Jennifer Davis' ePortfolio

A visual "portfolio" of NASA Earth Science missions as of 2 Feb 2015

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Welcome

Welcome to my e-Portfolio. This is an online memoir of my classes and projects at San Jose State University's iSchool. This website describes what I've learned while earning my MLIS, and it presents projects from my classes and some of the relevant work I've done throughout my career and projects at other universities. Collectively, this e-Portfolio shows how pursuing this degree has led to being proficient in 14 competencies that iSchool considers requirements for their graduates.

iSchool defines the e-Portfolio as: "The culminating experience for our MLIS program requires students to select, document, and assemble evidence of their competence in a series of skill areas the faculty have deemed essential for entry-level professional performance" ("289 eportfolio…", n.d.).
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This Document's Structure

You will find links to the required components of the e-Portfolio on the left-hand navigation bar: this introduction, a statement of professional philosophy, and pages supporting 14 competencies.

Each competency is an essay consisting of iSchool's definition of the competency, my understanding of the competency, what work has made me accomplished at the competency, several pieces of evidence supporting my defense of the competency, and a short conclusion.

The pieces of evidence are all online and consists of papers, recordings of presentations, and web pages.

At the bottom of each page you will see my affirmation that all introductory, reflective, and evidentiary work submitted is mine alone (except where indicated as a group or team project) and has been prepared solely by me. I had some assistance with scanning in documents and building and maintaining the WordPress site where this is hosted, but the content of this e-Portfolio is entirely my own.

You will also notice that this site includes multiple images. Part of my training at iSchool was to be unabashed about using graphics where appropriate to convey information or enhance a message. All images are licensed for non-commercial reuse (except for photos that I have taken, which are mine to use).
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Process of Creating the e-Portfolio

Impact of disability

This cumulative experience is meant to be a journey, and this has definitely been a journey for me, albeit not precisely what iSchool or I had in mind. Even before I applied to iSchool, I registered with the student disability center, and I have been disabled both physically and emotionally throughout my seven years in the program. The student disability center, my professors, and the administrators at iSchool have helped me to get through this program with extra time as needed. Unfortunately, this last year of my degree has been my most non-functional due to disability; I had to drop out of my next-to-last class in Fall 2014 three weeks before the end of term (with an A grade at the time), and I was incapacitated for over two months while creating this e-Portfolio during this Spring 2015 semester. Therefore, this was a bit less of a leisurely ruminative process than I had hoped. Luckily I prepared for an e-Portfolio possibility from the first day of my first class, and most of the papers, projects, and articles I needed for these competency essays were close at hand.
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Preserving artifacts

Throughout my classes, I captured information in DEVONthink Pro, a document management system. I have been in the practice of keeping log files on a daily basis for work, and I did this to track my activities throughout my MLIS as well. I kept most of my downloaded files and articles, along with my assignments, in folders on my MacBook Pro, and I stored all the website bookmarks throughout my classes first in Furl, a bookmarking system for which I was the software tester, and then when Furl was sold, in Pinboard. All bookmarks are tagged with the class number, such as "LIBR200″, and any pertinent subject keywords, such as "data visualization". These three systems together were sufficient to preserve everything I needed to complete this e-Portfolio.
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Technologies used

Specific to the process of creating the e-Portfolio this semester, I decided to use Trello to track my pieces of evidence. I created a list for each class and added cards for the projects from that class that seemed to have potential to be evidence. Then I created a list for each competency and began moving evidence cards to the competency lists. I tackled writing the competencies in numerical order, and as I came to each competency, it was very helpful to turn to Trello to see what evidence I had suggested for myself. I used HoudahSpot for more flexible, detailed searches of the documents amassed on my hard drive. I used DEVONthink Pro to create my initial drafts and my reference lists and transferred the first drafts to the appropriate competency page on a privately hosted instance of WordPress.

The first thing I did for my e-Portfolio was to set up the look and feel for my WordPress site. This included finding icons and keywords to represent each competency; this helped me focus on the meaning of the competencies and gave me short-hand reminders, in the navigation bar, as I was working on the competencies. I used Safari to search for the symbol set and Adobe Photoshop to craft the images into tiny icons. All other image manipulation was done in Preview. I did all my WordPress editing in Firefox. I used Safari to look up all my references and to participate in my Facebook e-Portfolio support group. When I searched for images, I used Google image search and selected "Usage Rights: Licensed for non-commercial use". All communications with my advisor Dr Fisher were through email, for which I use Gmail. I used databases at Dr Martin Luther King Jr Library to search for articles, and all of my paper textbooks have ended up in a temporary bookshelf on the floor under my coffee table. The APA style guide ("Publication manual…", 2010) has been extensively consulted, as has Purdue's OWL page ("Reference list…", n.d.) for electronic sources. As for tracking the progress of my competencies, I kept that information in my head, as I turned in two at a time in numerical order.

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Conclusion

Due to the unexpected time limitations imposed by my disability, this has been a more stressful experience than I anticipated, but I have learned more about LIS while completing it, and I have been astonished and pleased to look over the work I have done over the past seven years. I have thoroughly enjoyed almost every class I took at iSchool. I am amazed to find that the lessons of my first classes are almost as fresh to me as the latter ones; this information has sunk in deeply within me and become part of who I am. I feel passionate about library science, and information science–particularly that oriented toward geoscience–is positively numinous for me. I am proud to have worked through this degree, and I am grateful to my family for their stalwart support through these years.
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REFERENCES

289 e-portfolio handbook. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://ischool.sjsu.edu/current-students/courses/289-e-portfolio-handbook

Davis, J. L. (2015, April 17). Detail from Trello [Digital image].

Davis, J. L. (2015, April 17). Coffee table bookshelf [Digital image].

NASA Earth science division operating missions [Online image]. (2015, February 2). Retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASAEarthScienceDivisionOperating_Missions.jpg

Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). (2010). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Reference list: Electronic sources (web publications). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/

Last updated: Friday, April 17, 2015

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