Allison Miller: The portfolio is a process

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

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. Allison Miller is my guest today, and I'm looking forward to this chat, as I've known her pretty web since I started working at Catalyst, which is now 14 years ago. Welcome to the podcast, Allison.

Allison Miller: 0:43

Thank you, Kristina.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:45

Allison, you are a lifelong learner, which is not only exemplified by your many qualifications of which I think your Masters of Learning and Development with specialisation in Organisational Development is only the latest. Can you please tell us a bit about yourself? What do you do?

Allison Miller: 1:02

I got a number of hats. I like to think of it as a portfolio career that I have. And it really works for me because I think at this stage of my life and my career, it's nice to be able to pick and choose what you do. So I have a business called Digital Capability. I'm the Director and Lead Consultant there. The main focus we have there, there's probably two strong arms one is around course and assessment, sometimes quite bespoke, but sometimes not around course development and assessment writing and making sure that they fit in the compliance area of the vocational education training sector, mostly within Australia, but sometimes it's outside of that realm as well. And then the other bit is about capability development, very much around educators and again, very much mostly around educators, teachers within the vocational education and training sector. That's really where my passion lies is around building capability in other people. I get very excited about that. But I'm also still a teacher as well. So they do let me still teach within the VET sector, which again, I really enjoy.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:03

Allison, VET for those that are not familiar with that abbreviation outside of Australia, what does it stand for?

Allison Miller: 2:11

Vocational education and Training. Normally, it's technicals, normally it's TVET. Like a lot of places do as in Germany, they have a strong vocational education training sector, UK would have the further education, and certainly other countries around the world have technical vocational education and training. So it's an international kind of term.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:31

Allison, you talked about you hat of being Director and Lead Consultant of Digital Capability, and you're located in Adelaide, Australia if somebody didn't catch that on your accent. I though initially got to know you're through another one of your roles, namely, being involved heavily with ePortfolios Australia, What is that all about?

Allison Miller: 2:52

So ePortfolios Australia is what I will say a true community of practice. It evolved out of a couple of projects that we're running at the end of the 2000s, and the beginning of the 2010s decade, so around 2008, 2009, 2010. There were two strong projects going on at that time. One was being led out of Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the other from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, and there was funding to manage those two projects. But when that funding fell away, the community actually stood up and said, 'Well, we still want to do something,' and from that we've formed ePortfolios Australia. Professional network of people who are really keen around ePortfolio practice or ePortfolio pedagogy and about supporting research around that as well. So it's around professional development, trying to build networks, and support people who are often working in quite niche areas, and also some researchers. You're involved at moment with one of those research projects around ePortfolios, which is exciting.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:55

The community is absolutely fabulous and very active as well, pretty much on a weekly basis.

Allison Miller: 4:02

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:03

Now we've already heard about ePortfolios Australia, the community of practice, there, but Allison, how did you actually get started with portfolios yourself?

Allison Miller: 4:12

I was probably about six or seven years into my teaching within the VET sector, and then I got told that if I wanted to get up the next kind of rung of, let's say, the pay scale, but you know, also the title, so moving on from what they would call a lecture to a senior lecturer, that I would need to create a portfolio of evidence over the last five years of my life. And I was really quite annoyed that they told me this seven years into my teaching that 'Oh, you need to create this portfolio.' So why didn't anybody tell me about this portfolio? So I spent 12 months getting up at five because my kids were still young, getting up at five o'clock on a Monday, working for two hours to build this portfolio of evidence so that I could get up to this next part of my career and so forth. So I was a little bit kind of uhh about that whole process. At this same time, there was some research released around this thing called a new portfolio, and it was part of that Australian Flexible Learning Framework project. I read it and I just went, 'Oh my god. More people need to not go through what I went through. We should be looking to the future.' And what I've worked out is the future will always want to ask about the past. So as you move through different parts of your life and your career, people want to say, 'Have you got evidence of this or show me how you can do that.' I became a real advocate. So everywhere I went I just talked ePortfolio to the point that yeah, somebody came and asked me to run that ePortfolio project because just made so much sense to me that we go, okay, let's collect our evidence as we go. We might not know what we'll do with that, but if we can try to wrangle it and keep control over or at least have it front of mind that this might be useful at some stage of the future that it was stopped anybody either having a barrier, feeling like they wouldn't spend all those hours recreating their life or having to spend those hours recreating it when they should have been doing it on the way. Yeah, that's kind of how I got involved, and why they let me run around talking about ePortfolios, paid me to do it, it was wonderful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:09

Yeah, it's really frustrating, as you said, it looking back at five years and only being told at the end of that period that you need to talk about these past few years because that way, you might just really very easily forget something that might not be so important anymore in hindsight right now, but at the time what is really shown how much do you have grown during a particular timeframe.

Allison Miller: 6:33

Absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:34

Has that situation now improved?

Allison Miller: 6:36

In fact, actually, they might have changed it that it didn't need to be a portfolio. They don't because then after that, I applied for a position and then became a Principal Lecturer. So yeah, I was able to do that without having that portfolio of evidence by that time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:51

Well, there's still a lot of work to do in the portfolio world to make it also easier for people to collect the evidence, but not only the collection of the evidence, but really also the reflection on it because the collecting is just one part of it.

Allison Miller: 7:06

Yeah, absolutely. For me, it's the process of learning. Gary Brown, Helen Chen, and somebody else, I always forget who that third person wrote this great paper, and it was around being learning centred. So we talked about being teacher centred, then there's student or learner centred, and then this research was released about this learning centred and around how we actually have to teach people the skills to learn how to learn, but also manage that information so that they can use it in multiple different kinds of ways and for different audiences. For me, it's about setting a goal. So what is it that you need to achieve, and that can be in a very formal education environment, and that is I need to pass my assessment. So they're the kind of external goals. Or it might be a career or professional or it could be like accreditation or certification so that material is already set back for you. And then knowing or having some idea about that I've actually met that goal or that criteria. I know me, myself, I'm not waiting for the assessor to tell me or the accrediting body to tell me, I know myself, 'Okay, yeah, I've achieved that.' So I've got some idea about that I've actually achieved it. Then knowing what kind of evidence to pull together to be able to demonstrate that I've achieved that, and then be able to pull that evidence in a way that third parties can use, whether it's, you know, a job application, or whether it's demonstrating getting that pay scale for me at that time and so forth. Presenting it in different kinds of ways for different kinds of audiences, not just one big dump of evidence in one space. It's like you need to filter through, and then you need to have those literacies, to be able to put it together in a way that suits the end audience. Quite high level complex skills really to do. In the age of AI and technology change and also, maybe a little bit of going to say globalisation, we're doing a project at the moment where there are skilled migrants in Australia, so they might be engineers, and they're driving Ubers, or, you know, they're managing night fill at Bunnings or something, hardware store. They don't necessarily have those skills to pull together of, well, this is my goal. I want to be an engineer in Australia, and then working out the avenues to get to achieve that goal. So yeah, it's trying to help people achieve their career goals, life goals, happiness goals, especially in the world, in my feeling, it's changing really, really rapidly, and you have to be able to pivot quite quickly. Otherwise, you're more vulnerable, I think, in terms of life and health and so forth.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:33

That's also quite a big pivot at times, not just changing a slight aspect of your job, but pretty much the entire job description.

Allison Miller: 9:41

That actually takes time. So having that kind of forward thinking... So a friend of mine recently, she works in early childhood education, and she got quite significantly hurt, right, a child had kind of pulled her in a certain direction and she was off for quite a while with workers compensation and so forth. I said to her, you know, mate, why don't you go into teaching so you can actually teach other early childhood? And she's like, 'No, that takes too long dadada.' But I'm thinking if she'd started two years ago when I mentioned it to her then, she'd have started had that goal of right, 'What's the thing I do after I'm an early childhood educator?' Or my husband, he was an electrician, and then he got to the points like, 'I don't want to be on the tools anymore,' right? So you know, what's the thing after climbing around in roofs? So thinking about that now, while you're still fit enough to crawl around roofs or run around after young children or even if it's your retirement, maybe that's me, I'm just getting too old. So yeah, just having that forwards thinking of what's the thing after this, like, if this drops out or something happens to me, what am I looking for next over the horizon? I don't think that's what a lot of people think about.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:49

No because that is also quite difficult, and if you are in a fast paced job already, and you're always just doing, doing, doing, then taking that time out to actually think about what do I want to do in two years, three years time can be quite difficult. Allison you just talked about the migrants and supporting them in finding their new career, finding their new purpose, or how they can also get maybe back into their original job in a different country because that would be more for the engineers that might need to get new certifications because the certifications from their home country aren't recognised in Australia, so you are often very much in that support role of supporting people who are creating portfolios or who want to create portfolios. What is typically your approach there when you start on such a portfolio support project?

Allison Miller: 11:45

I think what people need to understand about ePortfolios, and I have this conversation a lot when we do talk about ePortfolios is it's a process. EPortfolio is a process. It can create an end result, but it's the process. So you can manage that process yourself quite easily. We've got the plan, act, reflect, and ePortfolio, the PARE sessions. We have people turning up going,'You know, like I make my students do an ePortfolio, but I don't have an ePortfolio myself.' Or 'I think I should be doing it, but I really don't know where to get started' and so forth. Then I show them, I say, 'Well, really I find because I have a distributed career and information all over the place that my portfolio is actually a spreadsheet. I show them this spreadsheet, and they go, 'Oh!' I think the penny drops. It's not actually that hard to do to try and manage what's going on in your life. You know you can have some sort of place to aggregate some of this stuff, you know where it is, or you can link to it and so forth. And they feel better than that they need to have this website that looks really flash and is up to date. And you know, they have this really big external kind of portfolio thing. So yeah, I think that's where I like to help people go,'Okay, just take it simple, just try to keep control over it.' Ideally, set yourself a goal, like have some sort of vision. Another project we've worked on, same lady with the skilled migrant, she's very clever, she's good at getting funding for projects. And that was called Vision, your future, you know, using visualization techniques or something that allows you to think about what's going to happen, not just at the end of the week, but perhaps in three months time or, you know, what is it that you would really love to be able to do if you had, you know, the choice? So yeah, it's about helping people go, Okay, well, what is it that I want, because I think that having a goal, or a vision gives you a benchmark or a sounding board, there's a lot of shiny things around lots of things that we could be doing. If you're over enthusiastic, like I can get sometimes you like, shiny things shiny thing, and then I go, Okay, does this align to my values or where I want to go, then, okay, then I should go down that path. If it's not, I just need to park it, I can find time. Another saying I say a lot is work out what makes you happy and do lots of that. I know that I'm lucky enough to make those decisions because of where I am in my career. And also, you know, we live in a white middle class kind of world. So you know, that's easier said than done, if you don't kind of have some sort of privilege to do those things. But you know, that motto of find out what you love, find out what you're gonna do, and try to do lots of that kind of stuff. And we'd have a happier world as possible. People can take that mantra, future thinking.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:21

When you support people who work with portfolios and who create their own portfolios or also who create activities for portfolio work. Where do they need most support in? What is the most difficult thing for people to create portfolios that you have seen in your very long portfolio career?

Allison Miller: 14:42

There's probably a couple of avenues if you're talking about formal education. So in Australia, the majority of ePortfolio practice in formal education is either in universities or in schools, right? We know it's in there. We know that portfolio pedagogy is in there, but we haven't really as a community be at a tap into the Australian school sector. So if anybody from the Australian school sector is listening at any point in time, we would really love you involved in ePortfolios Australia because there's a whole world that we've just haven't been able to crack for some reason, especially considering that, you know, education is an area in Australian universities that do you see portfolio pedagogy as part of their thing because they need to be accredited at the end. Yeah, in the higher ed sector, in formal education, there's so many demands on individuals. So I think the thing that is needed the most, I think time initially. It's not something that you can plug in at course number three or first year, we'll just do it in this subject, and then in the second year, we'll do in that subject, and then we'll do it in the third year. That just does not have the same impact as if you start the process and rebuild that portfolio over a period of time, and you can show the journey. A number of years ago, there were people going, 'Right, alright, what you'll be in three years, right? So write your story, right? Write your vision, write your story, what will you look like at the end of this degree, and so forth.' There was probably two aims. There's that vision, but the other one is to also help the students realise that, you know, that they might not be what they think they're going to be. So it's giving them a reality check. If you can do that really early in the course, like you know, this is not what you want to be at the end, you'll need to still do more work once you've finished or something like that. So yeah, having where possible, weaved through... Now that then needs champions to do that, and I've seen it work well mostly at those postgrad qualifications where you might have four or six or eight units, as opposed to 24 units. So you know, trying to get four people or subjects, and you know, sometimes they have the same teachers for the whole four subjects, a lot easier to embed because the champion is the teacher or the educator, as opposed to, you know, trying to get that waived all the way through. So when I first came on board, it was certainly a lot around graduate attributes or graduate capabilities were very big when I first came on board. That was kind of seen as the hook because you have to demonstrate you've got these capabilities through the course. So if you populated your portfolio, then when you finish, you had this kind of showcase of all these graduate capabilities. In those larger courses, obviously, things change. So there's all the external factors that influence what happens in a course. I'm not an educator, an educational designer, very often within the university sector in Australia, but at the moment, the governing body, so they call it TEQSA, so the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Authority (sic), probably, TEQSA, is concerned about academic integrity and AI. So they're making recommendations on how you might structure your courses so that it's more about the learning process than the output. Because we know that an output can be done by an AI, gen AI software quite quickly and quite easily and quite effectively. But is that the person? So when you go out with university X's parchment to say you've got their degree, do you really have all those skills or was it that something that was popped out in an AI bot type stuff? So there's a big pressure now on the universities to think differently, and guess what ePortfolios works really nicely in that space. They're calling it programmatic assessment. You're looking at the whole programme and demonstrating a learning journey throughout that programme. That's the latest that the teaching authority says you have to do. So they have to rush over to that because that's what, you know, we have to be concentrating on and then in three weeks time, the government's gonna say, 'Oh, no, you need to be able to do this better.' So then they all have to rush over to whatever that priority is. It's a lot of conflicting demands that learning designers and educators are trying to deal with in very stressful environments any way. Yeah, I think that's trying to meet as many as I was going to say masters, but there must be a more gender neutral term these days around, you know, if you've got many masters, how do you please all your masters and such your or your bosses or their demands?

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:56

Yeah, demands.

Allison Miller: 18:57

Yeah, sorry, I get old fashioned [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:00

Kate Mitchell from the University of Melbourne, in particular, has been talking quite a bit about the programmatic approach to using portfolios and also Shari Bowker from UQ. I'll also post links toward their episodes. As you mentioned, it is important to not just have individual portfolios created at various times without connecting them, but they all need to work together so that you can build on top of one and then move on to the next and make those connections, make it easier for the students and also, I guess, make it more transparent for the students why they are doing certain things so that they can then learn how to make those connections themselves.

Allison Miller: 19:39

And make it useful. So make the learning not just a process of ticking the box for assessment, like okay, I've done my three assessments I can move on. It's like, 'Well, how do I actually use stuff beyond just those assessments?'

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:51

Mhh. So that's from the organisational perspective where organisations typically need quite a bit of support in their portfolio strategy to make it cohesive, to give learning designers and also educators enough time, so that they can take the time to think about what they want to do because it is not just writing a couple of questions. There is more involved, also more longer term thinking and how to engage students in that practice and also bring across to them what they need to do because there's lots of higher order thinking skills involved. So looking at the individual person, so when you work with somebody who wants to create a portfolio, what is the most difficult thing for them there?

Allison Miller: 20:38

I think the initial bit is that vision, like being able to see or know, or talk confident enough to, I don't know. So there are a few things all jumping around in my brain. As I said, we did that'Visioning your future' micro credential last year, and it is still amazing how many people wake up, go through the day, go to bed, wake up, go through the day, go to bed, and they haven't really thought about where they're going, or where they want to get to. They think they're waiting for things to happen to them. Even when you talk to people in the workplace, it's like 'My employer doesn't do this.' You can take some control over this space, too. So it's about helping people know that they can have a vision that they are working towards, and it's actually good to have a really broad vision or really board goal. You might not reach it, but it's better to have something that you're working towards that you don't reach than you're just waiting for somebody to do something to you, like it's just going to somehow just pop into your space and so forth. Again, that takes a lot of skill and some confidence and support and time and takes some money because once you've got a bit of a goal then how do you make sure you're going to stick to that where you want to go with that goal? So I think that's the hardest part for people is to really understand who they are and what their potential is. Some of that could be cultural. If I think about some of the people who are the dynamics. So you mentioned Kate, and Shari, who are all very dynamic and very progressive, and all of those sorts of stuff. And then there's other people who are doing really well in their career, in their job, but they don't want to be saying as like, it's a tall poppy syndrome, you know, like, people don't want to look like they're talking about themselves or that I'm really good at something because then people go, 'Oh, who do they think they are?' You know, they're better than me or something like that. So I think some of it's maybe cultural as well that we don't want to be seen that we're trying to be something bigger or better than other people when in effect, in my mind, it's about you as an individual, really isn't? It's about what's important for you or your community. So sometimes if you come from a community, collective culture, then that trying to help them talk about what could they do for their community because they definitely wouldn't be able to sit and talk necessarily just about themselves and what's really important for them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:51

I think that's where also really come into some interesting areas with the portfolios because on the one hand, you have that individual, on the other hand, they are always operating in a cultural context, which might not necessarily be their own. And in the portfolio, you can or you have to bring all of that together because you are always in one way or another talking about yourself or what you have done, what you have learned, rather than just regurgitating something that you have read in a book or in an article because you do need to bring in yourself. That's maybe why some people struggle with where to get started or how to see themselves because that's not typically something that's being taught at school.

Allison Miller: 23:32

It's also around helping people know understand they have multiple identities. At the moment I'm talking to you in my capacity as looking after ePortfolios Australia. And then you know, this morning, I was helping my mom's. I'm a daughter then and then over the weekend, I was with my daughter, so I'm now a mother, you know, and now my friend this morning, I was doing something online with my friend. So I have all of these different identities. And so it's like, well, what identity you're going to bring into this portfolio? What identity do you want to bring in? Beverley Oliver, who was a strong advocate for a while in terms of ePortfolio, used to talk about the portfolio being a little bit like your wardrobe. So in your wardrobe, you have your sporty clothes, you have your winter clothes, you have your swimming clothes, You had all of those and depending on the occasion, you bring the items out. You don't expose your whole wardrobe. You don't,'Kristina come into my bedroom, have a look at everything in my wardrobe.' Yeah? You bring parts out depending on what identity you're going to be at that particular point in time. To me, I thought that was a really good way of explaining the ePortfolio. The ePortfolio, it's gonna have all of these bits and sometimes you'll put the belt on, sometimes you don't need the belt on. But you need to know when do you put the belt on and for whom do you put the belt on, all the right shoes that match the belt and so forth. It seems like maybe there's a lot of, talking to you out loud, a lot of abstract thinking going on here. You know, it's not tactile, you know, here's you go A plus B will give you C. I do an essay and then we do group assignment and then we have a 70% essay, then that will be go into a grade at the end. But it's not. It's a actually quite dynamic and requires a lot of thinking and thinking outside the box and abstract thinking.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:07

And also making connections between different elements. That's where I think also the programmatic approach comes in really well because that is what helps you make connections between individual classes and seeing,'Oh, this relates to that, or I can actually make use of that in this new class that I have,' or the graduate attributes / graduate capabilities that we are abstracting what has been learned in a particular class and bring that to something higher on a different level that can then also help us later on in a career, even though we are not exactly doing the same thing that we've done in the class.

Allison Miller: 25:42

That's why I think it's also quite disruptive because we still have an education system that was very similar to when I went to school[whispers] a long time ago. When my parents went to school, right? The structures and so forth, there was probably assignments, there were group works, and there were essays. We still have a very antiquated education system. So having that more broad, humanistic, maybe approach to education, and it's about what the individual needs, again, I come from an individualistic background, you know, maybe it's what the community needs, and so forth. Now, that's really broad, and it's very hard to get into a little box that you can, you know, put on a website and say,'At the end of this course, you'll be able to do this, and these are the careers you'll be able to go to.' You know, the people who, like yourself, who's a strong advocate for ePortfolio, and others in our community, you know, I have to remind them that it actually took something like 65 years for preschool or kindergarten to become mainstream. And somebody said, actually, in WA, in Western Australia, that was only mandated then, I don't know, 1960 or 1970 or something. So for me something that you think every kind of privileged child gets an opportunity to go to a preschool or kindergarten, it took a long time for that to become mainstream. And I say about ePortfolio practice, there's something about it and the community know what it's about. And it might not actually happen until you're not here any more, right? So what we're putting in place and what we're discussing, and what we feel really passionate about isn't necessarily maybe ever going to be mainstream, or if it is, it's not maybe even going to be in my lifetime. Because if it takes 75 years to get something that we take for granted now mainstream, you know, this concept might not happen in my lifetime, but doesn't mean I give up the passion for helping others understand the power of learning how to learn.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:25

I definitely don't want you to stop your passion for portfolios and learning how to learn because you're a fabulous member of the community who brings people together, who also have pushes people to do things. You're very good organised, and you keep us organised in ePortfolios Australia so that it's always good to have you in those conversations and see what we can do and also really learned from you a lot. One of the activities that the committee initiated, the ePortfolio Australia committee a couple of years ago by now, I think, was the PARE sessions that you've already mentioned earlier, and Kate Mitchell had talked about in her episode. PARE stands for 'plan, act, reflect, and ePortfolio'. How are the sessions going where all the participants support each other in their portfolio practice? We are coming back to the very important aspect of portfolios need support. People creating portfolios need support in order to really also take the time to understand what they want to do since it is not just a tick box exercise.

Allison Miller: 28:29

I would like to acknowledge that it was Sandra Stewart, who has been an advocate and supporter of the ePortfolios, Australia community for quite a while. She used to run these at our conferences, or our forums, that was called'Shut up and ePortfolio'. If you didn't get into that computer room early, you didn't get a computer. It was massive. And we did it for a couple of years. Then, actually remember when, probably COVID was probably what helped us take it online, I just kind of felt that the word 'Shut up and ePortfolio' was kind of a little bit aggressive, and it really didn't describe what we were doing. So you know, trying to word it stuff to get it out to encourage people was like,'What are you doing? You're planning, you're acting, you're reflecting, and then the ePortfolio is, you know, how do you bring all the ingredients together? Which clothes you're going to wear?' At first I thought, 'Okay, I'm happy to,' as you said, I'm organised, I like to organise stuff and get stuff done. And I thought 'Okay, yeah, you know, I'll play. I'll do whatever how many should we be doing?' I was like, 'I couldn't be done it monthly. You know, I don't know if I've got the time or energy.' We did a couple of these, and I'm always involved, and I'm like, 'Oh my god, this is perfect for me, right?' This becomes again, very individualistic. 'Ah, I need to stop for an hour and a half and work with others and be inspired by others and make sure that I'm working on my own ePortfolio.' Then I'm like, 'I reckon we should have more of these. These are great because these really worked for me.' We have different people facilitate them. So we're always open to people outside of ePortfolios (Australia) facilitate. We've got Barbara Nicolls, she's based in the UK. So she's ran one last year, she's going to run one again or

facilitate one this year at 7: 30:02

30 Eastern Australian time, which

is about 10 o'clock or 10: 30:07

30 in the morning where she is. And so that's her opportunity to be, as part of the Organising Committee, contributing and, you know, giving a different flavour. Having the different facilitators, they have their own approach. I just introduce the session and try to step back. Sometimes you have people, they don't even really know what they're getting into. They've seen something on LinkedIn, and they turn up. So we do breakout rooms. If you're new, or you're not sure, then I take them out to a breakout room and try to talk them through that process of 'Set yourself some sort of goal, then how do you know you've reached that goal? Okay, what evidence have you got that you've reached that goal? Where you're kind of keep it? Initially, which is I showed them the spreadsheet, or you know, how you're going to coordinate that for whatever the goal is that you want to do? They kind of, 'Oh, yeah, I can do this.' If you've got someone like Kate Mitchell, she's able to pull this resource out and that resource out and pop them all in the chat. And so people are just like, 'Oh wow,' you know, 'This is really inspiring,' and so forth. So we have a couple of repeat attenders, but they're often just small (sessions), and you know, the people that can attend, attend, and I'm like,'Well, it doesn't matter if nobody attends because I'll be able to work on my ePortfolio instead.' No, we have small groups, it's good, good fun.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:17

Having also the different facilitators, I think, will help because that gives that different view of the portfolios because there are just so many different possibilities that you have, which I think might also be a reason why it's not yet mainstream because it's not just this one thing that everybody can do, but it manifests itself differently in the different fields, and also, if you keep one for yourself.

Allison Miller: 31:39

Many years ago, Shane Sutherland of PebblePad talked about that you have ePortfolios that you don't just have one ePortfolio. Again, that different identity, different needs as you move on, different spaces, so LinkedIn can be part of your portfolio. You know, I have a website because I have a business, I have to also keep a matrix of all of my currency for my teachings. So there's another part of my portfolio. So yeah, we have these different ePortfolios, and I think we just have to crack the nut that is not the end product. It's not the end product. It's the process, the real benefit of ePortfolio practice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:18

Yep. Allison, this has been fantastic talking with you, and I know you need to run, so let's do the last three quick questions as a quick answer round. Any way planned for that [laughs], but let's keep it short because I know we could be talking much, much longer. And I'd certainly look forward to having more conversations at the upcoming Eportfolio Forum in September. I'll also make sure to link that in the episode notes. But now to your final last three questions. Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Allison Miller: 32:48

That was tricky. So I wrote down goals because I've said that a lot, goals, achieving, evidence.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:56

What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Allison Miller: 33:01

Focus on the process and not the tool or the product. So if there's one thing you can guarantee about the tool, it will change. You know better than anybody how much Mahara has changed over the years. The tool will change, or something else will come and replace all the current ones we've got. The process will never change. So focus in on that process, set a goal, know when you've reached the goal, collect evidence around the goal, and then make sure you're able to present that evidence and different kinds of ways and different kinds of audiences.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:27

Last question for you today. What advice do you have for portfolio authors who are our students or also just people who want to keep a portfolio as part of their job?

Allison Miller: 33:38

So certainly, again, that goal. Look to the future, like, 'What is it that you would like to be?' As I've mentioned before, that's a guiding step for me, like, 'Do I go that way, direction, or whatever it might be?' Track and manage your work. So the future will ask about the past. Again, that's something I can totally guarantee that somebody in the future is going to say, 'Well, can you show me how you've done that or when you did that?' It's been in I was looking at some paperwork this morning, I'm like, 'Will I need to provide that as evidence at some stage?' Within the VET sector, we do recognition of prior learning, like 'Will I need to be able to show that if I want to get recognition of prior learning for that type of stuff?' Manage your work and see the value of your work. I don't just see it as work, and I think maybe, again, depends on the type of work, what's the value of what you're actually doing? Who else might also value that? And then yeah, keep it somewhere. I just keep her pretty plain spreadsheet. I like spreadsheets and I just pop it all into there and I can have different tabs and link them and so forth. To me that's my portfolio, really, how I can keep everything there.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:42

Then you can take out from there and put it into another tool of what you needed in that moment where you want to demonstrate a particular part of your life there. Thank you so much, Allison, for having taken our time in the morning, right before yet another meeting or another round of meetings, actually. I really appreciate your time, and it's always fantastic to learn from you and then reflect on what I might like to take away from it for myself. Thank you so much.

Allison Miller: 35:09

Welcome and well done to you, Kristina, running all these podcasts as well. They're really valuable resource for people in the ePortfolio community.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:17

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Allison Miller. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources 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 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.