Brokering ISUComm Sites: Toward the Creation of a Large Scale ePortfolio Platform for Multimodal Composition

Abstract

This report outlines the authors' experiences developing and piloting ISUComm Sites, an electronic portfolio platform currently in development for ISUComm foundation courses at Iowa State University. Since 2007, ISUComm has sought to better teach students the electronic mode of communication through such a platform, but for some time the project had stalled. This changed in the spring of 2014, when the authors of this article negotiated the resources necessary to build a WordPress installation created both for and by teachers of ISUComm courses. This platform affords students the capability to build online portfolios that showcase their developing identities as scholars and professionals. But to be successful, our project needed "boundary brokers," or graduate students who use their experience as system developers and teachers to negotiate between stakeholders and users at all levels of implementation and development.