests, whilst also offering youth greater scope to share their varied personas. For example, presenting market-driven identities in creative industry proved a valued strategy for gaining economic capital amongst under-resourced students. E-portfolio curricula can also better house the existing social network and online content practices of students, which our curricular plans neglected. For example, the curriculum could accommodate students’ pre-existing digital portfolios by encouraging students to link link to theirs from within their e-portfolios.
+3> Cater for students who want to be seen as 'emergent creative pros', not "students"
An online identity as an arts student can be seen as undesirable to emergent visual creatives, who prefer to portray themselves as 'creative professionals' outside school. Examples of young creatives could be added to visual arts e-portfolio curricula for such students to learn from and experiment with.
+4> Foreground both process and product to make context explicit
The 'visual arts showcase' e-portfolio curriculum was taught as a capstone showcase exhibition project. This neglected sharing information related to students’ digital infrastructures. Their e-portfolios did not list the resources that each student used, which made it very difficult to compare the respective infrastructures youth used in e-portfolio curation. Teenagers from black, working class homes faced the greatest obstacles in accessing and using digital infrastructures. A danger lies in the increasing use of digital portfolios potentially serving as a new hurdle for these youth in accessing tertiary studies at elite institutions. This is allied to the rise of professional, digital self-presentation in spaces of creative production potentially serving as another gatekeeper to freelance projects.
+3> Cater for students who want to be seen as 'emergent creative pros', not "students"
An online identity as an arts student can be seen as undesirable to emergent visual creatives, who prefer to portray themselves as 'creative professionals' outside school. Examples of young creatives could be added to visual arts e-portfolio curricula for such students to learn from and experiment with.
+4> Foreground both process and product to make context explicit
My thesis revealed that students’ curation of disciplined digital identities and addition of other personas was strongly shaped by their levels of connectivity. In particular, under-resourced youth’s school and homes did not provide sufficient infrastructure for them to fully participate in e-portfolio design. The least resourced students were under-connected in lacking home internet access and having to share ownership of digital devices. Both were strong markers of class inequality. Under-connected students were at a severe disadvantage in being constrained to doing digital portfolio curation only in e-portfolio lessons. Youth with costly mobile internet access could workaround their computer lab’s slow internet speeds, but could not always work on e-portfolios at home owing to priorities related to mobile broadband costs.
The 'visual arts showcase' e-portfolio curriculum was taught as a capstone showcase exhibition project. This neglected sharing information related to students’ digital infrastructures. Their e-portfolios did not list the resources that each student used, which made it very difficult to compare the respective infrastructures youth used in e-portfolio curation. Teenagers from black, working class homes faced the greatest obstacles in accessing and using digital infrastructures. A danger lies in the increasing use of digital portfolios potentially serving as a new hurdle for these youth in accessing tertiary studies at elite institutions. This is allied to the rise of professional, digital self-presentation in spaces of creative production potentially serving as another gatekeeper to freelance projects.
+5> Provide workarounds for inequalities in digital infrastructures
E-portfolio teaching must accommodate the media ecologies of students who are under-connected to the internet. They should be identified and prioritised with classroom support, since other students can readily do such work at home. Our syllabi also neglected mobile technologies by focusing on desktop and laptop computer users. Resourceful teens used their mobile phones in class to continue e-portfolio curation and overcome school infrastructure constraints. Teaching should accommodate the mobile devices that students bring with them. Students must be encouraged to use these tools for creative production, as well as to make resourceful workarounds where there are problems with classroom infrastructure.I trust these five suggestions will help teachers of visual creative e-portfolios to better accommodate young people’s different circumstances, repertoires and creative aspirations.
Thursday, 8 March 2018
Missing social information and disidentifiers in digital self-presentation
Written for multimodal researchers interested in young peoples' self-presentation strategies and curation of digital personas.
I submitted 'Inequality in Digital Personas- e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media' in mid-February. Some of my thesis' findings and recommendations were removed to meet the 80,000 word restriction. This redacted writing may still have some value to researchers, so I'm sharing them as blog posts. Here's the first (all will be labelled 'PhD' for ease-of-finding):
Research background and three key contributions
Moving image media have become central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children (Buckingham, 2003, 2013). However, such media are largely ignored in multimodal research, despite its acknowledgement of the importance of computer games, film and television (Kress, 2010). My research made a novel contribution by focusing on visual arts e-portfolio styles. This benefits research into the broad range of texts in the classroom that have resulted from the impact of digital media in the last decade (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2013).
My action research project (2009-13) enabled students at two sites, an independent and a government school, to be taught the creative appropriation of online portfolio software, Carbonmade, for curating their electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). The two very different sites were chosen for the following reasons: first, I wanted to explore a wide range of students' choices that economic, cultural and social differences might contribute to; secondly, the bandwidth costs of online publication are significant in under-resourced settings (Donner and Walton, 2013), and thirdly, there are massive differentials in South Africans' general levels of access to, and familiarity with, online media (Goldstuck, 2010, 2017).
Aside from assisting students with developing new media literacies as digital curators, my investigation also made valuable contributions through two other methodological innovations. Its longitudinal nature is unusual amongst multimodal studies in spanning three years (2010-12) at an independent school and two years (2012-2013) at a state one. Diachronic changes in students’ digital designs were examined through the novel methodological contribution of a screenshot analysis. My third contribution is an original description of how young people’s access to digital infrastructures influenced their development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation and the modal density of their e-portfolio styles.
Although multimodal content analysis proved highly useful, my thesis did not focus on contributing to social semiotics. Nevertheless, interesting findings emerged that contribute to multimodal theory: Researchers have described the dangers of stigma (Trottier, 2013) and oversharing (Agger, 2012) in peoples' digital self-presentations, but little has been written on the absence of social information as missing identifiers (Goffman, 1963) or concerning disidentifiers.
1. Understanding missing identifiers
Signs may be called symbols where signs are available to convey social information that is frequently and steadily available and routinely sought and received (Goffman, 1963). In e-portfolio curation, students might be unable to add information to particular identifying categories. This could result in their online identities missing identifying information that audiences would typically expect in a showcase digital portfolio.
There is a research gap concerning audience expectations of teenagers' online disciplinary identities. However, research into professional branding (van der Land & Mutinga, 2014. Van der Land, Willemsen & Unkel, 2015. van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016) is suggestive of how profile creators might increase their credibility by making particular choices in the information they provide. For example, human resource departments might expect to see prospective employees' self-portraits on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017) and users who post theirs are perceived to be more socially attractive and competent than ones who don't (Edwards, Stoll, Faculak & Carman, 2015). In such portraits, smiling and eye-contact (looking in the camera) appear to increase perceptions of credibility (van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016).
Digital self-presentation as an online exhibition
Impression management is the term used to describe how a performer tweaks his or her performance to consciously give details or unintentionally give off details that leak off without any intention (Goffman, 1963). Notions of impression management have proved a useful theoretical foil for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007. Marwick & boyd, 2011. Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010. Lewis, Kaufman & Christakis, 2008. Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008. Schroeder, 2002. Tufekci, 2008). Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor situates impression management within a specific bounded place, drawing on the concept of a behaviour setting (Barker, 1968) in which behaviour is driven by the norms and goals of specific settings. This delimited place is distilled into a dichotomy between front- and back regions, colloquially front stage and back stage. In the front stage, the actor tries to present an idealised version of the self that accords to a specific role. In my research, pupils were assessed on their front stage self-presentation as visual arts students. Students' curations of digitally disciplined personas drew on varied repertoires from a backstage, where the real work necessary to keep up appearances is done.
Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor is focused on synchronous performance in a situation where the performer is co-present with a live audience and can adjust his or her behaviours in response to their feedback. However, many social media sites provide communicative situations that are dissimilar to face-to-face ones. These situations do not depend on being bounded in space and time, nor supporting co-present, real-time observation between individuals (Miller, 1995). Consequently, it is more appropriate to use an exhibition metaphor than a stage play (Hogan, 2010), for social media artefacts. E-portfolios, for example, are presented asynchronously in space for many possible audiences:
Hogan defines an exhibition site as a site (typically online) where people submit reproduced artifacts (read: data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases). Curators (algorithms designed by the site's maintainers) selectively bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences. Audience in these spaces includes those who have used the artefact or make use of it. There are two components of an exhibition space; in the first, information signifying an individual is delivered to the audience on demand by a third party. In the second, the reproducibility of the content and the database curator's role in distributing it means that the submitter does not continually monitor the data as the audience receives it. Nor may the contributor fully know his or her invisible audience(s).
The exhibition metaphor is highly appropriate for describing visual arts showcase e-portfolios, since these are exhibitions that are doubly curated; being self-curated by students, who organise digital content, that is redistributed via the virtual curatorship of an online portfolio service's database(s). The context of this exhibition space can stand in for the dramaturgical context of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast to the latter situation, the artist and his exhibit's viewers are not co-present in space in real-time, but may still monitor and react to each other. Furthermore, while the artist may order artefacts with a particular audience in mind, those who view and react to the content may be different from those for whom it was intended. This exhibition approach expands, but does not replace, the dramaturgical approach since each artist may adjust his or her self-presentation on an ongoing basis in response to audience feedback. An advantage of this expanded approach is that it can support a clearer articulation of the potential and perils of self-presentation in an age of digital reproduction (Hogan, 2010).
The expanded approach is also helpful for addressing the major difference between an embodied actor with a pre-existing physical presence, versus the disembodied e-portfolio exhibition space. Its creators must enter, select and upload information to create their digital presences. In e-portfolio production, students should have greater opportunity to exercise impression management and make strategic choices in what information they might provide through different modes. These modes provide different resources that students can use to control their information and affect not just what young people are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal (Jones, 2005).
Linking missing information to marginalised students' limited infrastructural access
Software both enables and constrains users' communications (van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2013) through posing particular kinds of representational and communicational choices. The degree of design and customisation afforded by Carbonmade, as well as what software does not offer users (van Leeuwen, 2008), shaped students' e-portfolio styles. For example, free Carbonmade users had very limited options for customising portfolio layout. Unlike paid users they cannot upload a custom logo or feature big images.
In curating online personas, few keen students would set out to produce digitally disciplined identities that were incomplete showcases, since this might potentially compromise their credibility. Nevertheless, for first-timers, the task of e-portfolio design work can be overwhelming (Yancey, 2004) as it may involve many unfamiliar tasks. These can include: identity work; remediation of creative productions and their arrangement for diverse online audiences; and being ‘web sensible’ in exploiting the affordances of the digital space (such as hyperlinks). While the on-going maintenance of e-portfolios may involve seemingly simple processes, their quantum contributes to it being a complicated medium for novices to manage. They often needed to do several updates for achieving currency and coherence.
Such a requirement placed marginalised students at the greatest disadvantage in being under-resourced in not having home computer and internet access. They had to make choices during e-portfolio lessons, where they were hampered by their inexperience with computers and the internet. Highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited these teens' development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production. The concept of a digital hexis was proposed by Fanny Georges (2007) to designate a scheme of user self-representations. These self-representations are transformed like a body that is shaped by habit or by repetitive practice. Thus, the notion of hexis bears analogy with the shaping of meaning and body. The extent to which digital identities are produced is drawn from repetitive interactions and continuous perception of self-representations on the screen (Georges, 2009, p.1). Participants as e-portfolio curators, thus evidenced a digital hexis in their e-portfolio's self-description, imagery and level of organisation. These young people's accomplishments in evidencing digital hexeis via e-portfolio styles were thus closely linked to opportunities for regularly accessing and using digital information infrastructures.
In analysing all research participants' e-portfolio styles, different patterns between the two sites suggested that young people's material circumstances were reflected in the extent of their digital self-descriptions and portfolio organisation. In particular, inequalities in histories of digital infrastructure's access and use (for example "free" internet Wi-Fi) led to large differences in the levels of modal density (Norris, 2009) of e-portfolios at either site. Students’ multimodal texts can be dense in meaning, given that each mode adds its particular layer of complexity. According to a Multimodal (inter)action analysis approach (Norris, 2004, 2014), each students’ e-portfolio had a particular level of modal complexity. The more intricately intertwined a webpage’s multiple disembodied modes (such as image, text and layout), the higher the density. Differences in the densities of e-portfolios were linked to the digital hexis for e-portfolio curation that teens could exercise. Thus, class and digital divides were evident in the extent to which digital personas and imagery was curated.
Youth’s development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation benefitted from digital infrastructures available outside class: No independent school student lacked extra-mural internet access, but a few government school pupils did. Without such privilege, these students had to do e-portfolio work in class. Their inexperience with desktop computers and internet browser use often resulted in slower progress and needing to play ‘catch up’ in class with peers. Overall, students with the least internet access created e-portfolio styles that featured fewer roles and had a lower modal density than those of their peers. Such self-presentations and portfolios seemed to be hampered by absent information that reflected its curators not having the resources or time required for providing all the details that the e-portfolio curriculum requested. Consequently, marginalised students' e-portfolios seemed disorganised and less polished than affluent peers who benefitted from additional production periods outside class.
Under-resourced students had to be highly resourceful to participate in e-portfolio production, given such costs and their difficulties in accessing digital cultural capital (Selwyn, 2004; Seale, 2012). Such marginalised youths reported not being able to produce e-portfolios to their satisfaction. By contrast, privileged students at both schools expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations of the 'visual arts showcase' e-portfolio as a school genre. Students who had “free” home internet could do e-portfolio work at their leisure, which tended to result in these teens sharing not only extensive information about their classroom roles, but their informal ones, using better production values and modally denser styles. Such teens pushed Carbonmade’s free online portfolio storage to the limit and some took advantage of their out-of-class infrastructural advantages for creating extra-mural portfolios that overcome storage limitations and provided a forum to circumvent the e-portfolio guidelines. A few students linked such "unofficial" portfolios from their e-portfolios.
2. Describing disidentifiers
In addition to students' e-portfolio styles missing social information, they also evidenced disidentifiers (Goffman, 1963), whereby signs broke-up the coherence between self-presentation and portfolios that students had tried to create. Teens' feedback suggested that they did not deliberately select signs that resulted in misrepresentation on their webpages. The presence of disidentifiers suggested novel self-presentation and content production problems when young people's multimodal choices become remediated online:
Just as Potter highlighted about children's' video-making (2012, p. 33), not every video, 'ends up as the coherent, fully designed, literate and realised use of meaning-making resources envisaged by some semiotic theorists'. My research likewise highlights the constraints of teenagers as multimodal designers. In particular, it is important to understand the (often hidden) role of digital infrastructure as an influence on their design process. Inequalities in the access and use to such infrastructures may enable certain styles of self-presentation or act as a gatekeeper, especially for marginalised teens. Non-internet connected students described being unable to publish the social information or artwork showcases they wanted to. In the absence of information on digital infrastructure in their e-portfolios, it was difficult for viewers to appreciate how differing contexts shaped the quantum and styles of visual and social information that users provided. For example, it is hard to spot that under-resourced students had put a lot of effort in making workarounds to overcome slow and unreliable ICT infrastructures. Another concern lay in students not deliberately choosing multimodal ensembles: default software values created disidentifiers that inexpert teenagers missed editing or forget to change, which resulted in misrepresentation of teens' interests.
Scholars who celebrate accounts of teaching contemporary digital media production with new media literacies (Jenkins, 2006. Burn and Durran, 2007. Lankshear and Knobel, 2009. Ito et al, 2010. Jenkins, Ito & Boyd, 2015) would tend to promote the integration of such like arts e-portfolios at schools. Likewise, teachers believed that publishing the prescribed style would be beneficial for all. By contrast, the content analysis and case studies of a range of students' e-portfolio styles revealed the exclusionary impact of infrastructural inequality. My content analysis and case studies for twelve teens revealed how highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited marginalised teens’ development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production.
When analysing digital curators' productions, semiotic theorists should not assume that incoherence, outdated information and the low modal density that results from missing social information solely reflects unmotivated students’ disinterest. Rather, it is important to consider how low production values might also result from keen youths who face infrastructural constraints that prevent online content curation and digital remediation.
Future research into missing social information and disidentifiers
Describing the infrastructural constraints that students experienced is consequential as it shows educators and other decision makers that youths’ differential resourcing must be accommodated in curricular design. For example, lessons should aim to prioritise infrastructure use by under-connected students. Teens’ mobile infrastructures must be better accommodated and students should be encouraged to describe infrastructural enablers and constraints in their e-portfolios. Future researchers should look at the outcomes of specific changes in class and whether they help promote greater equity, or not?
The absence of expected signs in an e-portfolio are missing identifiers that may reduce its value when viewers interpret a prospective apprentice or student's digital portfolio to be incomplete and not a 'proper showcase'. The prestige of the symbolic capital that students may develop via digital curations is linked both to the quality of the artworks they remediate and their organisation. Where students choose to be online, but produce partial, disorganised portfolios that do not reflect their best works, such curations may be judged to be inadequate and discredited by assessors or prospective employers. Audience research needs to be done concerning the reception of young people's e-portfolios. For example, how do assessors grade for missing identifiers and disidentifiers when evaluating digital arts portfolios for university access.
My research took place in two relatively well-resourced English secondary schools that could provide the visual arts subject, but future research could be done into the choices that young people make in the less well-resourced environments that are more common in South Africa. For example, how do non-dominant teens negotiate their cultural exclusion at school in creating digital personas that remediate their mother tongues and other repertoires?
More research also needs to be done concerning young adults' development of varied digital portfolios as they enter tertiary education, the workforce and other spaces. For example, how do young peoples' online portfolio styles change as youth become professionals or hobbyists?
People use multiple profiles to support job searches that may involve switching from one profession to a new one. There is an opportunity to research how young adults manage multiple profiles with limited internet access. Researchers must also explore how other constraints influence young adults' design of digital personas. For example, while online spheres are increasingly considered public, they are a source of tension for prospective employees. Older people voiced fears about being screened out of potential work interviews if they post self-image photos on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017). The ease with which HR recruiters can search young adults' "Google resumes" and their attendant fears of evaluation is likely to inhibit certain expressions online. Researchers could examine the extent to which young adults remain silent about their political and social justice views to 'fit in' with prospective employers.
I submitted 'Inequality in Digital Personas- e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media' in mid-February. Some of my thesis' findings and recommendations were removed to meet the 80,000 word restriction. This redacted writing may still have some value to researchers, so I'm sharing them as blog posts. Here's the first (all will be labelled 'PhD' for ease-of-finding):
Missing social information and disidentifiers
Research background and three key contributions
Moving image media have become central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children (Buckingham, 2003, 2013). However, such media are largely ignored in multimodal research, despite its acknowledgement of the importance of computer games, film and television (Kress, 2010). My research made a novel contribution by focusing on visual arts e-portfolio styles. This benefits research into the broad range of texts in the classroom that have resulted from the impact of digital media in the last decade (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2013).
My action research project (2009-13) enabled students at two sites, an independent and a government school, to be taught the creative appropriation of online portfolio software, Carbonmade, for curating their electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). The two very different sites were chosen for the following reasons: first, I wanted to explore a wide range of students' choices that economic, cultural and social differences might contribute to; secondly, the bandwidth costs of online publication are significant in under-resourced settings (Donner and Walton, 2013), and thirdly, there are massive differentials in South Africans' general levels of access to, and familiarity with, online media (Goldstuck, 2010, 2017).
Aside from assisting students with developing new media literacies as digital curators, my investigation also made valuable contributions through two other methodological innovations. Its longitudinal nature is unusual amongst multimodal studies in spanning three years (2010-12) at an independent school and two years (2012-2013) at a state one. Diachronic changes in students’ digital designs were examined through the novel methodological contribution of a screenshot analysis. My third contribution is an original description of how young people’s access to digital infrastructures influenced their development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation and the modal density of their e-portfolio styles.
Although multimodal content analysis proved highly useful, my thesis did not focus on contributing to social semiotics. Nevertheless, interesting findings emerged that contribute to multimodal theory: Researchers have described the dangers of stigma (Trottier, 2013) and oversharing (Agger, 2012) in peoples' digital self-presentations, but little has been written on the absence of social information as missing identifiers (Goffman, 1963) or concerning disidentifiers.
1. Understanding missing identifiers
Signs may be called symbols where signs are available to convey social information that is frequently and steadily available and routinely sought and received (Goffman, 1963). In e-portfolio curation, students might be unable to add information to particular identifying categories. This could result in their online identities missing identifying information that audiences would typically expect in a showcase digital portfolio.
Digital self-presentation as an online exhibition
Impression management is the term used to describe how a performer tweaks his or her performance to consciously give details or unintentionally give off details that leak off without any intention (Goffman, 1963). Notions of impression management have proved a useful theoretical foil for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007. Marwick & boyd, 2011. Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010. Lewis, Kaufman & Christakis, 2008. Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008. Schroeder, 2002. Tufekci, 2008). Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor situates impression management within a specific bounded place, drawing on the concept of a behaviour setting (Barker, 1968) in which behaviour is driven by the norms and goals of specific settings. This delimited place is distilled into a dichotomy between front- and back regions, colloquially front stage and back stage. In the front stage, the actor tries to present an idealised version of the self that accords to a specific role. In my research, pupils were assessed on their front stage self-presentation as visual arts students. Students' curations of digitally disciplined personas drew on varied repertoires from a backstage, where the real work necessary to keep up appearances is done.
Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor is focused on synchronous performance in a situation where the performer is co-present with a live audience and can adjust his or her behaviours in response to their feedback. However, many social media sites provide communicative situations that are dissimilar to face-to-face ones. These situations do not depend on being bounded in space and time, nor supporting co-present, real-time observation between individuals (Miller, 1995). Consequently, it is more appropriate to use an exhibition metaphor than a stage play (Hogan, 2010), for social media artefacts. E-portfolios, for example, are presented asynchronously in space for many possible audiences:
Hogan defines an exhibition site as a site (typically online) where people submit reproduced artifacts (read: data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases). Curators (algorithms designed by the site's maintainers) selectively bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences. Audience in these spaces includes those who have used the artefact or make use of it. There are two components of an exhibition space; in the first, information signifying an individual is delivered to the audience on demand by a third party. In the second, the reproducibility of the content and the database curator's role in distributing it means that the submitter does not continually monitor the data as the audience receives it. Nor may the contributor fully know his or her invisible audience(s).
The exhibition metaphor is highly appropriate for describing visual arts showcase e-portfolios, since these are exhibitions that are doubly curated; being self-curated by students, who organise digital content, that is redistributed via the virtual curatorship of an online portfolio service's database(s). The context of this exhibition space can stand in for the dramaturgical context of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast to the latter situation, the artist and his exhibit's viewers are not co-present in space in real-time, but may still monitor and react to each other. Furthermore, while the artist may order artefacts with a particular audience in mind, those who view and react to the content may be different from those for whom it was intended. This exhibition approach expands, but does not replace, the dramaturgical approach since each artist may adjust his or her self-presentation on an ongoing basis in response to audience feedback. An advantage of this expanded approach is that it can support a clearer articulation of the potential and perils of self-presentation in an age of digital reproduction (Hogan, 2010).
The expanded approach is also helpful for addressing the major difference between an embodied actor with a pre-existing physical presence, versus the disembodied e-portfolio exhibition space. Its creators must enter, select and upload information to create their digital presences. In e-portfolio production, students should have greater opportunity to exercise impression management and make strategic choices in what information they might provide through different modes. These modes provide different resources that students can use to control their information and affect not just what young people are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal (Jones, 2005).
Linking missing information to marginalised students' limited infrastructural access
Software both enables and constrains users' communications (van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2013) through posing particular kinds of representational and communicational choices. The degree of design and customisation afforded by Carbonmade, as well as what software does not offer users (van Leeuwen, 2008), shaped students' e-portfolio styles. For example, free Carbonmade users had very limited options for customising portfolio layout. Unlike paid users they cannot upload a custom logo or feature big images.
In curating online personas, few keen students would set out to produce digitally disciplined identities that were incomplete showcases, since this might potentially compromise their credibility. Nevertheless, for first-timers, the task of e-portfolio design work can be overwhelming (Yancey, 2004) as it may involve many unfamiliar tasks. These can include: identity work; remediation of creative productions and their arrangement for diverse online audiences; and being ‘web sensible’ in exploiting the affordances of the digital space (such as hyperlinks). While the on-going maintenance of e-portfolios may involve seemingly simple processes, their quantum contributes to it being a complicated medium for novices to manage. They often needed to do several updates for achieving currency and coherence.
Such a requirement placed marginalised students at the greatest disadvantage in being under-resourced in not having home computer and internet access. They had to make choices during e-portfolio lessons, where they were hampered by their inexperience with computers and the internet. Highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited these teens' development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production. The concept of a digital hexis was proposed by Fanny Georges (2007) to designate a scheme of user self-representations. These self-representations are transformed like a body that is shaped by habit or by repetitive practice. Thus, the notion of hexis bears analogy with the shaping of meaning and body. The extent to which digital identities are produced is drawn from repetitive interactions and continuous perception of self-representations on the screen (Georges, 2009, p.1). Participants as e-portfolio curators, thus evidenced a digital hexis in their e-portfolio's self-description, imagery and level of organisation. These young people's accomplishments in evidencing digital hexeis via e-portfolio styles were thus closely linked to opportunities for regularly accessing and using digital information infrastructures.
In analysing all research participants' e-portfolio styles, different patterns between the two sites suggested that young people's material circumstances were reflected in the extent of their digital self-descriptions and portfolio organisation. In particular, inequalities in histories of digital infrastructure's access and use (for example "free" internet Wi-Fi) led to large differences in the levels of modal density (Norris, 2009) of e-portfolios at either site. Students’ multimodal texts can be dense in meaning, given that each mode adds its particular layer of complexity. According to a Multimodal (inter)action analysis approach (Norris, 2004, 2014), each students’ e-portfolio had a particular level of modal complexity. The more intricately intertwined a webpage’s multiple disembodied modes (such as image, text and layout), the higher the density. Differences in the densities of e-portfolios were linked to the digital hexis for e-portfolio curation that teens could exercise. Thus, class and digital divides were evident in the extent to which digital personas and imagery was curated.
Better-off teens exercised their advantages in digital information infrastructure to curate e-portfolios with extensive information about multiple personas. These students typically enjoyed pre-exposure to publishing their artworks to social networks via mobile phones and/or home internet. These students could readily use mobile-centric and/or home internet access (Rideout and Katz, 2016) in developing a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation. Although students who had mobile phones were advantaged in being able to circumvent slow internet speeds in class, this was undermined when their airtime ran-out or the incompatible ecologies between contemporary phones and old computers slowed or prevented them from downloading artworks and self-imagery.
High ad-hoc broadband rates serve as gatekeepers to data intensive practices by mobile-centric users, such as e-portfolio curation. In South Africa, pay-as-you-go mobile phone contracts prioritize use of voice and SMS services. For affluent consumers, able to afford big data bundles, data can be amongst the cheapest in the world, at eight cents per megabyte upfront (Goldstuck, 2016). By contrast, the punitive ceiling rate of up to R2 per megabyte for “out of bundle” mobile data can be subtracted from ad-hoc users’ airtime, putting it amongst the highest rates in the world. Data bundles are not perceived as an essential purchase by the poor and so are rarely bought. They consider bundles as cheap as R25 to be unaffordable, despite these enabling major savings in the cost of ad hoc data (Goldstuck, 2016).
High ad-hoc broadband rates serve as gatekeepers to data intensive practices by mobile-centric users, such as e-portfolio curation. In South Africa, pay-as-you-go mobile phone contracts prioritize use of voice and SMS services. For affluent consumers, able to afford big data bundles, data can be amongst the cheapest in the world, at eight cents per megabyte upfront (Goldstuck, 2016). By contrast, the punitive ceiling rate of up to R2 per megabyte for “out of bundle” mobile data can be subtracted from ad-hoc users’ airtime, putting it amongst the highest rates in the world. Data bundles are not perceived as an essential purchase by the poor and so are rarely bought. They consider bundles as cheap as R25 to be unaffordable, despite these enabling major savings in the cost of ad hoc data (Goldstuck, 2016).
Under-resourced students had to be highly resourceful to participate in e-portfolio production, given such costs and their difficulties in accessing digital cultural capital (Selwyn, 2004; Seale, 2012). Such marginalised youths reported not being able to produce e-portfolios to their satisfaction. By contrast, privileged students at both schools expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations of the 'visual arts showcase' e-portfolio as a school genre. Students who had “free” home internet could do e-portfolio work at their leisure, which tended to result in these teens sharing not only extensive information about their classroom roles, but their informal ones, using better production values and modally denser styles. Such teens pushed Carbonmade’s free online portfolio storage to the limit and some took advantage of their out-of-class infrastructural advantages for creating extra-mural portfolios that overcome storage limitations and provided a forum to circumvent the e-portfolio guidelines. A few students linked such "unofficial" portfolios from their e-portfolios.
2. Describing disidentifiers
In addition to students' e-portfolio styles missing social information, they also evidenced disidentifiers (Goffman, 1963), whereby signs broke-up the coherence between self-presentation and portfolios that students had tried to create. Teens' feedback suggested that they did not deliberately select signs that resulted in misrepresentation on their webpages. The presence of disidentifiers suggested novel self-presentation and content production problems when young people's multimodal choices become remediated online:
The use of default software values created disidentifiers that inexperienced teenagers missed editing: some choices were not specified by them and their display simply reflected default settings. For example, in organising their portfolio folders, the navigation styles could vary between those they specifically chose and those that were the initial defaults. Such discrepancies were not deliberate and would create an odd navigational experience for portfolio viewers.
Teens could make choices that were later forgotten and their meanings no longer intended. For example, while "Kyle" was interested in graffiti in grade 10, by matric he described this as just a 'phase'. Nevertheless, graffiti remained listed as one of his skills, but there were no examples of such work under his portfolio.
A common example across students' work were copyright statements that featured the year they were written (i.e. 2010 /11). These could become disidentifiers when not updated to the current year they are viewed at (i.e. 2012 and later). By contrast, the author's intention would always be to assert their copyright for the current year as the most accurate form of legal statement.
Conclusion
Missing identifiers and disidentifiers point to the constraints that young digital curators face in infrastructure and practicing ongoing e-portfolio curation. In highly-constrained material and technological contexts, the concept of a signmaker expressing his or her interest is worthy of critique.Just as Potter highlighted about children's' video-making (2012, p. 33), not every video, 'ends up as the coherent, fully designed, literate and realised use of meaning-making resources envisaged by some semiotic theorists'. My research likewise highlights the constraints of teenagers as multimodal designers. In particular, it is important to understand the (often hidden) role of digital infrastructure as an influence on their design process. Inequalities in the access and use to such infrastructures may enable certain styles of self-presentation or act as a gatekeeper, especially for marginalised teens. Non-internet connected students described being unable to publish the social information or artwork showcases they wanted to. In the absence of information on digital infrastructure in their e-portfolios, it was difficult for viewers to appreciate how differing contexts shaped the quantum and styles of visual and social information that users provided. For example, it is hard to spot that under-resourced students had put a lot of effort in making workarounds to overcome slow and unreliable ICT infrastructures. Another concern lay in students not deliberately choosing multimodal ensembles: default software values created disidentifiers that inexpert teenagers missed editing or forget to change, which resulted in misrepresentation of teens' interests.
Scholars who celebrate accounts of teaching contemporary digital media production with new media literacies (Jenkins, 2006. Burn and Durran, 2007. Lankshear and Knobel, 2009. Ito et al, 2010. Jenkins, Ito & Boyd, 2015) would tend to promote the integration of such like arts e-portfolios at schools. Likewise, teachers believed that publishing the prescribed style would be beneficial for all. By contrast, the content analysis and case studies of a range of students' e-portfolio styles revealed the exclusionary impact of infrastructural inequality. My content analysis and case studies for twelve teens revealed how highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited marginalised teens’ development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production.
When analysing digital curators' productions, semiotic theorists should not assume that incoherence, outdated information and the low modal density that results from missing social information solely reflects unmotivated students’ disinterest. Rather, it is important to consider how low production values might also result from keen youths who face infrastructural constraints that prevent online content curation and digital remediation.
Describing the infrastructural constraints that students experienced is consequential as it shows educators and other decision makers that youths’ differential resourcing must be accommodated in curricular design. For example, lessons should aim to prioritise infrastructure use by under-connected students. Teens’ mobile infrastructures must be better accommodated and students should be encouraged to describe infrastructural enablers and constraints in their e-portfolios. Future researchers should look at the outcomes of specific changes in class and whether they help promote greater equity, or not?
The absence of expected signs in an e-portfolio are missing identifiers that may reduce its value when viewers interpret a prospective apprentice or student's digital portfolio to be incomplete and not a 'proper showcase'. The prestige of the symbolic capital that students may develop via digital curations is linked both to the quality of the artworks they remediate and their organisation. Where students choose to be online, but produce partial, disorganised portfolios that do not reflect their best works, such curations may be judged to be inadequate and discredited by assessors or prospective employers. Audience research needs to be done concerning the reception of young people's e-portfolios. For example, how do assessors grade for missing identifiers and disidentifiers when evaluating digital arts portfolios for university access.
My research took place in two relatively well-resourced English secondary schools that could provide the visual arts subject, but future research could be done into the choices that young people make in the less well-resourced environments that are more common in South Africa. For example, how do non-dominant teens negotiate their cultural exclusion at school in creating digital personas that remediate their mother tongues and other repertoires?
More research also needs to be done concerning young adults' development of varied digital portfolios as they enter tertiary education, the workforce and other spaces. For example, how do young peoples' online portfolio styles change as youth become professionals or hobbyists?
People use multiple profiles to support job searches that may involve switching from one profession to a new one. There is an opportunity to research how young adults manage multiple profiles with limited internet access. Researchers must also explore how other constraints influence young adults' design of digital personas. For example, while online spheres are increasingly considered public, they are a source of tension for prospective employees. Older people voiced fears about being screened out of potential work interviews if they post self-image photos on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017). The ease with which HR recruiters can search young adults' "Google resumes" and their attendant fears of evaluation is likely to inhibit certain expressions online. Researchers could examine the extent to which young adults remain silent about their political and social justice views to 'fit in' with prospective employers.
Cite this page
Noakes, T. (2018). Missing social information and disidentifiers in digital self-presentation. Retrieved from http://www.travisnoakes.co.za/2018/03/missing-social-information-and.html.
Updates
This blog post was updated on the 13th of March with additional insights from my 8ICOM talk and presentation (12 December, 2016).
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Thursday, 25 June 2015
Introducing the portfolio genre to first-timers from under-resourced schools and homes
Written for educators in minimally resourced environments that are interested in teaching novices about the role of digital portfolios; particularly to help justify tertiary education access to visual creative disciplines and bridging courses.
Although online portfolios are increasingly used to secure educational and vocational opportunities, anecdotal evidence from South African secondary schools suggests that electronic learning portfolio (e-portfolio) production is rarely taught. The costly infrastructures required to support e-portfolio syllabi most likely restrict these those schools with high levels of economic and cultural capital.
Although such schools may readily support young people's participation in visual arts and/or design subjects, such facilities support a mere one percent of young South Africans. Ninety nine percent do not have formal opportunities to study; visual art, graphic design and/or computer studies. The vast majority of young people are thus excluded from formal opportunities for developing digital or analog portfolios and self-presentations related to their creative productions.
However, it is possible for educators at minimally resourced sites to expose students to three important portfolio uses, namely:
- applications for select tertiary disciplines (in particular; architecture, design, fine art and media production);
- supporting access to bridging courses (such as the Cape Peninsula University of Technology's or Michaelis' School of Fine Art's portfolio workshops);
- and for creative professionals' and amateurs' digital self-presentation, curation and sharing practices.
I covered these using specific examples in a two hour lesson with Creative Code students at Ikamva Youth's Makhaza computer lab in Khayelitsha last year. Associate Professor Marion Walton had invited me to speak at her educational outreach project, which introduces dedicated teenagers to computer coding. Marion's lessons aim to make coding and visual design more accessible through youth media, gaming and mobile phones. She asked me to do a short introductory workshop that introduced newcomers to the portfolio genre's use, particularly in education.
Like most Capetonian teenagers, her volunteers have never formally been exposed to portfolios. I chose to start with its use in professions delivering visual creative work. To orient learners, I first provided an overview of the types of careers in which portfolios are important. I took students through the Wanna Have a Designer Future? design careers booklet by the Cape Craft and Design Institute. These volunteers were shown a typical art student's analogue portfolio, before being introduced to how visual creatives specialising in different genres use Carbonmade to present themselves and their creative work. In discussing important differences between online portfolio services for visual creatives, Deviantart and Behance were briefly introduced. The former offers additional social networking functionality, while the latter is integrated with Adobe's varied software subscriptions.
Portfolios may also be very important outside visual creative domains; I showed a Cape Times headline concerning my father, Professor Noakes', recommendation that eating animal organs is better for impoverished children than sugary, high-carbohydrate alternatives. As an academic whose scientific contribution spanned over forty years, I showed how his research contributions to sports medicine and science (in Challenging Beliefs) ranged across many media formats (video, articles, publication lists and other resources). To further buttress his reputation online, it was helpful that a consolidated resource be created with links to the Prof's varied intellectual contributions.
Each learner then completed a brief self-reflection on portfolios questionnaire, which aimed to stimulate individual reflection on what they had just learnt and catalyse contemplation on applying this knowledge in developing one portfolio, or perhaps more. These might range from; hobby showcases to school and co-curricular portfolios intended to support tertiary study and workplace applications.
I hoped that using an open approach focused on the resources that teenagers access in school and outside it could encourage this audience to appreciate that showcase portfolios are worth pursuing for sharing one's vocational and/or leisure interests. Feedback from these students suggested they had many. I trust that they will leverage their emergent coding, design and photographic skills for creating portfolios that serve the important uses introduced by the workshop.
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
Online portfolio users new to computers must get familiar with these new terms and processes.
Written for Visual Arts or Design learners new to online portfolio page creation and computers.
As a learner who wants to create one online portfolio (or more), but has not been taught computer courses and may have limited access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in school and home, you need to learn about the new terms and processes involved in working digitally. This post was written to help you better prepare for these:
1. Getting familiar with new words, acronyms, symbols and signs in online portfolio creation.
If you are used to working on paper and canvas, the move to working on a computer screen involves learning new words (such as 'screen resolution'), acronyms (like DPI), symbols (i.e. ©) and signs (e.g. @) and new processes (such as 'file editing and saving'). It is useful to ask your educator to provide definitions if you do not understand what he or she is talking about to avoid misunderstanding what is being taught. You can also research almost any word, acronym, symbol or sign's definition using Google and other search engines:
1.1 New words
It is important to understand the words used for online portfolio page design elements (such as uniform resource locator, title, header, body, footer, et al.) as your educator is likely to provide you with guidelines for each choice. If you don't know the terms he or she refers to in lessons, you may struggle to understand the reasoning behind the guidelines. Please ask your educator if you need further help or you can find out what new words mean by using a search engine; simply type in the word you want to know, a plus (+) sign, then the word definition straight after (i.e. type 'uniform+resource+locator definition' into www.google.co.za). If you can spare the time, it's best to read through several results to gain a broader understanding of the word's definitions and usage. {You should also read my post on 'Online portfolio page design element questions to help you in creating a better one', as it lists these elements with important questions on your use of them}.
1.2 New acronyms
Acronyms are heavily used in ICT and those you will encounter when creating your online portfolio will fall under the categories including: imagery digitization (DPI, OCR); file format selection (JPG, GIF, PNG); internet-use (WWW, HTTP, .COM) and screen display sizes (W, H). Please ask your educator to explain the acronyms you do not know, or search for them (for example, type 'JPG+definition into google.com and click to its top results).
1.3 New symbols
The symbols you are most likely to encounter in online portfolio use are © for copyright, ™ for trademark and ® for registered trademark. If you encounter others, ask your teacher for help. It is also useful to get help with sourcing special symbols when typing in your computer's word processing software and via your browser. You can then also ask to be shown how to cut-and-paste these into your online portfolio.
1.4 New signs
A sign you will definitely use is the at sign (@) in creating your email address (i.e. @gmail.com). You may want to experiment with signs for emoticon creation {i.e. listening to music d(-_-)b}, too}!
2 New processes
If you are new to working with a computer, you should sit close to a more knowledgeable peer or your teacher to get help with; using its keyboard, editing and saving files, using relevant software, accessing your lab's network and installing drivers for your own device(s):
2.1 Working with a keyboard
Be sure you get help if you are struggling to type what you intended to. Pressing a "wrong" button just once on your keyboard can create very irritating results: 'Caps lock' will capitalize all your text; 'Num lock' can prevent you entering numbers; and 'Ins' can lead to you typing over content you didn't intend to. You may also need to be shown by your educator or peers how to select alternate keys (such as the symbols above your numeric keyboard) using the relevant key combinations for your operating system and its software.
2.2 Editing and saving files
As a learner who wants to create one online portfolio (or more), but has not been taught computer courses and may have limited access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in school and home, you need to learn about the new terms and processes involved in working digitally. This post was written to help you better prepare for these:
1. Getting familiar with new words, acronyms, symbols and signs in online portfolio creation.
If you are used to working on paper and canvas, the move to working on a computer screen involves learning new words (such as 'screen resolution'), acronyms (like DPI), symbols (i.e. ©) and signs (e.g. @) and new processes (such as 'file editing and saving'). It is useful to ask your educator to provide definitions if you do not understand what he or she is talking about to avoid misunderstanding what is being taught. You can also research almost any word, acronym, symbol or sign's definition using Google and other search engines:
1.1 New words
It is important to understand the words used for online portfolio page design elements (such as uniform resource locator, title, header, body, footer, et al.) as your educator is likely to provide you with guidelines for each choice. If you don't know the terms he or she refers to in lessons, you may struggle to understand the reasoning behind the guidelines. Please ask your educator if you need further help or you can find out what new words mean by using a search engine; simply type in the word you want to know, a plus (+) sign, then the word definition straight after (i.e. type 'uniform+resource+locator definition' into www.google.co.za). If you can spare the time, it's best to read through several results to gain a broader understanding of the word's definitions and usage. {You should also read my post on 'Online portfolio page design element questions to help you in creating a better one', as it lists these elements with important questions on your use of them}.
1.2 New acronyms
Acronyms are heavily used in ICT and those you will encounter when creating your online portfolio will fall under the categories including: imagery digitization (DPI, OCR); file format selection (JPG, GIF, PNG); internet-use (WWW, HTTP, .COM) and screen display sizes (W, H). Please ask your educator to explain the acronyms you do not know, or search for them (for example, type 'JPG+definition into google.com and click to its top results).
1.3 New symbols
The symbols you are most likely to encounter in online portfolio use are © for copyright, ™ for trademark and ® for registered trademark. If you encounter others, ask your teacher for help. It is also useful to get help with sourcing special symbols when typing in your computer's word processing software and via your browser. You can then also ask to be shown how to cut-and-paste these into your online portfolio.
1.4 New signs
A sign you will definitely use is the at sign (@) in creating your email address (i.e. @gmail.com). You may want to experiment with signs for emoticon creation {i.e. listening to music d(-_-)b}, too}!
2 New processes
If you are new to working with a computer, you should sit close to a more knowledgeable peer or your teacher to get help with; using its keyboard, editing and saving files, using relevant software, accessing your lab's network and installing drivers for your own device(s):
2.1 Working with a keyboard
Be sure you get help if you are struggling to type what you intended to. Pressing a "wrong" button just once on your keyboard can create very irritating results: 'Caps lock' will capitalize all your text; 'Num lock' can prevent you entering numbers; and 'Ins' can lead to you typing over content you didn't intend to. You may also need to be shown by your educator or peers how to select alternate keys (such as the symbols above your numeric keyboard) using the relevant key combinations for your operating system and its software.
2.2 Editing and saving files
You probably have already used a mobile phone to edit and save pictures and search through these. But on moving to a shared computer in a lab, saving, editing and accessing these files often becomes more complicated, because your lab's computer is setup for many users with more complicated file paths. Your educator should show you how to setup and access a folder on the desktop where you can save your online portfolio-related work securely.
2.3 Using your computer's relevant software
2.3 Using your computer's relevant software
In digitizing imagery, you may need to edit its size, colour balance and resolution. Ask your educator or computer lab's manager to show you which software is available for this; your computer may have a basic image editing and management software (like Microsoft Picture Manager) pre-installed or more advanced software like Graphic Image Manipulation Program, Corel Photo Paint or Adobe Photoshop.
2.4 Accessing your lab's computer network
If you are scanning imagery at a different computer from the one you normally use and wish to copy it across, you should ask your educator or lab manager to show you how to access the lab's network and copy your scanned image(s) across. This is also useful if you have to use a different computer from the one you normally have access to.
2.4 Accessing your lab's computer network
If you are scanning imagery at a different computer from the one you normally use and wish to copy it across, you should ask your educator or lab manager to show you how to access the lab's network and copy your scanned image(s) across. This is also useful if you have to use a different computer from the one you normally have access to.
2.5 Installing drivers for your own devices
If you bringing your own device to class, you should bring the device's software drivers and a storage device (like a USB flash drive), too. Hopefully, your school lab's computers are up-to-date enough to install the driver and link to your device. If not, you should ask to be given access to the lastest computer at your school, so that you can install the relevant driver, download your files, save them to your storage device and transfer them to your personal folder.
Online portfolio page design element questions to help you in creating a better one.
Written for learners new to online portfolio page design choices, plus their educators.
You are already familiar with writing on paper. As you begin to work onscreen as well, it is important to understand the important differences between the analog environment of paper and the screen's digital one. The key aspects to consider whilst designing your online portfolio pages are categorized below, with related questions to answer in helping you design a better portfolio:
1. Understand the terms that define your online portfolio page's layout
Your online portfolio page is constructed using a digital page template that is constructed from a database of entries. Each webpage is constructed inside your web browser and, in Carbonmade's case, has a 'header bar' (featuring the portfolio title and 'Work' and 'About' navigation buttons), a 'page title' (either the artwork project folder's or the name you chose for your about page), a 'body section' (on your homepage this includes your project artwork folders and their titles; in your project's pages an artwork with its labels and tags and in your about page, your description, profile picture and related entries) and a 'footer' (typically used for a statement protecting your artwork's copyright). In reviewing each portfolio page, have you thoroughly defined entries for your; header bar, page title, body section and footer? If not, your page is likely to appear incomplete!
2. Use a spell-checker for your profile description
Are you sure that there are no spelling mistakes in your portfolio? While you may have to rely on your memory or a dictionary when hand-writing your profile, you should write your profile up in a word processing program (like Microsoft Word or Google Documents) to ensure that its spelling is correct. Once you're done, you can 'cut' the text content and 'paste' it into your profile description.
3. Check your digitized artworks' orientation matches your screen's
Paper is commonly used in portrait format, while all screens are made in landscape format. Before uploading digitised artwork, ask yourself if it is formatted for optimal display in the new format? If not, you should experiment with rotating, rescaling and different image resolutions to achieve the desired effect.
4. Check that all the elements of your online portfolio page's structure are present and work well with each other
The designers of Carbonmade's featured portfolios tend to take advantage of all the design options it provides. In particular, their choices for each of these webpage design elements must work together to create a thoroughly-professional impression. Check yours does too, by asking:
4.1 Online browser elements
4.1.1 Does your web address reflect the identity you're aiming to create?
4.1.2 Does your website title save well as a bookmark (see browser- and social bookmarking)?
4.2 Page title elements
4.2.1 Does your portfolio's title link well to your web address and portfolio's content?
4.2.2 Do your homepage navigation buttons link to complete pages?
4.3 Page body elements
4.3.1 Does the background colour you selected for your online portfolio resonate with the overall exhibition space effect you are trying to create (i.e. if your portfolio features mostly sketches, you may want to choose a white background to suggest a sketchbook)?
4.3.2 Does your page's heading tie in well with the page body content?
4.3.3 Do the text options you chose with your font's type, size and colour enhance the page's overall look-and-feel?
4.3.4 Have you titled your artwork project folder categories appropriately and chosen cover imagery for them that best highlights their content?
4.3.9 Have you added sufficient meta-information for your artwork folders and the digitised images they include? (For example, did you enter; an artwork description, a folder description, the relevant tags and a client description?)
4.3.10 Have you linked to your other web presences that relate to your online portfolio?
4.3.11 If you have chosen that you are 'Available for freelance', have you provided appropriate contact details that still protect your privacy from undesirable audiences?
5. Check that your copyright is protected
5.1 Have you added appropriate copyright statements in each artwork's description or your folder labels and your page footer to assert your moral rights as the artworks creator and protect them?
Hope answering these questions helps you create a better, more coherent online portfolio.
You are already familiar with writing on paper. As you begin to work onscreen as well, it is important to understand the important differences between the analog environment of paper and the screen's digital one. The key aspects to consider whilst designing your online portfolio pages are categorized below, with related questions to answer in helping you design a better portfolio:
1. Understand the terms that define your online portfolio page's layout
Your online portfolio page is constructed using a digital page template that is constructed from a database of entries. Each webpage is constructed inside your web browser and, in Carbonmade's case, has a 'header bar' (featuring the portfolio title and 'Work' and 'About' navigation buttons), a 'page title' (either the artwork project folder's or the name you chose for your about page), a 'body section' (on your homepage this includes your project artwork folders and their titles; in your project's pages an artwork with its labels and tags and in your about page, your description, profile picture and related entries) and a 'footer' (typically used for a statement protecting your artwork's copyright). In reviewing each portfolio page, have you thoroughly defined entries for your; header bar, page title, body section and footer? If not, your page is likely to appear incomplete!
2. Use a spell-checker for your profile description
Are you sure that there are no spelling mistakes in your portfolio? While you may have to rely on your memory or a dictionary when hand-writing your profile, you should write your profile up in a word processing program (like Microsoft Word or Google Documents) to ensure that its spelling is correct. Once you're done, you can 'cut' the text content and 'paste' it into your profile description.
3. Check your digitized artworks' orientation matches your screen's
Paper is commonly used in portrait format, while all screens are made in landscape format. Before uploading digitised artwork, ask yourself if it is formatted for optimal display in the new format? If not, you should experiment with rotating, rescaling and different image resolutions to achieve the desired effect.
4. Check that all the elements of your online portfolio page's structure are present and work well with each other
The designers of Carbonmade's featured portfolios tend to take advantage of all the design options it provides. In particular, their choices for each of these webpage design elements must work together to create a thoroughly-professional impression. Check yours does too, by asking:
4.1 Online browser elements
4.1.1 Does your web address reflect the identity you're aiming to create?
4.1.2 Does your website title save well as a bookmark (see browser- and social bookmarking)?
4.2 Page title elements
4.2.1 Does your portfolio's title link well to your web address and portfolio's content?
4.2.2 Do your homepage navigation buttons link to complete pages?
4.3 Page body elements
4.3.1 Does the background colour you selected for your online portfolio resonate with the overall exhibition space effect you are trying to create (i.e. if your portfolio features mostly sketches, you may want to choose a white background to suggest a sketchbook)?
4.3.2 Does your page's heading tie in well with the page body content?
4.3.3 Do the text options you chose with your font's type, size and colour enhance the page's overall look-and-feel?
4.3.4 Have you titled your artwork project folder categories appropriately and chosen cover imagery for them that best highlights their content?
4.3.5 Does the format of the thumbnails you chose (one, two or three per row) create the effect you wanted (for example, choosing one thumbnail per row creates a landscaped cinematic effect for each image)?
4.3.6 Does the labels you chose for your artwork folders look best inside the folder, below it or
should you rather design folder covers that include custom text?
4.3.7 Have you chosen an appropriate style of artwork navigation (either flipbook, flipbook with thumbnails or list) in each folder and is it beneficial to stick to a common style across all folders?
4.3.8 Have your titled your digitised artwork imagery well enough for any viewer to attribute your artwork appropriately?4.3.6 Does the labels you chose for your artwork folders look best inside the folder, below it or
should you rather design folder covers that include custom text?
4.3.7 Have you chosen an appropriate style of artwork navigation (either flipbook, flipbook with thumbnails or list) in each folder and is it beneficial to stick to a common style across all folders?
4.3.9 Have you added sufficient meta-information for your artwork folders and the digitised images they include? (For example, did you enter; an artwork description, a folder description, the relevant tags and a client description?)
4.3.10 Have you linked to your other web presences that relate to your online portfolio?
4.3.11 If you have chosen that you are 'Available for freelance', have you provided appropriate contact details that still protect your privacy from undesirable audiences?
5. Check that your copyright is protected
5.1 Have you added appropriate copyright statements in each artwork's description or your folder labels and your page footer to assert your moral rights as the artworks creator and protect them?
Hope answering these questions helps you create a better, more coherent online portfolio.
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Define your online portfolio's keywords, check its search results and take these steps to improve them.
Written for Visual Arts and Design learners and students who use online portfolios, plus their educators.
Like the proverbial billboard in a dessert, what good is an online portfolio website if it can't be readily found by your family, peers and potential clients? 'If you build it, they will come' may have worked for Las Vegas, but it won't for your online portfolio or other webpage types, whatsoever!
So, once you have created an online portfolio you want to share, it's up to you to take steps to ensure that your online creative presence(s) can be found through being well-ranked, searchable and visible. Here is a step-wise process to achieve just that:
1. Clearly define what you want to present and what you want to be searched under;
2. Refine your personal description, use of keywords and artwork tags;
3. Check your online portfolio service's search engine results;
4. Submit your online portfolio to external search engines;
5. Use your social media presences to promote your portfolio;
6. Respond to your audience;
7. Comment on others' works and create new presences;
8. Check your results, improve; check your results, improve; to infinity and beyond...
1. Clearly define what you want to present and what you want to be searched under.
In the attention economy, it is important to be highly differentiated in the work you do. This will ensure your work stands out and be easier for people searching using the distinctive combination of keywords that describe your artworks. Although it may be hard defining your niche within the constraints of your school's syllabus, you can make a start by thinking about the type of post-matriculation online portfolio you desire (i.e. for example it could have a specific niche in Fine Art (i.e. portraits of people in a particular community) or design (i.e. Surfrican slang).
It is useful to list the words that you would like your online portfolio to be found with, and then to ensure these words are used consistently throughout your portfolio (i.e. in your profile's description, artwork titles and projects' descriptions). These keywords should reflect the media, subjects or themes that predominate in your current and past work (for example; 'body-boarding photography at Cape Town's beaches' or 'Pencil illustrations of Spaza rappers').
If you are at a loss for (key)words, do your own online portfolio apprenticeship by searching the featured work of creatives whose work relates to your artworks and resonates with your interests; learn from the way the describe themselves and imitate their example. As you become comfortable with uploading work and refining your descriptions, you should develop the confidence to set your own example.
2. Refine your personal description, use of keywords and artwork tags.
Like an up-to-date online portfolio helps you prepare for your Visual Arts and/or Design exams, having the right keywords can guide your creativity and ensure your portfolio's development is aimed at realizing your post-school ambitions. Once you know the core of what you wish your online portfolio to be about, you should review your online portfolio and consider changing its title, artworks labels & tags and your profile description & tags to better reflect your desired portfolio presence. Making these changes is important as search engine algorithms rate coherence in an online presence and by consistently repeating keywords, you not only improve your search engine results, but are more likely to pull the most interested viewers for your creations.
3. Check your online portfolio service's search engine results.
You should test that your website is searchable on your portfolio service's local search engine, before checking results from external ones (like Google and Bing). For example, Carbonmade users can use http://carbonmade.com/portfolios to search for text (such as their 'first-' and 'last names') and by 'expertise' to narrow results down. Use your proper name, nicknames or whatever a friend or family member would typically use when searching for you.
No results? Oops. Check your online portfolio service preferences allow your portfolio to be found. Most services are set to "findable" by default, but yours can be an exception.
As you look at the search results page, you will notice that some creatives have not taken any time to check what their results show. Ask yourself, would you (or any other searcher) be likely to click on a result that: looks bad, features bad spelling and vague information?
No results? Oops. Check your online portfolio service preferences allow your portfolio to be found. Most services are set to "findable" by default, but yours can be an exception.
As you look at the search results page, you will notice that some creatives have not taken any time to check what their results show. Ask yourself, would you (or any other searcher) be likely to click on a result that: looks bad, features bad spelling and vague information?
 |
| Example of a search engine result for a matric learner (29 July 2012) |
If you would like the backing image to your search result to look better (which is usually your 'about' profile pic), you can experiment by seeing how changing this pic affects your result's appearance.
Should your portfolio be hard to find using your names, take steps to improve your search results (i.e. use your first and last name in your portfolio and include your nickname in your 'about' description).
You should also experiment with seeing whether you can be found using the combination of 'keywords' you want to be found with. For example, you can use the 'Sift by Area of Expertise' function to see where your results show up for combination of expertise or skills you wish to be found with.
Should your portfolio be hard to find using your names, take steps to improve your search results (i.e. use your first and last name in your portfolio and include your nickname in your 'about' description).
You should also experiment with seeing whether you can be found using the combination of 'keywords' you want to be found with. For example, you can use the 'Sift by Area of Expertise' function to see where your results show up for combination of expertise or skills you wish to be found with.
4. Submit your online portfolio to external search engines.
Once you're getting results on the local search engine, it is more likely that you'll get results on external search engines. Most users will search for your portfolio using Google or Bing: to register your online portfolio with Google for free, submit your portfolio to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=/addurl&pli=1, and for Bing go to https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx. You can also submit your portfolio to the Open Directory Project at http://www.dmoz.org/add.html.
At worst, your online portfolio could take up to two months to be indexed and you should check whether, how and where, it appears on the external search engine's results. If you are dissatisfied with the results, you may want to experiment with search engine optimisation techniques.
At worst, your online portfolio could take up to two months to be indexed and you should check whether, how and where, it appears on the external search engine's results. If you are dissatisfied with the results, you may want to experiment with search engine optimisation techniques.
You probably have a Facebook presence and maybe Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest ones, too. By posting a link to your online portfolio, you can introduce online connections to your work and update them when you post a new body of work or similarly significant updates.
6. Respond to your audience.
In Reasons Why Blogs Fail, Rean John Uehara makes several recommendations for bloggers to follow that could also be applied for online portfolios. One of them is to respond to comments; 'Nothing shuns away readers more than a non-responsive author. They might think that your blog is just another aggregator or a robot that publishes posts. Having a human connection is important!' It is rare that internet viewers make the effort to give feedback and you should take this opportunity to respond, whether it is to thank them for their feedback or respond to constructive criticism.
7. Comment on others' works and create new presences.
You can also raise your portfolio's visibility and visitors by commenting on other people's written and visual creative work with a link back to your blog. Once you are satisfied with the standard of your portfolio showcase, you can also create multiple presences that reflect different aspects of your creative work. For example, if you are produced work in computer graphics, you can join and publish them to www.cgsociety.org. You should aim to use sites that have a high authority in their creative niches, this way you work is more likely to be noticed.
8. Check your results, improve; check your results, improve; to infinity and beyond...
Your online presences are works in progress. In trying different approaches in promoting them, you should learn what works to attract the audience you want. Hopefully, this results in your spending less time experimenting online and more time producing artwork :) !
To let this blog's readers know if there are any other tips they should follow, simply add your advice in the comments box below.
To let this blog's readers know if there are any other tips they should follow, simply add your advice in the comments box below.
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