Jess's Final Digital Portfolio

Professor Blakesley:

My final digital portfolio can be accessed by clicking on the following link: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~clemenje/homepage.html

Overall, I am confident in my decision to purchase a template given the decision’s coherence with my overall pedagogy, which praises the value and encourages the use of templates for composition in both print and electronic media; it also fits with my larger faith in collective intelligence and ideology that individual competencies are best showcased through collaboration. The curvilinear design fits readily with the “quietly sophisticated” and “elegant” ethos I wished to portray, more so than anything I had the skills to come up with on my own. I did, however, use what I know from being instructed in hand-coding html to manipulate the layout of the template to fit my and my audience’s streamlined yet flexible navigational needs and to illustrate that I do, in fact, have both production- and consumption-oriented skills in my professed secondary area of expertise: Rhetoric, Technology, and Digital Writing.

The feedback I received from the in-class presentation was overwhelming positive and suggested that the robust content and design did, in fact, meet my professional pedagogical goals; however, a few small but impactful changes were made in response to my classmates’ and my own reconsiderations:

o The “index.html” page in my www folder had contained the school’s generic sample template. In the event that a viewer would get deep into my site and try to reach “home” by going to http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~clemenje (not realizing that “home” was actually built from …/~clemenje/homepage.html), I copied and pasted my “homepage.html” code onto the “index” page so that http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~clemenje and http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~clemenje/homepage.html will take a viewer to the same “home” location (and NOT to a generic sample template).
o I added in-page quick link anchors to the top of the C.V. page to mirror the navigation made available on the Teaching Artifacts page and to allow viewers to skip to a category of interest within the C.V. itself if so desired or needed.
o There was some concern about the readability of the text on the top navigational and website title buttons. I changed the font color of the text on these buttons from white to a darker shade of gray pulled from the background folder image in the body of the site not only to enhance readability but also to cohere with the larger site design scheme.
o Also to enhance readability, I modified the CSS to increase overall font size of body text to 12 pt. and overall font size of title text to 14 pt. to accommodate those with larger monitors.

In the future, I will consider adding thumbnail images of my work in the right column of the body of my C.V. page for further visual evidence and interest. The content of the site will also necessarily evolve as my pedagogy grows and changes. Ultimately, I will consider adding to this site or otherwise involving this site in a larger platform that houses both my teaching-oriented and scholarly-oriented professional materials.

As always, any and all feedback is appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jess Clements