Introduction
Each individual, or collaborative, project forms only a single part of progressive change. As committed researchers, we need to leave behind a permanent record of our work as a marker for those who follow us. They can thus refer to it and, more importantly, build creatively upon it. A comprehensive electronic webfolio offers multiple researchers and whole communities easy access to your research and recommendations, while scrutiny of your working papers and reflections helps others to avoid your mistakes or dead ends, and build more robustly on your successes.
In addition, the reproducibility of an electronic webfolio allows you to gift copies of your project to all those with whom you worked, and to show collaborators, family and friends how much you have achieved in your first year of college.
The Webfolio
The most valuable webfolios are those that begin as a research project commences. Your group may not know exactly how it wants to organize its webfolio, or exactly what the webfolio should include. But you should try to keep electronic copies of all your brainstorming, all your library searches (including the search terms you use), and all your composing, at every stage of your project.
Each whole-group and sub-group meeting should work out, too, how to keep a permanent record of its meetings. You might appoint a minute-taker, or you might decide to record in audio alone, or via video, all your whole-group and sub-group meetings. For you will not know, as a research group, exactly what information and ideas will prove most crucial to your final research conclusions until you are several weeks (or even longer) into your research. Nothing is more irritating than having to retrace your steps to information you had in your hand (literally or metaphorically) a month earlier.
Webfolio Contents
You may create your final project webfolio in any electronic medium you choose, including pebblepad, and integrate as rich a mix of media as you need to convey the full scope of your research. You may choose to integrate into the final any visual, textual and multimedia materials you choose but you must include, as the bare minimum,
- an Executive Summary (750 – 1000 words) of your research as a whole, including your recommendations
- your completed RING Project Worksheet, with any changes to parts A-E and particular attention paid to the thoughtful completion of sections F & G
- copies of all research instruments you created (such as surveys, sets of interview questions, etc.) with a short reflection on the success of each
- a representative selection of your most important research resources (copies of/links to articles, book chapters, etc.)
- a complete bibliography in APA format (in which all URLs function)
- a postscript, in which you recommend how future students might continue the action research cycles you have begun
- an identification of the most productive strategies a successor group might wish to follow, based on your experience, and the pitfalls you would advise that successor group to try to avoid
- a final reflection on your relationships, as a group, and as individuals, to the community(ies) within which you worked this semester, and on how those experiences might influence your community involvement in the future