Getting Started With ePortfolio
Beginning a professional electronic portfolio is the first step toward preparing for the job market in the twenty-first century. This quarter, you will learn to write well for criminal justice, but you will also create a professional ePortfolio to showcase the writing artifacts that you will create in this course.
You will add artifacts to your ePortfolio throughout this course. You should also add artifacts that you have from previous criminal justice courses or from previous criminal justice career work that you feel are compelling and relevant to your degree program here at Capella.
In this unit's studies, you read Kryder's 2011 article, "Eportfolios: Proving Competency and Building a Network." While this article is written for professionals teaching a technical writing course, you can learn quite a bit about how ePortfolios can be used to benefit your own learning and self-marketing during a job search, or even how the ePortfolio may be useful to you as a learner while working through a program.
Your first task is to set up your ePortfolio. Continual updating is in your best interest. Add files to your ePortfolio as you progress through this course (and others), as you will eventually lose access to your courses and the files in them. A second important step in this course is to add your instructor as a guest in your ePortfolio and post a confirmation statement, so your instructor can review your collection. Review the assignments and other activities in this course to see which demonstrate your program outcomes, and add those to your ePortfolio now.
You manage the content and layout of your ePortfolio. There is a binder in your ePortfolio organized by program outcomes to which you may be directed to save items. Complete information regarding the use and management of your ePortfolio can be found in the iGuide link under Resources in this study.
Collect artifacts (documents, images, other relevant files) that you believe showcase your abilities as a writer, particularly as they pertain to our course competencies and your ability to be a leader in writing in the criminal justice workplace.
Think about where you are going with your career and the types of writing that highlight your abilities or the types of writing that someone in this position might be doing. Also collect those artifacts that demonstrate your abilities to achieve the goals you set for yourself for this ePortfolio. Arrange the artifacts in a navigational structure and workflow that reads well and makes sense to you-one that tells the story of your work and leadership in the way you want it to be told.
Be sure to include reflective content on each page you create in the ePortfolio to help the reader make sense of what they are finding, from how it has been arranged to what the specific artifacts themselves are or even more. You will also write a reflective cover document for the ePortfolio as a whole.
You will construct your final ePortfolio to showcase your skills and learning. And you will write a final reflection essay in Unit 10 that explains how to navigate through your ePortfolio, as well as the rationale for the contents you have selected.
Complete the following steps to get started:
1. Start to identify artifacts that will showcase your writing skills.
Start your ePortfolio. Draft a short (one-page) reflection explaining the following:
• How do you believe business and technical writing differs from academic writing?
• How will this ePortfolio showcase your writing and the edge it could provide in a job search?
Adhere to the following writing objectives:
• Recognize the relevant differences between scholarly and professional writing.
• Polish and proofread carefully to produce a clean final document.
Requirements
Upload your reflection to your ePortfolio. Then upload your reflection to the assignment space, so your instructor can provide feedback.
• Written communication: Writing should be free of errors that detract from the overall message.
• Length of paper: One page.
• Font: Arial, 10 point.
Discussion board
Field Documents
Resources
In the Unit 1 Studies, you analyzed a field document from Appendix A of Report Writing for Criminal Justice Professionals. For this discussion, you will use that document to talk about some key features of criminal justice writing. How does the writing look, and what kind of details are present?
What kind of process appears to have been used to craft the document? Discuss the importance of attention to detail, brevity, and other field-specific features that you notice.
Discussion Objectives
• Analyze key features of an academic writing document.
• Discuss differences between academic writing and writing in the field.
Discussion board 2 with 300 words
Academic Writing and Field Writing
In this unit's Studies, you analyzed a criminal justice academic document. For this discussion, talk about some key features of academic writing and how it differs from the more practical writing in the field. Refer back to the sample academic writing you analyzed in the Studies, and answer the following questions:
What are the features of the text, the differences in expectations for writing (compared to field documents), and where do they come from? Why do we have these values in the academy?
How did you feel about the document you read while reading it, and about the prospects of reading and writing more of these types of documents as you progress through your degree program? Explain.