Ownership

As I progress in the development of my ePortfolio, I'm beginning to gain a deeper understanding of student ownership. The idea that a student owns a product because they created it is superficial if the idea for the product was not their own. If I give my students an assignment with a bunch of requirements and tell them that it has to be a book report, they don't really take ownership over the assignment because it's what I want to see, not what they want to create. The idea for and the design of the assignment should come from them so that they are truly invested in their learning. The importance of the assignment is for student to learn how to learn, so it shouldn't matter what the end product is as long as the student demonstrated the learning. In the same manner that I've been given the autonomy to create my ePortfolio, I need to give control of student work over to my students.