Helen L. Chen: Reflect through conversation to tell your story

Kristina Hoeppner 00:05

Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with 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. 

Kristina Hoeppner 00:26

My guest today is Dr Helen L. Chen, who has been a champion for portfolios for many years. She's co-founder of the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab and a research scientist in the Designing Education Lab of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Helen is also a board member for AAEEBL, the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning. In the past, she was also co-facilitator of EPAC, ePortfolio Action and Communication, a group of portfolio practitioners in California together with Dr John Ittelson, who was on the podcast earlier in the year. Helen, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Helen Chen 01:09

Well, thank you so much for having me, Kristina. I'm so delighted to be able to have this conversation with you.

Kristina Hoeppner 01:14

It's really great because we see each other quite regularly talking about specific initiatives with AAEEBL. So I'm excited to take a step back today with you and look at the bigger picture of your involvement in the portfolio community.

Helen Chen 01:19

Well, I'm thrilled. You know, any opportunity to reflect, especially reflect through conversation, I'm super excited to do and especially with you.

Kristina Hoeppner 01:35

Helen, I did already mentioned a few of your roles that you've been holding most recently, but do you want to share anything else about yourself and how you got involved in portfolios?

Helen Chen 01:46

Again, thank you for that kind introduction. Even though my official appointment right now is in Mechanical Engineering where I do research and engineering education, I'm actually not an engineer by training. I did my graduate work in communication where I studied the effects of mass media on children and adolescents. My interest in ePortfolios really came from when I first I finished my grad program, my PhD in communication, and I joined at that time was the Stanford Learning Lab. This is actually in the late 90s. One of the first projects I worked on was called the Learning Careers Project, which was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. There in the Learning Careers Project, I followed 30 Stanford undergraduates from freshman year until graduation, looking at the various experiences from inside and outside the classroom, on campus, and off campus. That really made up - comprised their education here at Stanford.

Helen Chen 02:10

It was really through my involvement in the Learning Careers Project where I became interested in portfolios. Of course, at that time in the late 90s, early 2000s, there wasn't much in terms of actual portfolio platforms. And most of the people that I was around were actually more interested in building ePortfolio tools or electronic platforms. But our interest, you know, was actually in the implementation of portfolios; getting faculty buy-in, student engagement in this concept of a portfolio. It was through that early work that I met John Ittelson and Trent Batson, who was the founder of AAEEBL, and John, together with Darren Cambridge were fellows for the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, which was the predecessor to EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, ELI. It was really through that initial work that the ideas around portfolios and in particular ePortfolios really came about and how I got interested in how I got started.

Kristina Hoeppner 03:36

What whirlwind through more than two decades of portfolio work and being involved in the community. You've been around people who were looking more at the ePortfolio tools, but you also mentioned that you were more interested in the pedagogy and more in the implementation of portfolios and how it can work for students rather than just looking at the portfolio tool side. You've been involved in that area now quite a bit, also co-authored 'Documenting learning with ePortfolios: A guide for college instructors' with Tracy Penny Light and John Ittelson, which was released in 2012 where you have been looking more at the instructional side of things, at the portfolio design side of things and also coined the term 'folio thinking'. Can you tell us a bit about that term, that definition and what you see behind it, what that concept entails for you?

Helen Chen 04:38

Absolutely. So it was really from our observations, you know, working with these learning career students and also developing an initial prototype of an e-folio as well as collaborations with various national and international portfolio researchers that really contributed to the approach that we refer to as 'folio thinking'. So I really can't take full credit for 'folio thinking' just myself; in collaborate - with my colleague, Cindy Mazow, who's now working as an instructional designer in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Helen Chen 05:11

At that time, we were really thinking about folio thinking defined as that reflective practice that situates and guides the effective use of learning portfolios. We really drew upon the literature in experiential learning, meta cognition, reflective and critical thinking, as well as a mastery orientation to learning. And then, of course, this long tradition of portfolios in teacher education, art, architecture. Where we see folio thinking being applicable is really providing those structured opportunities for students to not only create a portfolio, but also reflect on their experiences, that reflection, the synthesis, what now we call integrative learning, as being advocated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. So really, the practice of portfolios is very much connected with reflection.

Kristina Hoeppner 06:06

Helen, you're speaking primarily at the moment about learning portfolios, and of course, the lab you're in, the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab, has it in its title as well. It's very much connected to the career education. Are you also using portfolios in different contexts than the learning portfolio at Stanford?

Helen Chen 06:25

Certainly. If you asked me back in the late 90s, early 2000s, whether or not I thought portfolios would still be a thing, almost as you said, two decades, over 20 years later [laughs], I might have said "no." I mean, who's to say that it wasn't just another ed tech fad. At the time, when John and I were as well as Darren and Trent were kind of in this world, many of our colleagues at the University of Washington, at Northwestern University, Ali Jafari at IUPUI, were focused primarily on these e-folio or ePortfolio tools. Now where I see my work heading, and especially my work in the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab, which is housed in Stanford Career Education, has brought into this idea of a professional digital presence, that we're not constraining ourselves to just ePortfolios, but how are individuals' stories, how do students communicate what they know, what they can do, to a broader set of audiences? That is certainly one application that I see of ePortfolios around professional digital presence.

Helen Chen 06:39

But in terms of other venues for implementation, certainly, this idea of portfolios as a way for alternative assessment approach, and also in the classroom as students as well as faculty programmes are looking across experiences, again, inside and outside the classroom, on campus and off campus. And providing a means by which students can really make those kind of connections and integrate and come up with a more comprehensive, cohesive, holistic story about their education, and especially the knowledge skills and abilities that they've acquired along the way.

Kristina Hoeppner 08:03

So it's that integration into the curriculum, which I think, you're also exemplifying because you are teaching a course on 'Creating your digital self: The what, how, and why of building an online presence'. How do you engage with them and teach them about folio thinking and what they can do with their online presence?

Helen Chen 08:26

Again, this idea of everyone has a digital footprint. And one of the first steps, you know, in our curriculum is acknowledging, what's the story that's already being told about you online? And we typically explore that by having individuals either search for themselves, using a commonly used search engine, most often it's Google, you know, search for themselves or search for the person that they're sitting next to, after opening an incognito window, logging out of their accounts because of cookies and Google, of course, knowing where you sit and where you are in the world. And understanding the story that's already out there in terms of whether it's your social media profiles, what shows up in that, you know, first page of results? What shows up in the images that you may not necessarily look at, and then also acknowledge that different search engines will provide different search results. That is sort of being the initial, you know, the initial step; understanding what's the story that's already out there? And then the question is, 'What's the story that you want to be out there, you know about you,' acknowledging what your current digital footprint is, what is the ecosystem in terms of where you can be found online? And then taking a step further, as we think about our students who are maybe seeking employment or applying to grad programmes, where are the people, the people that you want to reach? Where are they, and can they find you? The kinds of conversations that have been fascinating for me to explore together with my colleagues in ILPL around identity, authenticity, in terms of your representation and who you are and where you can be found online.

Kristina Hoeppner 10:03

That also reminds me very much after the workshop that you and Sheetal Patel had given it an AAEEBL Annual Meeting. I think it was the one during the first pandemic year in 2020 because it was an online session where you explored and really looked also into diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, decolonisation principles in regards to well, how much are people comfortable sharing, and what are the cultural factors that we might want to take into consideration as well? Or why two profiles look very different? Is there something that you can share with our audience in that regard?

Helen Chen 10:42

I think one question that comes up often is, 'What does it mean to be professional?' LinkedIn actually had a whole campaign about, you know, defining or redefining what professional looks like, how it shows up. And my colleague, Dr Sheetal Patel, you mentioned, she is currently a Senior Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn and has shared many of the new features that LinkedIn now includes that are very portfolio like. The ability to include different kinds of artefacts, the ability to turn on creator mode, where you might be able to include hashtags that identify what kinds of topics you might be interested in exploring or have expertise in. That space around identities, you know, and how identities evolve over time, what individuals are feel comfortable sharing at certain times of their lives, and which ones they may not, you know, feel like they want to put out or lead with, I think has implications for ePortfolios. 

Helen Chen 11:41

EPortfolios I see as part of this digital ecosystem, part of your digital footprint, but it can often serve as the hub because in a portfolio, you have the greatest control and ownership about what you choose to share, and how you want to share it that when someone clicks on a portfolio link, as I often do, whenever I see them in a resume or CV or an email signature, you know, I'm deferring to them. This is actually something a student once told me that when someone clicks on that link, they defer to me in terms of there's no expectations about it has to look a certain way or has to be formatted a certain way. And when you think about LinkedIn or even a resume or CV, it is a standardised format. And portfolios really allow individuals to be able to tell their story, how they want to tell it, highlight experiences that are important to them, include aspects of their background, their upbringing, their identity, that may be difficult or that they're not able to share, you know, easily through a LinkedIn profile.

Kristina Hoeppner 12:43

Another aspect, I think, is also that a public portfolio can look very different from a portfolio that is created only for a course or for certification purposes that we might not actually see. So it's not just the how and what I want to show, but also with whom I want to share a specific portfolio.

Helen Chen 13:05

Yes, that's something that has been fundamental in sort of, when I give presentations or workshops to faculty and academics, differentiating between a showcase portfolio that is a curated collection of polished work that is outward facing for an external audience. And that's often times when we get questions from students 'Well, couldn't my LinkedIn be that public facing portfolio?' And the answer is 'Yes' that is certainly one sort of component of that. 

Helen Chen 13:36

Now, in contrast to a learning portfolio where students or individuals can include works in progress, individual goals, where you can be selective about who you want to share that portfolio with; it could be behind a university firewall; could be for individual courses for the specific purpose that a faculty may designate. Of course, the two can go hand in hand where aspects or artefacts from my learning portfolio can be selected and then put into a showcase portfolio that has a specific audience and purpose.

Kristina Hoeppner 14:09

It's really wonderful to see that you have your evidence of learning and then can use it in multiple different contexts therefore creating those different portfolios for the different purposes yet, not always having to start from scratch, but using what you have done and then shaping it within the context that you're creating it.

Helen Chen 14:31

So it's iterative, it's cumulative, and curation is a part of that iterative process.

Kristina Hoeppner 14:38

Helen, you and Dr Sheetal Patel, whom we've just mentioned, from LinkedIn, are co-founders of the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab at Stanford University and have a number of other researchers and students involved in that work that you do there. How do you serve the students in that lab? Is that lab there have for them to work on their portfolios in addition to their classes or do you help colleagues integrate portfolio work, career portfolio work, more into the classes that students take?

Helen Chen 15:12

So it's really all of the above. We offer workshops and courses that are specifically designed to help students not only develop their portfolios, but also think about how the story they want to communicate via their professional digital presence. In addition, we also connect with faculty members of our Center for Teaching and Learning. Stanford has a new capstone requirement, and so talking with faculty and staff who are thinking about how portfolios can enhance academic advising, and of course, we've worked closely with colleagues in Student Affairs since Career Education is housed within Student Affairs. 

Helen Chen 15:50

But the basic premise of our work is really this belief that all students have a story to tell, one that really integrates their whole selves. So really helping them think about how a portfolio, as one possible communication channel, can really help them more effectively communicate their knowledge, their skills, their abilities, what they know, and what they can do, and increasingly really privileging the aspects of their identity they want to share and valuing those aspects of their identity. We believe, or I certainly believe, that the idea of a portfolio helps students make some of those ideas, what's in their head, you know, visible. Visible in a way that they can get feedback from others. And whether that feedback or that input is from like peers, family and friends, faculty, advisors, mentors, or even prospective employers or grad admission committees, that feedback is really what feeds into their ability to be able to tell their story. Even though students who come to our classes or workshops, many of them gravitate to us because they think, 'Okay, well, I'm going out to the job market, I'd like to have this portfolio to help enhance my job application or to help with my preparation for med school, my med school application or med school interview,' let's say. However, I think the real value, though, is the opportunity to be able to practise telling their stories such that if they were in that hypothetical elevator, that person that they may be talking with, may not see their portfolio, but when they get asked the question, 'tell me about yourself, or what do you do,' they will have had that opportunity of practising that answer and be able to communicate that more effectively. 

Helen Chen 17:37

Increasingly, I think about how students tell their story. It could be, you know, in an elevator pitch, at a networking event, it could be through the portfolio, through their online presence. And so how do we provide them with those opportunities to be able to tell that story more effectively, regardless of format and depending on who they're talking to?

Kristina Hoeppner 17:58

Have you now also integrated students checking in the generative AI tools, in particular, ChatGPT, what that knows about them?

Helen Chen 18:10

We have not explored that yet. It's an area that I'm very interested in learning more about. One tool that I'm particularly interested in, which I'll share with you, Kristina [laughs] so you can include the link, is how an AI can actually help facilitate reflection; reflection about experiences, whether it be an internship or a research project or other experiences. And is there something about AI that can help scaffold the reflective process, such that as students are thinking about what to include in their portfolio, a tool can maybe help guide them in that initial reflection such that they can then figure out what to include, you know, or how to represent it, you know, in the digital format. 

Helen Chen 18:50

A colleague of mine, who's in the Stanford d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, is developing - it's an AI chatbot. So one can imagine okay, how would you reflect? Like, you know, I've had an internship experience, how would I talk about it? You know, I could be faced with just a blank page and wondering, okay, how do I, where do I even begin. What this chatbot does is actually have a series of questions, a series of prompts that I respond to, and then it actually will send me a summary of my responses. So I'm curious as to whether that would be more revealing or would certainly be an easier place to start than me facing a blank page.

Kristina Hoeppner 19:36

If you're working with a template, you could of course already have those questions. However, I guess, the direction that this tool might go at some point or might really help with that it tailors the follow-on questions more to the responses that the student had given.

Helen Chen 19:52

Yes. So I think there are lots of possibilities, and I hope we'll be able to explore these more in the upcoming AAEEBL, ePortfolios Australia, Eportfolio Ireland webinar series.

Kristina Hoeppner 20:03

Speaking of the AAEEBL Association, so the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning, what does AAEEBL want to achieve?

Helen Chen 20:14

Well, I think it was intended and has become the professional community for researchers, practitioners, instructors, faculty, staff, and students, of course, interested in ePortfolios. And ePortfolios have certainly proven to be more than just another educational technology fad, and in our annual meetings, in our events, we've had great interest from people who are new to ePortfolios, and that's been very gratifying to see that the interest is still strong. What is it about the paradigm of ePortfolios that continues to resonate as a model, as an assessment approach, as a technology, as an alternative to traditional grading practices? I think that really emerged from COVID. And you know, what I've always appreciated about that portfolio community, the international portfolio community, is its collegiality. I think it's a very welcoming community. And what's paralleled sort of the growth of the international community is actually the growth in scholarship. The opportunities for publications and research has really continued to thrive, as seen in the International Journal of ePortfolio, and then at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, they host a database called PEARL, which actually includes peer reviewed research from a variety of like fields and disciplines around ePortfolios. So that's been, I think, very encouraging, and really represents the continued opportunity, as well as the challenges that as researchers, as scholars, as practitioners, that we are hoping to try to address through this broadly [laughs] defined term of ePortfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner 21:57

What is the next big event that people might want to join and meet community members from AAEEBL?

Helen Chen 22:05

Well, we do have our Annual Meeting for AAEEBL, which will happen both virtually as well as in person. Both of those events will take place in July; July 13th and 14th for the virtual event, and then July 19th to the 21st in Vancouver, British Columbia. So we're very excited to have the opportunity to kind of reconnect with our colleagues both, you know, old and new around ePortfolios. And in this year, the theme has a special focus on AI. So really excited about that. 

Helen Chen 22:39

I do also want to mention that our AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force continues to put on highly interactive and engaging workshops around a variety of topics relevant to not only AI, but digital ethics, intellectual property, raising awareness, and this very interesting and relevant topic of labour - who's doing the work around e portfolios - and so those are also events that are offered regularly and well worth participating in.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:11

Thank you for that pluck for the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force there. I will make sure that all the resources that you mentioned today, Helen, will show up in our show notes. You've been involved, of course, with portfolios for over 20 years, initially, you thought, 'Oh, this might be fad, it'll be over very quickly, and soon I'll go back to some other communications things,' yet that hasn't really happened. And I'm actually really grateful that you're still active in the portfolio community because every time we meet, I learned something new from you, see what you're involved in and can't follow your work there. So Helen, what trends have you observed over the years?

Helen Chen 23:52

Anytime I talk with anyone about ePortfolios, I still always go back to the fundamental questions. Why ePortfolios? Why do you think this is a tool that is going to address, you know, the problem or the need or the challenge that you currently have, you know, on your campus, in your programme, with your students, with your faculty? So why ePortfolios? In the back of my mind, I, you alluded to my longevity to date [laughs] doing this work - Why now? You know, why is it that we're coming to this now? Those are always the questions that I remind myself, you know, as I'm talking with colleagues about, you know, who are considering a portfolio, you know, solution because I don't believe that portfolios are necessarily the magic bullet or the one size fits all, you know, solution, it still really is dependent on what's the need, what's the need of your students, what's the need of your faculty, and then again, what kind of infrastructure or ecosystem, resources need to be put in place in order for portfolios to be successful? And of course, there's a lot of factors that contribute to that.

Helen Chen 24:58

In terms of trends we mentioned some of them already. I'm still intrigued by this idea of authenticity in two aspects: authenticity when individuals are looking to represent themselves in this online space. How can you ensure that there is alignment between their individual identities, who they are, how they are represented, you know, online? So that aspect of how can you be authentic online? The other is authenticity with respect to assessment, authentic evidence of student learning. And this may be relates to the ungrading movement, and individuals, faculty, staff looking for alternatives to traditional grading practices.

Kristina Hoeppner 25:42

is that kind of then also where you see the future of portfolios that we have the learning portfolio, but increasingly, also look into the assessment portfolio in order to have more authentic assessment, going away from lots of traditional ways of doing assessment because of course, also AI has shown lately that it can game the system more lots of the traditional ways of submitting work for assessment can just be done by a machine, and therefore, we do need to rethink that part of education.

Helen Chen 26:16

I guess the conversations around AI have made me question like, what kinds of things can be outsourced, and which ones need to be you know, what things the individual student needs to take ownership of, and also finds valuable? The kind of checkbox or checklist approach to learning, you know, maybe they can outsource that to AI. However, if we're talking about reflecting about your own personal experiences, trying to interpret them, you know, drawn meaning from them, I mean, that has to be done by an individual.

Helen Chen 26:51

Now, it's intriguing to think, can an AI chatbot help them, you know, uncover what kinds of things were meaningful? Because it's like having a conversation and reflection through conversation is something that I do believe in. So if you're having a conversation with another person versus if you're having a conversation with a chatbot, which then can speak it back to you, be able to summarise, this is what you said, and then for the individual to be able to look at that and say, 'Oh, I hadn't realised that feature of that particular experience or the project that I worked on, actually was important in ways that I didn't see at the time.' I just think it's easier to kind of be able to look at that's what I said, but is that really what I meant? You know, is the value in the meaning is that really coming through? And if not, could I talk about it in a different way? Or how do I represent that?

Kristina Hoeppner 27:43

Yes, that is very intriguing. Since we do know that learning happens in that conversation through giving and receiving feedback to thinking beyond what you have thought, and Rita Zuba Prokopetz, for example, has done quite a bit of work in that area around feedback giving and feedback receiving. So if the technology can help in that area to elicit those things, when a student might be learning on their own or might not have that conversation partner available, when they are creating their portfolio will be good to follow on. 

Kristina Hoeppner 28:16

What would you'd like to be able to do with portfolios right now that you can't just yet fully do?

Helen Chen 28:23

I think we're kind of at a stage with ePortfolios, where if I had started keeping a portfolio in the early 2000s, where would I be now? This sort of accumulation of information, artefacts, and so on, what does that look like? Some of the tools, maybe some of the eCommerce related tools that I've seen employed in some portfolios, where you can tag experiences, you can tag different artefacts, and then be able to filter them, you know, by calling up all the experiences that were related to a particular, you know, subject area or a particular skill, I find that very interesting, you know, as a tool to help me make sense of my various experiences. 

Helen Chen 29:08

Still, I think the focus on developmental, formative portfolios, portfolios, not so much as showcase that are kind of that polished collection of exemplary work, but how can portfolios be used more formatively? Certainly, we've had students in our classes who are not looking to build a portfolio for employment, but they're looking to build a portfolio for collaboration to find like minded people who would they could have conversations with. 

Helen Chen 29:34

Increasingly I think about portfolios as something that can help someone else advocate for you that it can be something that you know, if we've met, and I would like to introduce you to a colleague of mine, how can you ensure that the way I represent your story as I'm trying to do this email introduction is accurate? And the best thing I mean, usually if I'm doing an email introduction, I'm sending a LinkedIn profile or some kind of document that could better explain why I think you should be connected with my colleague. Those are some aspects. 

Helen Chen 30:09

The last I would think, is the ability to be selective in audience like creating more tailored portfolios. And that was an idea that I got from Jeff Yan of Digication many years ago; that what if you could create tailored portfolios for specific positions or specific audiences? What would that look like? It's a lot of work, you know, to kind of think about that, but I think being more selective and tailored could be features that could emerge in the future that can be helpful.

Kristina Hoeppner 30:37

That is, I think we have a dedicated portfolio platform like Digication that you've mentioned, but also Mahara that I work on can really help because in contrast to a LinkedIn profile, which is the LinkedIn profile, everything you put on there is always visible, you cannot really tailor it, with a dedicated portfolio platform, you can create those multiple portfolios, have some private just for yourself, others that might only be shared with fellow students or a mentor, and then yet others that you use for employment purposes, and then also have a portfolio for each employer that you might want to get in touch with. So that is I think we have we have that flexibility with the dedicated portfolio platforms to help us there. 

Kristina Hoeppner 31:22

Three last questions for you that I'm asking everyone, Helen. Which words or maybe even short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Helen Chen 31:33

So when I think about the 'e' in ePortfolio, you know, I go back to a wonderful piece written by Ashley Blackburn, who redefined the 'e' in ePortfolio as experience, evidence, and engagement. And of course, when I first started doing portfolios, the 'e' 100% cert for electronic, but of course, now we assume that, of course, it's going to be electronic or digital portfolio. So when I think about the 'e' in ePortfolio, the three words that come to mind are empowerment, empowering individuals to really take ownership of their learning and how they want to represent themselves and how they want to tell their story. The idea of equity that it becomes a platform that allows students from all different backgrounds and interests to be able to tell their story in the ways that they want to tell it, and especially when I think about my colleagues at LaGuardia Community College and the work that they're doing, the work that they've done, actually, allowing portfolios as that platform to increase greater equity and inclusivity and access. The last word would be empathy. Empathy, for the student experience, experience a variety of people to be able to understand where they're coming from, who they are, and the story that they want to tell. 

Kristina Hoeppner 32:50

Helen, what tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities? 

Helen Chen 32:57

Here, I would draw from what I've learned from my colleagues in the Stanford d.school and the design thinking process of having empathy for who you're designing for, typically students, but also faculty, staff, and many others.

Kristina Hoeppner 33:12

Now looking at the student side of things, what advice do you have for portfolio authors?

Helen Chen 33:17

The advice I would have for portfolio authors reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the students that was in my class this past winter. She said her portfolio represents her, but doesn't speak for her. And so for portfolio authors, and particularly for students, it's not going to be just copying and pasting your resume and putting it on a website. You also don't want to include necessarily everything that you've ever done. When I think about what is a portfolio not. And it's not intended to be a scrapbook or a yearbook, you know or even a transcript or resume, it's again, it's not supposed to be all inclusive. The idea is to share enough because it's through this digital format, to get people interested, such that they want to learn more. They want to have that follow-up conversation with you. So that's the ask with any kind of portfolio, I think, is that you intrigue them enough that they want to have that follow-up conversation. So again, it's a representation of you, but it doesn't represent all of you, and therefore the opportunity for them to want to come and speak to you.

Kristina Hoeppner 34:25

I really like that idea of making it that starting point to have a conversation afterwards so that it's not all just digitally mediated, but you actually also get to the conversation with these students or whoever had created the portfolio. 

Helen Chen 34:40

Yes. 

Kristina Hoeppner 34:41

Thank you so much for your time.

Helen Chen 34:43

Thank you, Kristina. I really enjoyed this conversation and welcome any additional follow-up if anyone has additional questions.

Kristina Hoeppner 34:51

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Helen Chen. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find links and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the portfolio platform Mahara. Our next podcast will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about it so they can subscribe as well. Until then, create, share, and engage.