Abstract
In recent studies of ePortfolios, scholars have grappled almost exclusively with issues of program development and assessment, and this narrow view of ePortfolio as a means of evaluating students, teachers, curriculum, writing programs, and so on, has restricted our understanding of ePortfolios as they exist within the university. This project contributes to that conversation by exploring institutional ePortfolios as products of student life writing, looking at the intersection of research on ePortfolios, computers and composition, and auto/biography. Specifically, I examine the way that students construct their academic (and perhaps professional and personal) selves through the process of developing and maintaining their ePortfolio. In doing so, I reveal gaps in our current approach to assessment, where much attention has been given. My primary thesis in this project is that the field of life writing presents a hitherto unexplored way of reading and re-reading ePortfolios that moves beyond the standardized narrative of progress that we anticipate from our students. I begin by laying some disciplinary groundwork for my argument from the field of portfolios, digital technology in composition studies, and life writing theory. What I hope to show, ultimately, is that by looking to these digital archives as representations of student’s lives that are produced by and are continually producing the academy, we can better understand the subject’s interaction with the world, the university, various technologies, and perhaps even ourselves. By doing so, I conclude that we must rethink our role as educators and assessors to redefine how we teach, assess, and generally think about ePortfolios.