Recently on Techvibes a recently graduated student was not only looking for a job as a graphic designer but was looking for advice on an inexpensive way to display her course projects for potential employers. There is a group of new websites and online tools that can help students achieve this.
These days it’s becoming increasingly important for students and recently graduated students to produce an eportfolio of their educational projects and reflections on their studies. At the UBC Office of Learning Technology (OLT), one of their analysts, Alison Wong, has been pursuing projects whereby faculties and students can develop the online presence that they need.
There are several good sites that are currently being used by students. The KEEP toolkit is one of them. The setup includes easy to use tools so that students can provide a variety of examples of their academic work and can present them in a variety of formats from the static documents (such as sample teaching plans, research papers and presentations to name just a few) to multimedia items which may include video or podcasts. This system is ideal in that the user doesn’t need to know alot about web development, programming languages etc…. It’s definitely user friendly. The one drawback that I noticed is maybe in the presentation. While there is easy manipulation of layout, a beginner may lack knowledge of how to beautifully present their work in terms of layout. The content will be there but if the look and feel of the pages isn’t flowing properly it may not look professional to a prospective employer viewing the eportfolio.
On Alison Wong’s blog, she mentions a free website that SFU students are using http://members.freewebs.com/ . The particular site has a variety of free tools and hosting for people to create simple websites and blogs. Asthetics are more pleasing and utilizes a webbuilder for the user to create a personalized site. The templates have predesigned layouts to take the guess work out of webpage design. Upon viewing the webpages using the templates I noticed that some of them were too busy looking. This can easily be cleaned up during the setup stage.
One of my new favourite portfolio sites came to me as an ad on the back of the latest issue of Broken Pencil magazine . It’s “Canada’s Online Arts Community” terminus1525.ca . This new eportfolio site is aimed at young artists from Canada and overseas who want to network and collaborate their work. You can show your artwork online for free and “ad free”. As part of your account you can participate in forums to discuss art and common interests, post your art pieces and you can also create a “studio” to get together with other artists online and collaborate. This is a very beautiful well put-together website. It’s definitely worth a browse even if you don’t qualify as being part of the young artist set.
These 3 online websites/toolkits present a good range of the type offerings available for post-secondary students and the recently graduated. The ease of setting up a portfolio even for the unintiated webbies is good. As long as one feels comfortable serfing the web, uploading photos/multimedia, filling out webforms a student shouldn’t have any trouble getting samples of their work online and creating a web presence quickly. The only issue is to provide templates for the design challenged to make their work appear professional.
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