Kristina Hoeppner 00:05

Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast on portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios into their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner, and I'm delighted to talk with Teresa McKinnon today. 

Teresa is an academic language teacher in higher education and a senior fellow of HEA who has worked many years at the University of Warwick. She retired at the end of 2020, but that does not mean that she is any less active in the community. Teresa recently attended the Eurocall conference and presents regularly. I've met Teresa several years ago in the UK at a Mahara Hui, our community gathering for organisations working with Mahara, and had many online interactions with her. Teresa implemented portfolios at Warwick and also created her own professional portfolios, which are the two areas that we are talking about today. Thank you so much for taking the time today to chat with me, Teresa. 

Teresa MacKinnon 01:14

My pleasure, Kristina. Lovely to see you. 

Kristina Hoeppner 01:17

Lovely seeing you, too. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself, your professional career pathway?

Teresa MacKinnon 01:24

Yeah, sure. I would define myself as a language educator. I started teaching in secondary education. That was the start of my career, and I spent 15 years teaching French and Spanish in secondary education, before moving to the University of Warwick and teaching in higher education, where I taught in business language, managed business language, training, and became an academic lead for eLearning, and finally, an associate professor at Warwick. I've now retired, as you mentioned, but a good deal of my professional life continues online.

I was an early adopter of technology. So the sorts of activities I now have the freedom to indulge in more often, which is the joy of retirement [laughter], is that the work that I did on Virtual Exchange, connecting university cohorts for language education, I can now continue to support through a role with UNICollaboration, a not for profit, and I work as well in teacher education with the Future Teacher 3.0 team. And we organise regular webinars. As you mentioned, I still work with the Association for Learning Technology, where I'm a Fellow, particularly around open education. I lead the open education special interest group. I also work with open badges to support colleagues who want to implement open badges in their various networks, and through my work with UNICollaboration, I work with colleagues all around the world in higher education, to look at critical digital literacies, and to train in critical digital literacies. Because my focus on open education, I'm also very interested in open recognition and assessment. So still fairly busy, really [laughter].

Kristina Hoeppner 03:26

Very busy. I'm wondering why you call yourself retired [laughter].

Teresa MacKinnon 03:31

I can put things in the order I wish, which is great [laughter]. It's been a new chapter rather than a sort of a continuation. And I continue, obviously, to maintain my website where I keep a track of what I'm doing and where I'm presenting.

Kristina Hoeppner 03:45

We'll definitely link to all of the things you've already mentioned, in just this short amount of time so that our listeners can follow up, follow you in all the places, and also maybe participate in one of your workshops or collaborate with you on some of the initiatives that you're involved in.

Teresa MacKinnon 04:05

They will be very welcome. Yeah, absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner 04:08

Thank you, Teresa. So kind of my first question relates really to your professional portfolio because you have been implementing language portfolios at Warwick University for students to it, I kind of want to come a little bit later, but first your personal professional portfolio as part of the CMALT certification. Why did you decide to keep your portfolio or to keep a portfolio in general? How did you get to portfolios?

Teresa MacKinnon 04:35

Right, yes. Well, I think I'd always been aware of portfolios as a sort of contributor to the educational experience if you like. Collecting, curating, and sharing things for your professional development, but it was actually the implementation at Warwick for students, which meant that I experimented with different ePortfolio solutions and tried them out for myself. I very much support the first rule of implementation, which is personal experience. You need to try it for yourself, and you need to sort of test to distraction before you start engaging and involving students and not expecting them to do things. 

So it was actually the very positive experience I had with Mahara that left me thinking, 'I could make really good use of this, and this is a really useful tool.' And because of my commitment to open education as I've mentioned, my professional values are very important to me. When you're using a lot of learning technology as I have as an early adopter for many years, you're very used to compromising. You're very used to compromising your values in order to achieve something through a tool, and my experience with Mahara was that we shared the same values that actually my information and the things I wanted to share, I could diarise and keep private and use Mahara quietly in the background as a place of reflection, and then decide what I show and share. And I thought, well, this is really, really helpful for me. I tend to come from a sort of heutagogic perspective in terms of learning pedagogy that actually individuals direct their learning. And I know that's very powerful for me because I know that when I experience learning, it works best for me if I've got some control and some agency and how that learning happens, and it was important for me that students felt the same way. 

So yes, for me, it was very much a case of the technology and the values enshrined in that technology that I saw in Mahara that were critically aligned with my values as a learner. So it was a no brainer. For me, this was going to be something that was not because at the time when we started using Mahara, it didn't have an implementation anyway. So it was very much something that I thought this is something I'd like to experiment with and try out. The Leap2 export was really useful as well. So I could continue outside the framework of the institution as well. So yes, Mahara really chimed with me, resonated with me.

Kristina Hoeppner 07:19

So kind of focusing a little bit more on the pedagogical or content side of the portfolio rather than so much on the technology, you've created at least two portfolios, at least that I'm aware of, to become a Certified Member of the Association of Learning Technologists (CMALT). Did everybody need to create a portfolio or what's that your personal decision to make a portfolio?

Teresa MacKinnon 07:45

When you prepare for CMALT, you have to submit a peer reviewed ePortfolio or portfolio of some form, and in many cases, certainly, when I started doing my CMALT application, my first one, most people were submitting a document, a Word document. And because my work was principally revolving around media and media use, particularly audio, but also video, it was, again, an obvious choice to use Mahara to put that together. It's the flexibility and the ease of presenting that I really liked, and the fact that I could combine different media, the fact I could showcase my open badges as well, I'm sure people, well I know people do submit CMALTs through other technologies, through WordPress or whatever. But Mahara worked for me, and yeah, I was happy to do my second submission as well using the same technology. 

In terms of content, I suppose what's important is the ease of integration of the different media. So language learning is very multi sensorial. So you really want to capture the video files, the audio files, the images. So the very fact that it's easy to combine those and to add narrative around them, the same with the Open Badges, makes it a really flexible tool for my professional development as well.

Kristina Hoeppner 09:07

I really like your CMALT review portfolio, and I use that quite extensively in my own workshops or also when introducing Mahara because you exemplify the language of portfolios and the language of reflection really, really nicely, that through the language that you use, where you say, "I was mentored" or "I realised at that time" or "looking back" at things so kind of these little words that give the reader the information that there is much more than you can currently explain in your portfolio that that you are not taking us through all the many, many experiences you've had over the years, but you pick the one that is most important. So one other word to use is "a highlight" that makes it really nice to show others how important language is and how to use these little words to show that you're reflecting without always saying, 'Now I reflect' or 'Now I do this or that.' And so that I find is really fascinating in your portfolio to see, and it's a prime example of what a professional portfolio can look like.

Teresa MacKinnon 10:23

Oh that's, that's really lovely feedback, Kristina. You know, I really, I kind of thought, 'Okay, it's out there, and I don't know that anybody's ever going to look at it now it's been assessed [laughter]. But it actually resonates with me in terms of how we implemented ePortfolios with students, too. That very often and there's a mindset around this, people think of a portfolio perhaps as a place that you push everything, all the bits of evidence you've got, and you sort of put it in front of somebody and say, you figure it out, you sort it out. And one of the things I used to work with students very closely on was telling a journey, or describing a journey, and the use of your ePortfolio as a way of drawing attention to certain light bulb moments or key interactions. 

I remember in the first CMALT submission because I didn't pass first time, I had to work very hard on presenting my information, and I really didn't understand what was meant by reflecting. It was a process I think that ALT gifted me with in a way through doing some art that made me think more closely about what matters about reflection. And as you say, it's not describing every single reflection you've ever had, which hopefully, is an ongoing process. That reflective process is important for a practitioner. It's more drawing attention to certain things and evidencing them.

You know, we used to tell them, 'you really don't need to upload every standing homework that you've had back because we don't have time to assess that, you know. Our tutors have half an hour per portfolio to work together and look at all these portfolios. We had sort of 300 students during this every year. So it was very important for them to take control of that narrative and to actually present it in a way that engages somebody from the outside who is taking an interest in what they've done. So I guess, really, I've learned that sort of probably unconsciously through the work that I've been doing with students on it, and also through the CMALT process, which is very clear about reflection. 

Kristina Hoeppner 12:44

That also shows that it's really important to not just tell somebody 'Oh, create a portfolio', but to give specific instruction and help them tease out what you actually want, not what you want to hear because it's not a yes or no question, but to tease out where you want to get to, what you want to get from the learner in terms of reflection and that it's not just a description or a summary, but really gets into the depth of what have you learned, what would you do differently, what would you keep the same? It's great to hear that you've learned through the work with the students that influenced your professional portfolio work and that also, vice versa, your professional portfolio work influenced how you're working with your students.

Teresa MacKinnon 13:32

It's a virtuous circle, really, and you just reminded me of how when we talked with students as well, how important it was to say to them, you know, they were describing their language learning journey, obviously, that, in fact, we want the negatives as well as the positives. They would tend to assume that we only wanted to hear of the great moments that happened, and you know, their wonderful teaching. And we said, 'No, no, we, you know, we want to learn from you. If something in class or in terms of the nature of the activities or the interactions you were asked to engage in, in your language learning, have the opposite effect of language learning to you, we want to know that.' So it made that whole process a really helpful professional development process for our tutors. It was about making sure our criteria, our assessment criteria reflected that in fact we wanted to hear 'warts and all' as we say, the story.

Kristina Hoeppner 14:30

What sort of portfolios did your students then create as part of their language learning journey? Was it assessment portfolios primarily or did you also use it for employability purposes, presentation purposes?

Teresa MacKinnon 14:43

We had this discussion with them at the beginning of every year and they get a little handbook as well. But that in fact, what started the process of was their personal use of Mahara for perhaps, you know, social activities or whatever. You know, so we wanted to give them time just to get to know the tool and see how it worked and see what they could share and how they could share it. If they were running a social group at the university, we'd encourage them to maybe create a page for it on their Mahara. So we gifted them the tool and said, 'Look, we're not going in watching you every moment of the day here. This is your tool. Ultimately, you're going to submit an assessed view of part of it, but you're only going to submit certain pages organised in a collection, and what you do with the rest of the tool and the potentials of the tool is up to you.' So we encouraged experimentation and ownership of their space. That doesn't always happen I think. There's a tendency to say, 'Okay, the university has given you this tool to do X,' and that sort of limits then the students' exploration. They're just trying to tick the boxes that we've given them. 

And I think that's often a flaw with assessment practices generally. You know, one of the things I always used to explain to my language students is that, 'Yes, you want to be assessed and get a good mark in language, but I want you to be a lifelong learner, I want you to continue your use of language once you finished this course.' I think assessment has an important role to play in empowering learners to be lifelong learners and to continue beyond ticking boxes for a particular task.

Kristina Hoeppner 16:27

Did your students take you up on that invitation toward not just use their portfolio space for the assessment, so the required part of a course but also try different things out?

Teresa MacKinnon 16:40

Some did. I suppose with with any of these things it's, you know, there's a proportion. So some did. The last implementation I used of ePortfolio was with some student teachers, and obviously, for them, their focus was, you know, what could I do with this to reach beyond to show prospective employers what I'm doing, and I did see them making use of views that they could then share to the process, if you like, to get an interview. I even had a student once who came back to me once I've got this interview because, you know, I showed the things that I'd done. 

I think particularly with things like language learning, the context is kind of specific. Going into a job that isn't requiring language expertise, showing that experience has shown because of the sort of nature of language acquisition and the skills acquisition that happened, being able to show that you've been through that process and you were able to respond to the challenges and that you've got an insight into how you learn is very valuable. We didn't go in and sort of look through individual students' use of the ePortfolios. I think the only time that as an admin I went in to look at a particular ePortfolio was when somebody submitted documents that weren't displaying correctly. So if there'd been a technical issue that needed addressing, but other than that, we literally allowed them to use their ePortfolio as the domain as their own, and some of them did use the Leap2A to export and then take it away.

Kristina Hoeppner 18:25

That's a great use and that also showed that portfolios can help with practice and maybe in some ways, even first learn about transferable skills.

Teresa MacKinnon 18:35

Yes, yes, it's definitely a very useful tool for that, and one of the sort of specifics, really of that within Mahara has been the fact that when I've sat with students, and we've been just exploring ePortfolios of what you can do with them, it was quite surprising to me that although many of them knew how to embed or how to find videos, they didn't know how to embed them within a page and then comment on them. Or when it came to uploading images, they haven't thought about copywriting whether those images. So the fact that that is scaffolded within the tool means that there are journeys that happening to those students as they use Mahara that they may well not be getting elsewhere. 

The focus on accessibility, the focus on presentation, these are all life skills really aren't they? You know, being able to as you would in a CV, show your skills in a way that is relevant to the audience and keep adding to those skills. And I think it's learning by doing as well, which is really crucial when it comes to technology because you know, you can go on any number of trainings, but if you don't actually use that technology from one moment to another, it's forgotten. So the fact that you're actually acquiring those skills whilst you're achieving a further goal without your focus being totally on, 'Oh, I know how to do X with this tool' is really important to contextualise this and enriches that experience.

Kristina Hoeppner 20:12

For your many years of portfolio practice, both with students and in your own professional life, and then also teaching others how to work with portfolios, have you observed any trends with regard to implementing portfolios or maintaining portfolios and working with it in a tertiary or higher education institution?

Teresa MacKinnon 20:35

I think for quite a while we've been trumpeting, you know, it is time we were using ePortfolios rather than using Word documents and things so that we could make that whole experience and that, particularly in media rich subjects that demonstration of your skills more obvious. That sort of message is being embraced gradually. It's taking a very long time, I think. It's taking longer than I certainly would have expected, but then again, the pandemic has probably helped to boost awareness of digital skills and digital communication. 

For me, the biggest and the most important change over time, is that shift from a portfolio as, as just being a collection of your best stuff, to an understanding that actually an ePortfolio tool gives you a private space, a domain of your own to experiment and try. Let's face it, learning is messy. So if we only pay attention to the good stuff, we're forgetting how we got better. And it's actually really crucial to capture those journeys and the reasons why we change things and the reasons why, in our own minds, we thought, 'Well, that didn't work,' and then we wanted to make it better. So even if that bit never gets shared, having a space to collect it is really useful, but it also means as well, that we're paying really good attention to where that data is stored and how and who controls it and how it's looked after. I think, we are more and more aware now of the dangers of exposing your data and having that harvested for nefarious purposes. So it's kind of important that again, it comes back to values that when you select a tool, you really understand what's happening within that tool, you appraise it critically.

Kristina Hoeppner 22:28

Digital ethics is definitely a big topic that we are discussing in the wider ePortfolio community, especially through the work that the AAEEBL Task Force is doing, and you're mentioning exactly the items that we've been looking into there like accessibility, data storage, data privacy, copyright, rights of authors, knowing what is allowed, what isn't allowed, and also what viewers expect. So not just the pedagogical side, but also the ethical side of it to make sure that it's not causing any harm.

Teresa MacKinnon 23:02

That's really crucial. I'm really glad to hear that. I know personally, that I'm not terribly good at writing good alt text. And the work I've been doing with Future Teacher and the people I collaborate with in that Future Teacher UK network has really helped me learn more. It's one of the things that I think, you know, that could even be part of uploading to your spaces such as Mahara. But as you add an image, what alt text you put on, you know, how do you describe it? Well, so again, it sort of helps you through that journey.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:38

You mentioned that you want students to not just submit their best work and show their perfect side, but you also want to see the messy side. Does that actually mean that lecturers or academics, faculty need to rethink what to assess and how to assess the work from the students?

Teresa MacKinnon 24:00

I think there's a good deal of work that needs to be done on assessment literacy, not just with faculty, but with the general wider public. And it happens to be the day today (25 August 2022) when our GCSE results get announced in this country. So there's a lot on TV about results and marks and numbers, and grades. There's a good deal of work to be done there for people to really understand. So within the context of our use the language ePortfolio, the ePortfolio was actually contributing 20% of their overall assessment mark for their module. Eighty percent was coming on tested skills around language production. So they would be speaking, listening, reading, and writing tests that contribute the other 80%. So there it's the mixture that counts. So we were giving a proportion of that assessment mark not to where you are right now with your language production, but to how you've managed that language acquisition process and how you've got involved in it because that's a set again of transferable skills that we need to know that you've got. 

So actually, what I'm saying, I think, if I sort of draw a distinction little bit, what I'm saying about using an ePortfolio for capturing the messiness of learning is that that messiness doesn't need to be shared with anybody other than yourself. Using the journal tool, for example, within Mahara, to every week reflect on how your course is going and what you've done, you may be the only person that reads that. But the fact that you actually build a habit of reflecting, and you keep those notes, obviously, it could be noting is anywhere, helps you to then spot, the moments. It helps you to spot the things that you keep on doing that actually aren't helping you. Unless you sort of keep tabs, it's a little bit like, you know, going to the gym, or, you know, addressing weight loss, unless you have some way of recording where you are at any point in time, it's difficult for you to reflect effectively on change and then to come up with a strategy for managing that change. 

Teachers see it. You see it every day, you know, that students will tend to lean towards certain strategies, and they always will use them, even if they're not helping. And you try to perhaps explain that to a student or to show them an alternative way, and we spend quite a lot of time talking to people about strategies for learning. But in fact, the most productive, and I come back to heutagogy, the most productive is actually when the learner themselves makes a realisation, and they direct their learning in order to change. And ePortfolio can be a really useful tool, particularly a journal, to capture what is happening, just describe it, even for your own purposes, and then to reflect upon it. Maybe that bit of reflection then generates. So it's a quite an involved process.

Kristina Hoeppner 27:10

thinking of involved processes and changes and innovations of what would you like to be able to do with portfolios that you currently can't just yet fully do?

Teresa MacKinnon 27:22

I think what I'd like to see is just wider use of ePortfolios, generally. I now use FolioSpaces to host my ePortfolios there now. But I think, in order to make people more aware, perhaps learners more aware that in fact, you can, if you prefer to, we've talked about social learning, but you know, I've always struggled with that social constructivism idea because I tend to go away and learn privately and focus and then test things out in a social context. But the fact that an ePortfolio can give you a place to do that, to do the private as well as the public, to do the curation as well as the collection, is really helpful. So I'd like to see, you know, people using ePortfolios or making ePortfolios available with low, low barriers to adoption. 

Obviously, a good deal of our formal education takes place through institutions. So in further education and higher education, I don't see a reason why every institution shouldn't have some sort of ePortfolio platform to then be implemented as students or as disciplines or as schools see fit. It just accelerates the fact that you can have a space of your own. You need to be able to access it on your phone as well as on your laptop. Again, some of the learning what came out of the pandemic revolves around how difficult it is for many people to have the bandwidth to regularly use the tools that they have, to have the devices. There's still some sort of fallacy that everybody who's a student has a laptop, you know, many, many households who want to access learning, do not have the funds to do that. So lowering those barriers, seeing use of an ePortfolio as a normalised tool in the same way, as you know, perhaps we think of buying stationery back in the day, you know, providing notebooks and providing biros, you know, that this is something that you can use to support your learning, but you can use it in multiple different ways, which is kind of how Mahara can be really helpful. It's so flexible. 

Yeah, that would be my wish, I think, that there's wider general use, but not just, you know, I accept that under 18, it's a bit trickier possibly to manage that sort of thing. So I'm sort of focusing particularly on post 18, but for formal and informal learning as well. And you know, that's where open recognition comes into things as well where, you know, curating your open badges, showing them that can be as useful in a vocational context as in a formal education context.

Kristina Hoeppner 30:17

Let's see where we'll be in five years time, and if more organizations, yes, fingers crossed [laughter], more organisations implement portfolios on a wider scale and also give students or learners in general the opportunity to keep it for life and to make changes and keep it updated. 

Now, we are coming to the last part of our interview today with our quick question round. So the first question for you, which three words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Teresa MacKinnon 30:50

Creativity was definitely going to be in there, and I thought, actually, it's not really about creativity. It's about being constructive. Social constructivism and thinking there and taking ownership and constructing something that you want then to show for a particular purpose, whatever that is. So I think my C word there is going to be 'constructive'. Another C word is going to be 'connective' because in fact, you can use your ePortfolio to make connections and to share and show, and my third word obviously has to be 'reflective' because this is a great space for reflection and a need to reflection. Just a good place to put things together that then builds that habit of reflective practice.

Kristina Hoeppner 31:38

Thank you for these three words. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Teresa MacKinnon 31:47

Creating a learning activity is front loaded. There's a tendency often when we're sort of time pressured to see it as a task, something to be done, and you will achieve it more quickly if you do it yourself and put it out there. So what I would say is actually turn that around. Take greater time to understand your audience and the purpose of your ePortfolio task, and then work collaboratively. So work with your students, work with your tutors, and thrash something out together and understand that that may be an iterative process. So we implemented ePortfolios over, I think, a 10-year period, and we updated our handbook year on year as we went through, and that's because we learned every time we implemented we learned something new. So having time and being perhaps flexible around your task design to incorporate the ideas of others that really helps build a community as well. So it's, it's a really useful process to do. 

Getting that time I appreciate is really difficult. So those are discussions that managements need to have within institutions that in fact, the time that is invested in that way in team building, is really important to actually making more effective use of your teaching time. Isolating teachers, putting them under stress and time pressures doesn't bring out the best in them. You know, we all need time to talk things through and try things out.

Kristina Hoeppner 33:20

Now the last question, we've had a tip for learning designers and instructors. Now what advice do you have for portfolio authors?

Teresa MacKinnon 33:29

I think that's a simple and short one and that's be yourself. Be your authentic self. You know, artifice shows up very, very quickly. You might not want to reveal everything, and nobody is asking you to reveal everything. The beauty of using an ePortfolio is that you should decide what you reveal.

Kristina Hoeppner 33:48

Thank you so much for taking the time today, Teresa, to talk with me and take me through your journey through the years of working with portfolios and also in particular, highlighting how your values are reflected in the work that you do and how you can bring in yourself so that you can be yourself in your portfolio. 

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? 

This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Teresa MacKinnon today. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find links to resources that she shared and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host Kristina Hoeppner, projet lead and product manager of the ePortfolio platform Mahara. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.