Introduction

Introduction

Welcome to my e-portfolio, a culmination of my work in the Master’s program at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University, completed between Fall 2011 and Fall 2013. This e-portfolio demonstrates the skills and knowledge I have acquired in my time here.

The e-portfolio contains this introduction, my professional philosophy, Competencies A-N, and the conclusion/affirmation. The links to each of these are in the left-hand column. Each competency has an introduction explaining my understanding of the topic, followed by two to four pieces of evidence backing up my learning. The evidence links lead to Google Docs, where I uploaded all of my work. This is followed by a short conclusion describing how I hope to use this information in the future, as well as any references I may have used.

From my first class on, many of my professors emphasized the importance of keeping my work organized and backed up in anticipation of using it for this e-portfolio. One professor, Dr. Robert Boyd, was especially diligent in making sure all the students knew how to upload work to the e-portfolio part of D2L, as well as letting us know we may want to save all our discussion forum posts in addition to our regular homework. This advice was invaluable, as I ended up using many discussion posts as evidence.

I have kept my work very organized, knowing that would make it easier when it came time to start my e-portfolio. At the beginning of this semester, I wrote out the topic or name of each piece of homework on a separate index card, then started sorting them by which competency they fulfilled. This way, I could see how much evidence I had for each competency; in the areas where I was weaker, I was able to supplement from some competencies where I had more evidence (since a lot of the work fit into more than one category). I worked on the competencies in alphabetical order so that I would have a mix of difficulty levels; saving all of my weakest competencies for last would have led to more stress. I gave myself five days to finish each competency so I would be done in plenty of time before the deadline.

This e-portfolio was a great way to review all the concepts I have learned about these past two years. Some topics I hadn’t thought about in a while, so it was an excellent look back at the topics I’ve learned and the work I have done. Thank you for taking the time to read my e-portfolio.