Ruth Cox & Kevin Kelly: Grow and nurture the portfolio through the framework of ePorticulture

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 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 00:27

Today I'm speaking with Dr Ruth Cox and Dr Kevin Kelly. Ruth and Kevin were instrumental in establishing the ePortfolio initiative at San Francisco State University in the mid to late 2000s, researching comprehensive assessment strategies that benefit both learners and support programme assessment. In this conversation, we're going back to those roots to see how they held on to the ground and see what plant or plants have grown out of the initiative. 

Kristina Hoeppner 00:54

Ruth and Kevin, it's a pleasure to talk with you. Ruth, let's start with you because you're new to the podcast. And so please tell us a little bit about yourself. What did you do at San Francisco State and also your wider academic career because now of course you are retired and enjoy a different life. 

Ruth Cox 01:13

Thanks, Kristina. It's lovely to be here with Kevin and with you. We've enjoyed your podcast. So it's fun to be a part of it now. My life I think of in three acts. My first act was as a performing artists in the theatre and in television. After that, I did do a doctorate in psychology and began teaching at San Francisco State in 2001. Almost 20 years ago, in 2005, Kevin and I met to do a needs assessment for our campus related to portfolios. We learned that there was a need and so we were able to begin to plant the seeds for this project almost 20 years ago. Now I am in my third act and raising a grandchild and still living in San Francisco. Excited to think back over what has happened in all of our years of doing this work. 

Kristina Hoeppner 02:00

Thank you, Ruth. Kevin, our listeners may remember you from an earlier podcast episode where you and Christine Slade talk about the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principle of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Decolonisation. So they may also remember that you are still a lecturer at San Francisco State and also a consultant working with lots of colleges and universities. What would you like to share about yourself today in our current context? 

Kevin Kelly 02:28

Well, in our current context, it probably emerged in that podcast with Christine Slade that I'm also a member of the board for the Association of Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) and was fortunate and honoured to be their keynote speaker this past July at their conference, and also got to be the keynote speaker for the ePortfolios Australia Forum. It was hosted at Charles Darwin University in Australia. I didn't quite get there in person, but I did get there remotely. So always keeping busy as I like to say and excited to be here. Thank you so much for the opportunity. 

Kristina Hoeppner 03:10

Kevin, besides the obvious speaking engagements, you're also writing quite a bit and are now I believe on your third or is it already your fourth book?

Kevin Kelly 03:19

This is true and seldom wrong and right again, I like to say. So the book that I just turned into the publisher, the manuscript is called 'Making college courses flexible' and is designed to support instructors and instructional designers and campus leaders as they grapple with how do we create equivalent learning experiences for students who might be in different places in the classroom or remote or different times: in real time or on students' own time. And so those require some fancy footwork by instructors who are still leaving the pandemic with a little bit of a head spin. So I'm excited about what that book offers. And then I'm working with a colleague, Katie Linder, on the second edition of her book, 'The blended course design workbook'. Next year will be a busy year for me signing all three copies of the books that people buy.

Kristina Hoeppner 03:19

Wonderful. And we'll make sure to link to all of those publications as long as they already have a website for it so that people can look at them because I think while they do not have the portfolio in the title, I think they are really important also for our conversation today because they also show the range of fields that you're working in, that you're considering in your teaching and also in your practice relating to digital technologies, assessment, and always ensuring that students can bring in themselves in the learning process, but also not forgetting the lecturer, forgetting the tutors, and the learning designers.

Kristina Hoeppner 04:52

So for you, where does the portfolio fit in at all and of course, Ruth, you already mentioned that you and Kevin met in 2005 to talk about portfolios. How did you get introduced to that practice and the tool back in the day? 

Ruth Cox 05:06

Well, I think because my background was in the expressive arts, the idea of self reflective learning was always a part of my experience in my undergraduate years. Many of my friends and myself, we had to create performance based portfolios. So bringing that to San Francisco State, we began to realise that a number of disciplines already did require a paper based culminating or capstone project, and many times those projects would just be finished and then left behind. 

Ruth Cox 05:36

So Kevin, and I had an interesting experience; I told him that the chair of our department had a pile of fantastic portfolios under her desk that no one came back to get after turning them in. And I said, "I think we can do better than that." At that point, Kevin had already been helping people put their learning onto CD ROMs, right, through K-12 kinds of ways to document and assess learning more creatively. So it just made sense to make this shift to a digital way of collecting and reflecting and selecting people's work. Then we got lucky because we had leadership that admired the idea and said, "You know what, there's a need, could you guys go out and talk to 80 different disciplines and see on our large campus, what might be the need?" So we had a lot of fun, and the rest was history, I guess, you might say [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner 06:22

Kevin, what was the needs that you had been identified? And I believe you started with health sciences as one of your your pilot programmes, right?

Ruth Cox 06:31

That was my discipline. I was teaching in the Health Education Department. That was where we started. 

Kevin Kelly 06:37

We included, as Ruth mentioned, a number of disciplines ranging from education, which she mentioned, I had been involved in a grant to prepare future educators in the K-12 space to use technology in their teaching, and as part of that many of the secondary education and elementary education instructors required their students to create portfolios. And they were in that same transition that Ruth mentioned, of moving from paper portfolios to electronic. In the early days, 1999, that was something as simple as creating a branching logic PowerPoint where you create a menu on the opening slide and allow people to navigate around, much like you would see on the web today. And they would put this on a CD ROM because the internet was less prevalent at that time. 

Kevin Kelly 07:26

But we also found a wide variety of disciplines that either were considering or already moving toward a digital portfolio experience when you look at nursing, journalism, education, health sciences, just the number of disciplines, I think we found out of the 80, almost a third were either using portfolios or considering their use to change the way that they asked students to demonstrate proficiency not only of course level outcomes, but programme level outcomes. That allowed us to, as Ruth said, find some executive stakeholders to sponsor our work and really put some meat on the skeleton.

Ruth Cox 08:08

The other interesting discovery was that when I went in search of a tool to use, I found that there was an entire state using portfolios quite successfully, and it was the state of Minnesota. So we forged a friendship with the state of Minnesota technology teams in their CSU like system, and we used eFolioMinnesota, and they gave us enormous support in the Master's in Public Health Department and in Health Sciences. It was really exciting to learn how they were using it for workforce development, how they were using portfolios in ways that we hadn't even yet thought about. It was a great collaboration at a state level to meet the folks from eFolio.

Kristina Hoeppner 08:48

That would have also been a wonderful way to envisage what students might be able to do with portfolios after they graduated because if I remember correctly, the eFolio project in Minnesota was very much geared towards the lifelong portfolio where you can come back, where you use it for career purposes, and so on, and not just in the pure educational setting. 

Ruth Cox 09:10

And also transfer from high school to two-year [college] or two-year to four-year, which was part of the model that we began thinking about how some of the programmes like the Metro Academies Program, we could bring people from City College of San Francisco over to San Francisco State with a portfolio that might have been started in their first two years and transfer with them. Actually, Kevin and I and two other authors, Alycia Shada and Savita Malik, were able to be in the first volume of The International Journal of Electronic Portfolios with this project that we started.

Kristina Hoeppner 09:43

Yeah, you are true pioneers in all things ePortfolio. 

Ruth Cox 09:47

Yeah, we were a long time ago [laughs]. 

Kristina Hoeppner 09:50

Yeah, and still in the field. And Kevin, I think it was you who just mentioned that portfolios were used in roughly a third of the study programmes that were at San Francisco State. That's quite a large number at that time. Were that mainly study programmes that were geared towards a profession or recertification or accreditation? Or was it really many different areas? And do you remember why they had that ePortfolio or portfolio component?

Kevin Kelly 10:19

Well, I'll ask Ruth to fill in my gaps in memory, but I do think a large number of them, again, the ones that I listed before nursing, journalism, education, the health industry, all of those have the potential to showcase not only a student's academic work, but to bridge to career. There were other disciplines, however, even my own course, which was called 'Learning with your mobile device' was something that was done in isolation as an undergraduate general education course. It wasn't tied to anything else, but I really wanted students to be able to capture their work in ways that wouldn't get lost when the learning management system course shell closed, and the students no longer had access to their work. 

Kevin Kelly 11:03

As a matter of fact, one of the team at the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching where Ruth and I met originally, his name is Taylor, and he came on board as someone who wishes he had had a portfolio when he was going through his studies. When he transferred from the community college to the university, he had one major and then he switched to English. And they asked him for his written work as evidence of, you know, his preparedness for the major. The only problem was, he had celebrated his leaving the community college with a bonfire at the beach and had burned all of his papers in a cathartic expression and had no papers left. He didn't have a digital copy of any of them at that time. So he had to rewrite many essays in order to showcase that he was ready to go into the field of English. It was those types of student experience stories that helped me at least understand the value of ePortfolios beyond just supporting a programme that's seeking a pathway to maintain accreditation or to support students getting into a particular career.

Ruth Cox 12:15

Another department that we supported for many years was Liberal Studies, which really had, you know, very multidisciplinary coursework that students were taking all over campus. The Liberal Studies core faculty really appreciated seeing what the students were doing. Otherwise, they really didn't have windows into all the different things that students were doing. Likewise, Geography; we had a really innovative geography professor that loved seeing her students' work through, you know, all the different documenting they were doing.

Kristina Hoeppner 12:44

That's wonderful to see the breadth in which study programmes it was used because of course, we all know that pharmacists, nurses, teachers, and the like to keep a portfolio because it also goes towards their professional certification by geography, or in our context here in Aotearoa, we also use it with vocational students so that you can have plumbers creating their portfolios and hairdressers. It's, of course, also a good way of showcasing their skills and showcasing their progress. 

Kristina Hoeppner 13:12

The idea that you came up with at San Francisco State, and the opening metaphor already alluded to it a little bit, was that you coined the term 'porticulture', which sounds a little bit like horticulture, and you do have that plant metaphor going throughout your publications and when you talk about the portfolio initiative. So what did you envisage by creating a porticulture at San Francisco State?

Ruth Cox 13:40

Well, first of all, we're both gardeners, and we're both naturephiles. We both love nature and the natural world. I think we really looked at the cycle of plant growth and the cycle being the sort of the basic four components of preparing the soil and planting seeds or transplanting seeds, growing and then harvesting. So when we thought about comprehensive learning assessment, we thought about using the same cycle, basically. It actually overlaid quite well. And it was a nice way to be able to talk to students and faculty. It was understandable, you know, it was grounded, literally. It made sense.

Kevin Kelly 14:20

Well and to piggyback on that idea, it's also a reflection of the fact that a garden is never finished. It's constantly evolving, and so we could let students know that the work that they're doing now in terms of preparing the soil and transplanting work and harvesting, that effort can translate into what happens next season, whether that be going off to graduate school or transferring from community college to four-year university or preparing for the profession. All of these represent new iterations of the same cycle. We hopefully instilled in students a feeling that they should and could continue their work with the ePortfolio once they left San Francisco State.

Kristina Hoeppner 15:05

I think we can also then take it further to say you trim things off, so you go through your portfolio, you curate it, or you transplant some of the plants into a different part of the garden if you want to showcase something else. It's a very rich metaphor that allows for a lot of connections and also that visualisation, which I think helps students who had never encountered a portfolio before to make sense of what they can do with it. 

Kristina Hoeppner 15:32

You've not just looked at the portfolio as that one thing that is there for the student, but to also take it all the way up to orbit the programme assessment. How did you come up with that idea that you did not just want to create one portfolio but use it for multiple purposes?

Ruth Cox 15:51

Well, I think the accrediting bodies were ready to think about new ways of doing things. And I think we all know that changing the culture of assessment is probably one of the most intractable aspects of K through 12 and higher education. So we were working, for example, in the Masters in Public Health, and the governing bodies were interested in seeing student work. So we had rooms filled with student work that we'd had to save over the years, and we began to show them some of these digital portfolios, and they were just really amazed and excited to be able to so easily share with the accreditors work instead of having a lock and key and having to literally go into a room to do a programme assessment. We were able to share more actively and directly with the assessment authorities. There was something about that, in terms of programme review, that was really heartening. 

Ruth Cox 16:44

Likewise, you know, we opened up the doors of the classrooms. So many times faculty doesn't know what assignments each other are sharing or giving. And so suddenly, a faculty member could say, "Please take a look at the capstone projects that my students have done and how it relates to the community assessment that you did in the first semester." So connecting the dots for faculty was also really a wonderful, I think, aspect of widening it out. 

Kristina Hoeppner 17:08

How did the students take it on to suddenly share their work with others? Because before that they've probably primarily shared a test with their instructors, or were they already used to sharing their portfolios with other students when it was in a non-digital format?

Ruth Cox 17:23

Well, in that department, we had a lot of peer review, and I think many departments had already started doing quite a bit of peer review. This just made it easier to share the work. Do you think so, Kevin, did you see that experience?

Kevin Kelly 17:34

I did, and I also feel like when you make your work public, it changes the motivation levels for students because they know that it's got an audience, and they actually put additional effort into what they produce. Therefore, we can benefit from that, and also let students know that this is a way that they can continue to get feedback cycles again, after they leave, ask their peers for feedback about the work that they're doing if they're going to use it as evidence for a promotion at work or anything else that might benefit them down the road.

Ruth Cox 18:12

Some of our projects involved community involvement in public health in particular, so that students who, for example, were working in HIV clinics in San Francisco, they were working in a number of public health settings in improving housing, improving air, water quality projects, and they had never been able to share their final projects with the community based organisations that they had been embedded in. So this became the first time where we could open a window to the community to see the impact of the actual work that students were doing on behalf of these community based organisations. And likewise, if they were working in a team, then it meant that everyone on that team could share the same video or the same artefact or the same research that they had done in the organisation. So actually, we got feedback from community based organisations that they were getting donations to their organisations based on the fact that they had a relationship with our department. That was really a big deal to realise that the impact was a circular impact.

Kristina Hoeppner 19:06

Probably also quite a bit of motivation for the students. 

Ruth Cox 19:09

Yeah, much more.

Kevin Kelly 19:10

We saw a similar dynamic for the California Studies programme where students used the portfolios to highlight their internship with the National Park Service. And so again, it was a way of benefiting both parties, the community organisation and the students and the campus and create kind of a reciprocal nature to that partnerships so that they wished to continue it over and over whereas in some cases, we've seen those partnerships die on the vine to continue that ePorticulture metaphor because there is less of a tangible connection. It's not as visible and so people don't tend to it as often.

Ruth Cox 19:49

Yeah, I forgot about the Parks and Rec[reation], that was another department that we worked with quite a bit. 

Kristina Hoeppner 19:54

Now looking back at your initiative that you started a little over 15 years ago, where is the garden at? Is there a little trimming to do? Is there a lot of free planting going on? Where do you think you have helped the portfolio initiative at SFSU?

Kevin Kelly 20:11

I think it might have been left to go back to a more natural state. I don't think that the current team at San Francisco State is tending the garden the same way, Ruth, myself, and our team did back in the late 2000s, early 2010s. That being said, there's still ePortfolio work going on, but it's happening in a more organic state. Again, probably at individual course level, some programmes have adopted ePortfolios, a new lease since Ruth and I have left the campus and others have stopped using it altogether. 

Kevin Kelly 20:36

Some of our biggest users like the Metro programmes or others are using other ways to showcase students' achievements, and so it's probably indicative of how all gardens go through periods of change. And I'm hopeful that the seeds that we planted will emerge when we get to a good rainstorm.

Ruth Cox 21:05

I think you do need champions for these kinds of projects, and so you do need stewards, you do need land managers, you do need long term visioning. You know, leadership is critical, and the culture of assessment, I think, still is pretty entrenched and hasn't changed as much as I would have hoped. So some of these things have gone into the worm bin and are being composted, some of these ideas, but I think there's still all rich early work is still there, and anyone could just pick it up at any time and start planning again very easily. I hope also that in the arts, I think it's never gone away. And so it's just richer now, possibilities. 

Ruth Cox 21:45

I think one sort of dead end was trying to adopt a universal system funded, campus wide, system wide solution. Somehow that took us into an area that wasn't necessarily all that helpful, but sometimes the smaller plantings were more successful, rather than trying to overlay an entire system wide, you know, implementation.

Kristina Hoeppner 22:04

Kind of having that sustainable practice where everybody tends to their little corner of the garden, rather than trying to coordinate an entire park of a vast area where then nobody really feels responsible for it so much. 

Kevin Kelly 22:17

People will use different tools for that tending of their own corner of the community garden, let's say. So one way that Ruth and I supported kind of at a meta level was to focus on process rather than the tool. After doing that needs assessment, we identified that there what - five or six different tools being used or being considered throughout the campus, and so rather than trying to make everybody switch to one and doing a large, laborious process, we focused on the process that Ruth identified earlier: you collect your work, you select the work that does what you want it to do for a specific audience, you reflect on the nature of that work and what it means in a specific context, and then you build the portfolio and publish it. So collect, select, reflect, build, and publish became this cycle that we promoted with departments, regardless of what tool they use. 

Ruth Cox 22:17

Exactly.

Kevin Kelly 22:18

And in some cases, that meant that our team had to become more proficient with a number of tools, as Ruth and our colleague Angie and others went out to either community colleges or different disciplines at San Francisco State to prepare the students to use those tools for those different purposes. Hopefully, again, we'll be able to cut through some of the overgrowth that's occurring right now and take advantage of the composting because I think the soil is ready for another round of plantings and good things in store for San Francisco State. 

Kristina Hoeppner 23:47

Kevin, you just mentioned the various technologies that you had investigated, and so I think it is a good reminder that portfolios are not so much about the technology that yes, the technology is important for students to create or to upload their evidence, to share the evidence, to reflect easily, but it is really the pedagogy behind it, why we want students and also faculty to create those portfolios, what we can do with them, that we can also use them for that programmatic assessment, that we can do so many things with them, and that it's more about that and that that practice, of course needs to be established at the organisation in order to flourish and attract people to look at those portfolios.

Ruth Cox 24:28

That's well said, Kristina, and that's I feel sustainable. I feel really, that the process is memorable and is lifelong. Once you've left the higher learning space, you have your whole life in which to do the same iteration of collecting and selecting, reflecting what you want to put forward in your life, no matter what it is you're doing. So I think the process is where we really loved focusing, and I still feel strongly that it's a good one. 

Kristina Hoeppner 24:56

Now what do you wish you'd been able to do back then when you piloted your portfolio initiative?

Kevin Kelly 25:03

I think the ability to spotlight student work in a more public and visible space. Every time that we wanted people to get an idea of the impact that this could have for students to share work with their families, if they're first generation and want them to see how they are developing in ways that their family might not understand without some contextual clues of 'hey, this is the work I'm producing in this new space that I'm in.' But it requires sending a link to someone, it requires making it easy to find and with all the different tools means that there's no one space. Even on our ePortfolio website, we did a fairly good job of posting examples with students' permission of portfolios that we felt were really model that other students could aspire to make portfolios like these in a diversity of expressions. 

Kevin Kelly 25:57

Ruth and I wrote a chapter of a book called 'Techno expression', and I think that might be one of the things that we wished back then, that we could foster more is that students' ability to be creative in the ways that they showcase their work and not be as hindered by the structure that individual departments might need in order to make sense of that work and give them a score [laughs] and a degree. So that balance right of who owns it? The students might own the work in the portfolio, but the institutions create a process by which they share it. So it's this mix of who's really being served here? In many cases it's both. And so hopefully, students that we were able to touch, were aware that they could create new portfolios for different purposes, and again, extend that cycle of 'hey, now that I've completed my two year degree or my four year degree or my graduate degree, I can keep creating new portfolios for new purposes and keep that cycle going for myself personally.' 

Ruth Cox 27:00

Kevin really touched on a lot of things I was thinking. So thank you for that, Kevin [laughs], especially being able to share out learning gets very hidden. And you know, it's really special to be able to share a link. I remember when Savi, one of our students who then went on to be a leader in the Metro Academies was able to share it with her grandparents who were living in Kenya, that was the first time they said they understood her work. They understood why she was passionate about what she was doing. 

Ruth Cox 27:26

So for me, I had a little sadness when the portfolios would be wiped away because they were being held into the institutional umbrella, you know, they weren't the owned by the student. So I would encourage all of my students to get a copy of their portfolio in some durable format so that they could kick it with them. I really would have liked that balance to be on the side of the ownership of the learner, and the learner gets to take it with them, no matter where they go. I think some people did morph them and change them into professional portfolios, and they use them to present themselves to the world in very creative ways. But there's a lot of films that were made, for example, documentaries that were made during that time that were embedded in portfolios that have endured. 

Ruth Cox 28:09

And in fact, if you go on the web, a lot of the portfolios that we created, were being used in presentations to show this is what a really good portfolio looks like [laughs]. They've had a legacy that's continued. Our ancestral roots are still being pulled forward on the web. I'm not sure how some of the owners of those portfolios feel, but they escaped from the bounds of the institution and have a life of their own. I'm a learner centred believer, and I want the learner to be able to own their own work and bring it with them no matter where they are, what they're doing. 

Kristina Hoeppner 28:37

The Internet keeps it forever. 

Ruth Cox 28:38

It does.

Kristina Hoeppner 28:39

Now, you already mentioned that tending to a garden is always quite a bit of work and that right now, it seems like the garden at San Francisco State has entered a bit of a wild phase, which of course allows for lots of different growth, and Kevin mentioned the organic growth there. Are there any trends that you have observed in portfolio work over the years that you might want to mention, either with or without a gardening metaphor?

Ruth Cox 29:09

Well, I think one of the most amazing advances has been the PEARL advanced system that AAC&U has created to be able to cite articles related to portfolio. There's almost 1,000 different articles in that database. That's a very significant investment that they made in chronicling the kind of research that's come out of this work. So that's one thing that's been pretty cool.

Kristina Hoeppner 29:31

Yeah, and I still remember the AAEEBL presentation that Jessica Chittum gave, I would want to say maybe 2015, maybe 2016 when the conference was still in Boston, where she introduced the PEARL database because she started out creating it and really showed where the research happened that a lot of the research initially was very descriptive, so more of the show and tell, but that some research has already started looking into more qualitative research and also quantitative research in order to really also establish portfolios as a field of study. And so it good to keep up with its database of those peer reviewed articles to make sure that all those voices are heard and that people can find the literature in the field very quickly. Kevin, is there anything for you?

Kevin Kelly 30:23

In my role as a board member for AAEEBL, I have seen the emergence of ePortfolios being used for professional purposes within higher education. So the number of sessions at the AAEEBL conference every summer has seen an increase in the number of sessions devoted to not only presentations about how people are using their portfolios professionally, but workshops for practitioners to begin thinking about creating portfolios or making their portfolios more robust, and possibly even using them in conjunction with other platforms like LinkedIn or places where people expect career specific information about an individual to be housed. And so it's this rather than one big garden, lots of micro gardens, maybe it's a container garden where these things reside all throughout a space, but in different vehicles.

Kristina Hoeppner 31:18

Then when you move on to something new, you take your container with you and keep it for that lifelong practice of gardening. Is the only thing that you'd like to be able to do with portfolios that you simply just can't yet fully do? Kevin, do you want to start your?

Kevin Kelly 31:35

Sure. Well, I would say kind of building on the idea that I came up with earlier that technologies are there, but they're such a disparate number of tools that people use for portfolios that it hasn't become institutionalised the same way a learning management system where you have, let's say, at San Francisco State 25,000 students all using the same tool for specific purposes. When you get to ePortfolios, you have students creating YouTube channels and LinkedIn pages and Wix or Weebly websites. And these are all things that they're doing on their own without any instigation from the institution itself. Then you had all the ones that the programmes and institutions place on the students to use. So you get this really disparate set of items, artefacts that aren't contained in one place and makes it harder for individuals, whether they be future employees or peers and colleagues and classmates to see the breadth and depth of the student's work over time. 

Kevin Kelly 32:37

So I think it would be nice to have some sort of aggregator so that it's easy for a student to use all the tools at their disposal, but make it possible for someone to see the richness of their growth over time and also the ability to provide a two way conversation. So they're giving feedback, they're publishing with Creative Commons, so other people can build on it, and other ways that basically constitute them. This isn't a one way transmission, here's my stuff, but instead, 'hey, I'm sharing this with the world in the hopes that it makes your work easier or allows you to move in directions that you hadn't considered.' 

Kristina Hoeppner 33:14

It's interesting that you mentioned the aggregator because that's exactly what I often think their portfolio is that it brings together all those different sources, of course, files from the computer, or just things written directly in the portfolio, but also being able to embed things from social media in order to bring all of that together in one place. So we are kind of do ending up with one tool that students would need to access in order to curate all the sources from different areas, which then to Ruth's point earlier, might make it difficult for some to kind of buy in because they might have different requirements, or they might prefer a different tool or kind of having that one size fits all tool might not work as well as it does in the learning management space because the portfolio has such a rich way and allows for so many different ways of actually working.

Ruth Cox 34:08

Yeah, I can remember when I think about what I would like portfolios to do that we can't yet do fully, I remember some of the student frustrations at the time that we were doing it, and a lot of it revolved around the technologies that the students were using out in the world were so much more sophisticated than the portfolio tools that we were offering them from the university. So for example, in apparel design, we had fashion designers who had these amazing portfolios already in the world. I think they were using, you know, Weebly or they were using Wix, some kind of a page builder, but they were able to embed so much more media and a range of expression than we could manage to host for them. 

Ruth Cox 34:46

And so whatever it is, it has to be, again, the learner's portfolio where they get to put, you know, as much in as they need to and then curate it for different purposes, but also take it away with them at the end of this whole experience is really important how to bundle it up and take it away without it being too difficult to do that. I can remember so many frustrations for students who were already well down the path and would have been the most exemplary expressions of portfolios who were kind of stopped in their tracks. I'd like to get around that.

Kevin Kelly 35:16

Well, Ruth, that makes me think maybe in part because I teach a class called 'How to learn with your mobile device', making it easier for students to submit work to their portfolios mobily, if that's a word.

Ruth Cox 35:28

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly 35:29

Because I can imagine that having to record something and then go to your computer and edit it down and write a reflection to be able to do many of those things from the device while you're in the field would make it a more tangible and also just easier to execute.

Ruth Cox 35:47

It's much easier to make a film now on your phone than it is anywhere else [laughs]. So yeah, it's good. The more mobile the better. I agree, Kevin.

Kristina Hoeppner 35:54

Thank you for that idea. And now already to our quick answer round. So I'd like each of you to answer the three questions so that we get doubled the advice and double the insight to other episodes. Let's start with Ruth for the first question. Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Ruth Cox 36:16

Reflection, expression, ownership.

Kristina Hoeppner 36:20

Kevin, do you have another three words to the three words that you already shared a few months ago?

Kevin Kelly 36:25

Well, let's see if they're the same [laughs]. Metacognition, for sure. Reflection, I would add and so repeating what Ruth mentioned. I'll stop at those two.

Kristina Hoeppner 36:35

I do like repeating words because they do help the word cloud to have some bigger words in there. And to see the trends there.

Ruth Cox 36:41

I just want to say I actually had fun with that because I put my keywords into the PEARL database advanced search, just to see what would come up in the portfolio database. So that was kind of fun. 

Kristina Hoeppner 36:51

Did you get something for each of your three words? 

Ruth Cox 36:54

Yeah, I did, I did, for reflection, expression, and ownership. I also tried empowerment and student agency, and a lot of articles came up.

Kristina Hoeppner 37:02

So see Kevin, now you also have two more additional words that you can add to your list [laughs] since you left an empty space there.

Kevin Kelly 37:10

I'm gonna say 'community' for my third word. 

Kristina Hoeppner 37:13

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

Kevin Kelly 37:21

Borrowing the word from Ruth, empower the students to either own what they've created or transplant it to something that they own soon after the grading and feedback from the instructor is completed. Really having those learnings designers and instructors focus on a student centred approach, as Ruth has pointed out several times, that is really, I think, one of the most important aspects of this work.

Kristina Hoeppner 37:45

Ruth, do you also have a tip to share?

Ruth Cox 37:48

I like the idea of growth over time. So holding the idea that when you start a programme or you start some kind of a path that you want to document the beginning stages and then be able to look back over time and see your growth over time and be ready to be amazed and help students to hold on to their work and look back and even revise earlier work. 

Kristina Hoeppner 38:10

Now to the last two tips. Again, Kevin, we'll start with you. What advice do you have for portfolio authors?

Kevin Kelly 38:17

Well, if we mean portfolio authors as people constructing an electronic portfolio, then I would say be bold. Think about multiple audiences so that you can reuse artefacts for different reasons. One, to get a score from an instructor, one to share with your family and friends, one to impress or at least show a prospective employer that you have the skills and knowledge that they need and want and to do all that requires not hiding under a bushel. The light needs to shine brightly, and so do it in a way that's compelling.

Kristina Hoeppner 38:54

Thank you. Ruth, what is your advice?

Ruth Cox 38:57

I like the idea of - there's a word called 'bricolage', which really means making do with what's at hand. I would really advise portfolio makers to never throw anything away. Even if you think something is garbage, don't throw it away. Put an early draft, put an early version of a painting or a design aside into your portfolio and just let it be there. So in other words, have a box that everything is held in and then when you're starting to put together some kind of a presentation, as Kevin said, for a different audience, maybe for a class or for a family member or for prospective employer, look back over everything. And you'll be surprised there might be something in there that would be really relevant to share. 

Ruth Cox 39:01

Making do with what's at hand, not throwing things away, being ready to be amazed and surprised at your own creation because sometimes we move so fast in life, we've forgotten what we've already done, and we need to go back and reflect and pull things forward that we may have already forgotten about.

Kristina Hoeppner 39:54

Thank you so much for that wealth of advice. And Kevin, you're the third person who had mentioned 'be bold'. So there's definitely a trend there as well. Many thanks, Ruth and Kevin, for this conversation this morning. It was wonderful to reflect and look back at the portfolio initiative that you started in the mid 2000s, and to get a little bit behind the thinking of why you wanted to foster the ePorticulture at your institution and help students and also staff in the entire programmes to make good use of the portfolios. 

Ruth Cox 40:33

Thank you, Kristina. It's lovely to reflect back and be honoured in this way for the work we did. Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner 40:42

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Ruth Cox and Dr Kevin Kelley. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. 

Kristina Hoeppner 41:00

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 episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about it so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.