English 8123 Digital Media Production
Overview
For your final project, you will create an online portfolio tailored to your current career needs.
Rationale
Sooner or later, you will face the next step in your professional career: searching for a job, applying to a PhD program, etc. At a time when hardcopy portfolios are becoming obsolete, electronic portfolios are becoming a norm, and online portfolios a more common occurrence than ever. As English or Communication majors, having an online portfolio will give you an additional edge.
This online portfolio project, I hope, will
- provide you with a new means of marketing yourself in lieu of the traditional hardcopy or electronic portfolio,
- allow you to better market yourself, with space for more content and multimedia technologies to make your portfolio more dynamic, and
- give you a new platform where you can better use your creativity.
Portfolio Content Orientation
The content of your portfolio will depend on what you want to do when you graduate from the current program. The way I see it in terms of career purposes, you will most likely fall into one of the following categories:
MA Students
- To go on to a PhD program
- To find a lecturer or adjunct position at a college
- To find a teaching position at a K-12 school
- To find an industry position
PhD Students
- To find a teaching position at a college
- To find an industry position
Your career goals determine whether your portfolio will be academically oriented or industry oriented. This means, of course, that the contents you put into a portfolio will be very different.
Portfolio Content
The following are typical items we see in most graduate student portfolios. Of course, you don’t necessarily need to include all of them.
- Professional Profile
- Curriculum Vita or Professional Resume
- Personal statement
- Writing/publication samples
- Project samples
- Teaching philosophy
- Sample syllabi
- Sample assignments
- Student evaluations
- Teaching observation/evaluations
- …
Project Components
- Online portfolio
- Rhetorical analysis (this should be emailed to me)
Design Tools
For this project, you may use any tools: html, css, templates (from WordPress, Wix, or whatever platform you’re using). You may even use ChatGPT or other AI tools such as the following:
- Wix ADI: A powerful AI website builder that simplifies the website creation process with AI-driven design, pre-made layouts, and easy customization. Ideal for most users who want to create professional websites quickly.
- Framer AI: A no-code tool that allows you to build websites by simply describing what you need. It’s perfect for those looking for a fast and intuitive way to generate functional sites from text prompts.
- GitHub Copilot: An AI code assistant that suggests code as you write. This tool is invaluable for web developers working alongside designers, speeding up the coding process and reducing manual effort.
- Adobe Firefly: Adobe’s AI tool for generating images, effects, and templates, integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud products like Photoshop and Illustrator, helping designers automate repetitive design tasks.
- Fronty: A tool that converts website designs into HTML and CSS automatically by uploading design images. This AI-driven approach simplifies web development by generating code from design files.
Using these tools to assist you in creating your website would NOT be considered plagiarism as long as you acknowledge their use and the exact extent of their use. The focus of this project is not on whether you have mastered the technical coding skills of web design but on whether you have acquired the appropriate rhetorical skills in utilizing appropriate resources, whatever they may be, in accomplishing your purposes. In fact, I’d be extremely interested in your analysis of how each tool or resource, including the AI tools, is effective or otherwise.