Establishing a system of organization early on for your materials will help when it comes time to do your e-Portfolio. The following is an example.

Create a folder for each class and within each of these create more folders: Assignments, Lectures, Handouts, Powerpoints, E-Portfolio, pertinent Discussion Board Posts, etc. Within these folders organize by assignment, if necessary: (Assignment 1: Instructions, Blank Assignment Page,Rough Drafts, Files Turned In, Instructor Feedback, etc.)

In the E-Portfolio folder for each class, keep a copy of the Green Sheet, Course Calendar, Roster (with email addresses), your grades, and a Word Doc called E-Portfolio. On this document, log: class name, professor name and contact info, semester you were in the class, team member names and contact info, lists of the exact file used to turn in final product for each assignment (very helpful, especially when you go through several drafts and revisions), a short description of each assignment, and all of the competencies potentially supported by this class and what piece of evidence might be used to show that it supports this competency. This might sound like a lot of work, but it's really not if you start with everything organized in this way. At the end of each semester, just take some time to put some info into this "E-Portfolio" page for each class.

Finally, keep all emails organized by class. Some of them may come in handy for proof of team work, leadership skills, etc.

You can contact your advisor as early as your first semester and begin getting an idea of what he or she expects for the e-Portfolio. Your advisor might even let you enroll in his/her 289 Blackboard class. This will allow you to see all posted guidelines for the Portfolio and to keep an eye on the Discussion Board where people who are currently working on it are talking. Also, the Plone site you will (probably) create for your portfolio can be established at any time.

A few other back-up strategies to avoid disaster:

1.) E-mail your final versions of your course assignments to yourself
and just keep them in an e-Portfolio folder in your e-mail account.
This method assumes you have a secure e-mail account (e.g. web-based
like Yahoo! or GMail) with plenty of memory.

2.) Do the same thing with Plone. Every student has a Plone account.
It should take less than an hour to get your account active, set your
options to "private", create a folder, and put your key documents
(term papers, etc.) in the folder. Just slap anything in there, you
can delete it later. This method has the added benefit of getting
started with Plone.