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Ten weeks have gone by and we are at the stage where the initial portfolio has been peer reviewed, and suggestions made for improvements.

Peer review is akin to inviting fellow archaeologists to critique your methods and results. They bring their own tools, experiences, and perspectives, helping to unearth insights that might have been missed. Similarly, the peer review of my portfolio has provided fresh perspectives, helping me to see my work through different lenses.

To further labour the archaeological metaphor, as an archaeologist sifts through layers of earth, unearthing artifacts and evidence, the process of peer review has allowed me to dig deeper into my own learning journey. Each piece of feedback adds perspective that adds richness to my understanding.

The feedback I received from the instructor and my delegated peer has been very valuable, both in terms of site design and contents. Among other changes, I have:

• tweaked the land acknowledgement to refer to specific Calls to Action in the TRC that I can help to answer through my role at VCC
• added more theoretical background to my reflections on each artifact

We are nearing the end of the fieldwork process – the next stage is to collate and prepare the findings for one more review…

The first 7 weeks of this course served as preparation for the creation of my online portfolio. I had to revisit my goals at the beginning of the MET, consider the audience for my portfolio, and choose which artifacts from the 9 courses I completed to include.

Now the actual work begins. Over the past two weeks I’ve set up my WordPress portfolio site at opened.ca. I’ve chosen a theme, based on aesthetics and some functional requirements, such as responsiveness to different screen sizes. I’ve strated to add content to the WordPress site, and in the process have had to choose which blocks to use. Blocks are the lowest level unit of content in a WordPress page, and can contain text, multimedia, downloadable content, and embedded content from elsewhere. Choosing the blocks has been analagous to choosing edtech – I’ve had to think about the best way to represent my thoughts to my audience. I’ve come across some shortcomings of the opened WordPress instance – for example none of the available themes properly renders PDF files on the page, so I have had to use a workaround to display PDF-based artifacts. Again, there’s an analogy with edtech – sometimes the ideal tool isn’t available (or perhaps more commonly, doesn’t exist), and we have to use what is available.

Even though I created a proposal document outlining which artifacts I wanted to include and why, the process of actually building the site has made me (re)think about the reasons for their inclusion, and how they relate to my overall MET journey. Again, this reminds me of the reality of implementing edtech: We talk about ‘pedagogy first’ and how it’s important to fit the edtech to the educational goals, and not vice-versa. But in reality the two are in a reciprocal relationship – the edtech subtly (or not to subtly) influences the original pedagogical aim. As with many things in life (and on an archaeological site), it’s messy.