Eportfolio Community Profiles - Pete vandenberg

I think audience in one of the toughest things to try and manage in a Rhetoric or a Writing course, and that's because we're in a course here distanced from what we think of as real audience, and students are committed to this idea, conditioned over time to the idea than anything they're going to write a classroom setting is gonna be written for the teacher, and the uptake is going to be their grade. And trying to wrestle them out of that situation is really difficult, but a robust platform like Digication and e-Portfolio prep platform that can function as a workspace as well as a medium for communication between groups is tremendously helpful with giving that sense of real audience. Where the rubber hits the road in teaching audience, and learning about writing for audiences, making decisions about style, about mode choice, arrangement those kinds of things in relation to audience and occasion. And when you can really sense the possibility that your audience may in fact read what you're doing, rather than just the teacher, those choices become real. I think the great thing about Digication, or any portfolio product with the same affordances that Digication has is that students are able to interact in a variety of modes, recognize a relationship between writing and - in visual modes, and make choices about the integration of those different modes. I think the key thing about technologies that always follows learning outcomes, you have to first ask two questions: what do I want students to be able to know; what do I want them to be able to do when the course is over? And when you have defined those things in the formal learning outcomes then you ask how does the technology come in and assist? So we don't want technology to lead, we want it to follow effectively.