ABSTRACT
Judy and Candyce’s story: Candyce led the mentor program in University Studies, while Judy was director of the program. In University Studies, peer mentors worked with the faculty who taught Freshman Inquiry, and graduate mentors worked with faculty teaching Sophomore Inquiry courses. As director of mentor programs, Candyce had contact with all the new and continuing mentors and designed the training they undertook each spring term prior to their becoming mentors the following fall. The mentors became an invaluable resource for the program. Their inventiveness, dedication to the goals of the program, and the knowledge they brought from their majors, previous experience, and understanding of technology helped everyone. They made every good idea better. When Candyce decided they needed a resource site, the mentors created a website better than anything we had envisioned. When we had questions about technology, what to use and how to use it, the mentors had strong perspectives. They were students too and could give us a student perspective on how the program was or could work better. We asked two mentors to participate on the first ePortfolio system design committee. They were the first to say that the technology or platform is not the most important factor. They told us that the time it took to teach the technology that students would probably never use again would be better spent on the more substantial goals of the program. They advised us to find the easiest platform we could and spend the classroom time on reflection rather than on teaching technology. It was a key lesson in our development of the ePortfolio.
