I forget if it was my academic adviser or one of the librarians at work who first suggested I join SLA but in my opinion the dues for the dues more than pay for all of the excellent professional development opportunities and tools provided by the association. The Future Ready 365 blog is an excellent tool, I have watched more webinars from SLA than from any of the other associations I currently subscribe to and I feel like I can always find something new and exciting coming from their website and their members. They will also probably be my favorite for a long time because they’ve accepted my first poster proposal (more on that project to follow) which will make them hard to beat.
Lisa Chow and Sandra Sajonas gave a wonderful presentation on the creation and promotion of your e-portfolio. I am going to begin work on my portfolio over the summer and hope to be able to come close to what they described in their webinar. An e-portfolio is an expanded online resume that allows you to keep track of projects and offer writing samples or other work to prospective employers. The strength of Chow & Sajonas’s presentation lies with the variety of tools they outlined and evaluated. Past articles I’ve read about the creation of an e-portfolio cover some basic information about arranging items aesthetically on the screen and are geared primarily to creative trades such as graphic designers and animators.
I loved the suggestion of adding constantly updating elements (for example connecting your blog reel to your e portfolio) to ensure that your portfolio will be higher on the list for a Google search. Both Chow and Sajonas use Google Sites for their portfolios. I’ve worked with Google Sites in the past and I found it easy to use and manipulate, I liked the amount of freedom you have in the details of the page and the control you have over the look. Google is a good tool because many of their tools are meant to work well together.
Another option they mention, that I’ve worked with in the past is PBWorks, which I’ve used for class assignments. I like PBWork’s ease of use but it is a workspace software and always looks slightly unfinished to me. Though part of this may steam from my classmates leaving the tracking edits widget in the right hand sidebar making the site look too busy. I will probably look into using WordPress since my blog is already here and I will continue to update it often. One of the drawbacks mentioned with WordPress is that it does not work with Google Analytics, but the Dashboard controls its own statistics.
The second portion of the presentation dealt with how to track and promote your portfolio once it’s put together. I’ve used bit/ly to shorten links for my Twitter feed but I haven’t been using it to track clicks. I’ve used Google Analytics in the past and it’s a great way to track who is looking at your site and when but if I connect my portfolio to this blog I’d be better off using WordPress’s statistics.
For more details on the presentation and for a list of tools that can be used to create your own e-portfolio, click here.
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