Reflection

What you see here is a result of our work done in the Learning Media Design course (Fall 2017) at Carnegie Mellon University taught by Professor Marti Louw & Francis Carter.

Our partnership with both QVMS teachers, Joe and Schuyler, was invaluable to our design process. Throughout this process, our two partner teachers were very accommodating to our inquiries and classroom visits. They provided helpful feedback that allowed us to finetune our design moving forward during each stage of the design process.

Due to the constraints of our course and limited time at QVMS, the task we gave students during our two prototyping sessions was simple and retrospective: “Tell us a story about your experience in this class.” We asked students to share a story of their learning because we knew they could generate ideas to work with based on memory. To truly test the design of our solution, we would have students creating e-portfolios throughout the school year during their project process. This would enable us to know more fully how the e-portfolio solution we designed affects their project process.

Overall, we learned a lot about portfolio practices in the context of a public middle school. If given further time with this project, we would like to explore prototypes focusing on the subsequent phases of e-portfolio process (curation, sharing, and final reflection) to design a more complete open portfolio solution. Thank you to Quaker Valley School District, our partner QVMS teachers Schuyler and Joe, Prof. Marti Louw, Francis Carter, and the maker and education communities for supporting us throughout our design process! Hopefully, we have made our thinking visible and helpful for your own open portfolio practices.