Spring 2001

E-folio as a Writing Tool
John Alexander, Manager, Instructional Technology and
Rachel Saury, Director, Arts & Sciences Center for Instructional Technology

"What do a 19th Century Ukranian minstrel, a Siberian shaman, an African American and a white rapper all have in common?"

With this provocative question, we open our home page for SLFK 204, "Story and Healing." But before we had crafted that hook, we had, as teachers, asked ourselves several questions that we found even more provocative:

• How do we merge the perspectives of two specialties-Slavic folklore and African American literature-and the cultural artifacts of two seemingly distant cultures?
• How do we make the course content personally meaningful to students while also teaching them a rigorous intellectual approach to the topic?
• How do we get the students to write more and better?
• How do we make the course more engaging, not only during class but also outside of class?
• How do we get the students to work in meaningful, productive groups that further course objectives?

The solution to this series of pedagogical questions for us was E-folio, a Web-based collaborative writing tool developed by our colleague, Yitna Firdyiwek. Through E-folio students can do the following activities:

• post their work electronically to the entire class
• post their writing to their assigned group members
• read and comment on each other's work
• use simple html commands to do hypertextual links, including images, sound files, etc.

In SLFK 204, the students posted weekly journal entries and papers and used E-folio to prepare and present group projects. Thus students can learn from each other in various ways:

• They learn how to constructively critique a piece of analysis and research.
• They see and draw inspiration from others' work in the area of style, level of rhetoric, and tone.
• They see how their classmates process new cultural information about the role of story in healing, not only in the cultures being studied, but in their own shared cultures, their disparate ethnic and racial groupings, and, finally, their personal lives.

E-folio is also interesting in the context of a course on folk narratives because it brings people together in a shared forum; thus it mirrors the form and function of an oral tradition in so-called "traditional" cultures where storytelling brings people together by illuminating shared themes. Through E-folio, students could collectively see their common experience on many levels, both intellectual and personal. Moreover, the theme of healing is all about how sharing common experience through a folktale (indirectly and unconsciously) or a personal narrative (more directly) can be profoundly transformative. Working through E-folio, a cultural forum for such sharing, was a transformative experience for many students. They expressed their belief that the course had changed their lives, had opened them to greater acceptance of others' ways of viewing and dealing with the world, had taught them a new, fresh, fun way of seeing and analyzing their own and other cultures, and had taught them about cultures previously seemingly distant and alien.

Because we were team-teaching this course, E-folio enabled us to collaborate on writing assignments and announcements to the class. We were also able to communicate effectively and easily with each other. If we forgot to include some critical point in a lecture or class discussion, we could post it to the class after the fact. If we noticed in students' weekly journal entries a shared area of confusion, we could address it in a response to the class as a whole using E-folio, or we could build in our next lecture clarification. We could respond personally and immediately to students' concerns, thus keeping our fingers on the "pulse" of the class and tailoring each day to themes or problem areas. Because E-folio lets students themselves attach a photograph to their personal information in the database, we also more easily associated names and faces-and so did the students. Further, the students were able to do a greater volume of writing than they would in a paper-based course.

We found the process so stimulating and engaging that the additional work involved was more pleasure than toil. In addition, because the course required students to read and comment on each other's work, they received more attention to and feedback on their writing than in some conventional courses. After only one semester of team-teaching using this tool, we can't imagine the course without it and are going to continue to develop its uses, particularly in the area of fostering good writing and critical thinking skills.

E-folio offers worthwhile returns to the instructor on a modest investment of time:

• Instructor time: 2 hours (orientation; setting up E-folio for the course).
• Instructional time: 2 class hours (first generally orienting the students; introducing students to html).
• Location: needs to be scheduled in an ITC-supported classroom.
• Money: none.

For further information:

• Visit the "Story and Healing" SLFK 204 Web site: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~res4n/slfk204/
• Contact one of us: john@virginia.edu or res4n@virginia.edu
• Contact Yitna Firdyiwek to set up an E-folio account: yitna@virginia.edu
• To consider using E-folio: http://nmc.itc.virginia.edu/e-folio/
• To learn more about the ITC supported classrooms: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/labs/