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Construct a Plan

Anyone can link to everything. Exemplary e-portfolios involve STRATEGY...

Your task is to develop a overall plan that presents and organizes the evidence your audience needs to see in a way that supports your purpose. A good e-portfolio should have a flow to it, an order that makes sense to the user as they go through the e-portfolio.

Which organizational strategy best communicates your message?

Alphabetic
 - a bit arbitrary, yet everyone knows how use alphabetic order to find information!
Locations
 - show important relationships or connections between different aspects of your e-portfolio visually.
Categories
 - group similar items together because they have similar important attributes. Labels these categories to help shape the perception of the kind of information that is contained within them.
Continuums
 - develop a value scale based on an important aspect of your evidence to indicate its relative importance.
Time / Sequence
 - an obvious choice for showing accomplishments over time. Resumes use this strategy almost exclusively.
Themes
 - in conjunction with categories, thematic concepts can be used to group
a number of similar categories to foster additional meaning.
Metaphors
 - relate evidence or categories of evidence by using familiar items to suggest a likeness or analogy between them
Multiple Organizations
- use a blend of the strategies above such that your purpose and your target audience has been meaningfully addressed.

Reference: Nathan Shedroff's Information Interaction Design, 1994.

Storyboards Visualize Your Strategy

Storyboarding is a proven method for organizing your thoughts as you begin setting your strategy in place. It helps you "think out loud" - plan ahead and get a sense of how your e-portfolio will go together and eventually what it will look like.

Storyboarding is like drawing the blueprints for building a house. First you have to decide how many rooms there are going to be, how big these rooms will be and what function each of them will serve. The number, size and function of the rooms depends on the audience and the purpose for the house.

The next to pages that follow are two examples to get you started.