Work Incrementally. Save Everything. Be Flexible.

Condensing years of experience into a few sentences or square feet of space isn't easy.

I spent most of the day yesterday at the NH Homeschooling Coalition (NHHC) annual Spring Workshop, where I served on a panel and shared what I know about homeschooling high school. The purpose of the workshop was to enable those with questions about homeschooling to hear from those who were already homeschooling successfully. NHHC volunteers also set up large tables with displays of curriculum materials for browsing and catalogs to take home. Attendees included those who were considering homeschooling for the first time as well as experienced homeschoolers who were looking for help with the high school years. Some of the questions I was asked were:

• What does your program include, and how did you decide to include those subjects?
• What resources do you use, and where do you find them?
• What records do you keep, and why?
• How do you know when you're finished? (Unlike a student attending school, a homeschooled high school student does not necessarily receive a diploma from an accredited institution.)

The only way I could answer these questions within the short time reserved for the workshop was by focusing on a subset of possible subjects, resources, and records. Likewise, the curriculum materials I supplied for the display tables were necessarily limited to what I could easily carry. As I struggled to decide which experiences or items would be the most relevant, interesting or representative, I felt like a beachcomber with only a small bucket selecting seashells for a prized collection.

My feelings about creating an electronic portfolio during the past two weeks have been similar to my feelings as I reflected on my homeschooling program. Sift and sort, select and reject. I have assessed the quality of each item and questioned my reasons for including or omitting it. In doing so, I came to the following conclusions.

1. It's easier to catalog work incrementally than all at once. I routinely advise new homeschoolers to keep records as they go instead of trying to reconstruct an entire year's worth of studies or, worse, four years of high school. I have found the same advice applies to developing a capstone portfolio for this program. The work I did for courses that required a portfolio, namely New Media (PW 5500) and Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PW 5000), was easy to transition into a capstone portfolio. I had to dig deeper and search longer to find enough information to represent my work in the other (non-portfolio) courses. 
2. Save everything, because it might come in handy later. Even though I usually encourage homeschooling parents to save photos, recordings, ticket stubs, book receipts, and other "evidence of learning" for their children's portfolios, I didn't follow this advice for my own work. Initially, I regarded my work as being limited to the Word and PDF documents I created for my course assignments. Over time, as I tried to piece together what I've learned, I discovered that email messages, discussion posts, course syllabi, and photographs are useful documentation of learning, too. 
3. Be flexible when it comes to organization. As I experimented with different hierarchical structures for my portfolio and moved pages around, I thought of my mother's favorite motto, "A place for everything, and everything in its place." I wanted to find the best, most logical arrangement for my work, but I kept seeing other possibilities. As David Weinberger wrote in his book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, "The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex" (198). The very nature of digital storage defies my mother's adage and allows me to insert the same item in multiple locations, to create layer upon layer of connections. Where I might once have debated whether to put my carefully edited essay on media convergence in the portfolio section labeled "new media" or the one labeled "editing," I could now slip it into both locations. I could also create an overview page that included links to all the work in my portfolio. 

I enjoy seeing the overlap between my work on this portfolio and my involvement in the homeschooling community. I am fascinated by the cycles of learning, reflecting, and sharing, the give and take of creating knowledge.