Final thoughts

Developing this e-portfolio has helped me focus my enthusiasm for my chosen course. This course was structured very similarly to the I write paper and a few other papers I am taking. Having started and withdrawn from a different course I am very happy with this one, my previous course involved a lot of tests, one paper had a test every week, while my results were more than satisfactory I found that I did not excel at anything which led me to withdraw from the course.
I have found that this course allows a lot more freedom where assignments are concerned, with our own interpretations of briefs being the main focus a lot of the time. Having enjoyed(relatively speaking) my first semester in my BA it has encouraged me to continue on in my course and my studies at AUT

Early on In the I-reflect course I decided to use Blogger.com as my site for displaying my e-portfolio. This is shown in my initial proposal for my E-portfolio. Having almost completed my E-portfolio, I have found a few problems that have arisen, now that I have most of my entries up on the site it has become quite long, and requires a lot of scrolling to navigate through it. Now that I am reflecting on this I think I should have giving Mahara more consideration, while I still do not know how to operate Mahara and am unlikely to do so in the future. I cant help but thinking that I would be better suited for displaying my E-portfolio in a more manageable and user friendly way.

Posting pictures was easy for me, the way you do this is essentially the same as bebo and facebook, already knowing how to do this made it easy to get them on blogger.com. My trouble with pictures was getting them in the position I wanted them. There is the option to put them in the to left top right etc however this is only really relevant if you have text in the same posting, also if the picture was of a normal size it would go across the whole screen, this meant for me that the only viable place was the bottom of the posting. This meant that it forced my pictures down to the bottom of my blog even further away from where most people would look.

Video was my next challenge but it was once that I needed to overcome for my E-portfolio to work at all. When posting videos I decided to you tube rather than blogger.com own internal means for this. I used you tube mainly because people are familiar with it and this would make them feel more at home? that was my intention anyway, also the idea for me was that if in the future, I was to use a different blog site, I would already know how to upload videos to you tube making my skill twice as useful. The actual uploading of the videos was relatively easy, it was however very time consuming (this is because of the slow internet connection I have at home).

Reflection

At the start of the this course I was very worried that I was was not going to be able to find a viable topic for my e-portfolio. My concerns were put to rest when Finlay selected my topic (which was B-boying), of course I had to make things hard for myself by choosing something that I had very little (basically none) experience in. In hein site this had both advantages as well as disadvantages. Having no experience meant that in order to use my e-portfolio as an advertisement of my skills in this area to a potential employer, it meant that I had to be both learning and teaching at the same time. The good thing about knowing nothing is you have nothing to lose, at the "Jam" sessions that I would train at I realized that everyone could tell that I was new, with this knowledge I was able to learn and ask questions without shame. Had I already know what I was doing, I think that it would have been harder for me to ask for help from these people, they would have already know that I had some skills and thus would want to help. Now that the course is coming to an end I am very happy that I chose to do B-boying as the focus of my e-portfolio, it has given something that I can continue to develop and work on in the future