Though my days of making Digication portfolios are long past (buried along with the rest of my memories from an overwhelming Freshman year), I still cringe when I think of what it took to navigate that maze of an online portfolio system. Lisa Dush’s point about it not teaching students how to approach writing as content could not be more clear when I reflect on how I approached making my Digication portfolios. The writing happened first, a research paper or collection or revisions, and the Digication was built around how to display that writing in the most fluid way possible (which was not very fluid at all). At no point did I consider my writing to be content for the portfolio: there was no way of interconnecting it aside from tabs, which made all of it seem like separate pieces that I was squishing into this format. In fact, when being taught how to use Digication, I don’t remember it being introduced as a way to learn digital literacy. It was taught as a way to display the writing we had already done, a way to make it public, but not as an new format of writing or viewing content.
I have to agree with Professor Dush’s critique of Digication. It does not approach digital learning in the way that it claims to. I now understand part of the reason she opted for other ways of producing digital content in the class I had with her.
