Essentials of Business Communication 8th Edition by Mary Ellen Guffey

Exercise 12

E-Portfolios: Job Hunting in the Twenty-First Century
In high-tech fields digital portfolios have been steadily gaining in popularity and now seem to be going mainstream as universities are providing space for student job seekers to profile their qualifications in e-portfolios online. Although it is unlikely that digital portfolios will become widely used very soon, you would do well to learn about them by viewing many samples-good and bad.
Your Task. Conduct a Google search using the search term student e-portfolios or student digital portfolios. You will see long lists of hits, some of which will be actual digital document samples on the Web or instructions for creating an e-portfolio. Your instructor may assign individual students or teams to visit specific digital portfolio sites and ask them to summarize their findings in a memo or in a brief oral presentation. If this is your task, you could focus on the composition of the site, page layout, links provided, colors used, types of documents included, and so forth. A fine site to start from that offers many useful links is maintained by the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) at the University of Southern California, Visit http://www.usc.edu and type student e-portfolios to search the USC Web pages. Click the link to the CET site.
Alternatively, single groups or the whole class could study sites that provide how-to instructions and combine the advice of the best among them to create practical tips for making a digital portfolio. This option would lend itself to team writing, for example, with the help of a wiki.