New Linguistics Course Focuses on Digital Portfolios

 A new Linguistics course taught by Christiane Donahue will debut in Fall 2023: LING 05.02 "The Digital Portfolio: Theory, Design, and Function." This course introduces students to the scholarly conversation about portfolio website design and function, and to analytical methodologies for studying website discourse and design.

The theoretical and methodological work of the course will include studying the ways in which portfolios are a particular kind of discourse and the features of that discourse; the nature of multimodal design as communication; the functions of visual rhetoric and visual semiotics; the role of storytelling in portfolio design; the concept of integrative knowledge; and metacognitive reflection as an essential component of building that knowledge. In addition to analyzing portfolio website artifacts in light of these conceptual components, students will create their own portfolios in order to develop their understanding of the nature and value of portfolio websites.

The practical components will include curating a WordPress portfolio's contents, developing its features and design, and presenting it to each student's major department or program. Students will create a portfolio, build knowledge in the process of reflecting on and curating its contents, reflect on its design and their discursive choices in that design, and analyze the meaning-making features of digital portfolios. A secondary benefit will be improvement of writing ability and writing knowledge within the disciplinary context of their major or minor via reflection on the student's body of work across courses.

The course carries an ART distributive and has no required pre-requisites. It will be in the 3A timeslot in fall 2023.