Kristina Hoeppner: 0:04

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. Today, my guest is Tom Worthington, an Honorary Senior Lecturer, Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, and also Fellow of the Higher Education Academy who works in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. Thank you so much for joining me today, Tom.

Tom Worthington: 0:45

Good morning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:46

Tom, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do?

Tom Worthington: 0:51

I'm essentially a semi retired computer professional. So I had a whole career working in the Australian Public Service, writing computer software, working my way up through the hierarchy to be in charge of building computer systems. And lastly, I wrote computer policy for the Australian Department of Defence. But more recently, for about two decades, I've been teaching part time at the university and doing occasional training in industry, and also consultancy work. The fun part is teaching students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:25

You're also a lifelong learner because I think, I've recently seen that you've also earned your Master's in Education.

Tom Worthington: 1:32

That was quite a while ago. That was seven years ago now, I think. You can blame it on the Vice Chancellor at the Australian National University who said, 'It'd be a good idea if the people who are teaching actually had some sort of qualification in teaching.' I started doing the short course the uni ran, and then they said,'Oh, well, you want to do the longer course? And then 'You want to do the graduate certificate?' Then it just followed from that. I went did a Master's.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:00

Fantastic. So Tom, were you introduced to portfolios in that Master's, or did that already come earlier?

Tom Worthington: 2:07

That was many years before. I was trying to calculate how long ago it was. I think it was 26 years ago. I was at the Defence Department writing policy on the use of the internet and the web for military operations and looking at the internet and seeing it had graphics in it. It wasn't just text. So I think I need to learn something about graphic design. So enroled in a course at the University of Canberra in the Design School. This is where they train architects and graphic designers, and took myself off there a few days a week for six months, and I'd leave the office with my severe suit on, and then I'd get to the uni, take all that off and sit in the ground and draw pictures with the stick. For that they said, 'You should have a portfolio,' which was a great big ring binder to hold very large sheets of A1-sized paper with your sketches and your architectural drawings and all that stuff to show prospective clients. I wasn't planning to be a graphic designer, but I went and got a binder and put all the work I'd been doing in the course in it. It still sits under my office desk at the uni, and that's a portfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:21

It sure it is. When did you encounter the digital version of a portfolio?

Tom Worthington: 3:27

Well, as part of my Master's studies, they had a capstone where you had to prepare an ePortfolio using Mahara where you reflected on what you'd done in the courses. It's one of these things where the idea is to try and knit together everything you've learned in separate courses and try and make sense of it all. This was at Athabasca University in Canada where I was an online international student. They'd had problems with the portfolios because students were taking as long to do their portfolio as they had done to do all their studies. So they actually made it a course, one semester long, and structured it where you had to do a little sample bit, and you'd get comments from your colleagues in Mahara, and then you get comments from your supervisor, and then you do another bit, and so on, and then you present it online, showing what you'd done. I went through that difficult process, which was made easier by having that scaffolding, as we say. And essentially I've been using the same thing for teaching students at the Australian National University.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:34

Tom, have you been, actually been a student of Dr Rita Zuba Prokopetz or Dr Debra Hoven? You mentioned Athabasca University, and they were doing the Master's in Education there.

Tom Worthington: 4:46

Yes, Debra.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:47

I'll make sure to also point to her interview that I had done a few months ago where she was talking about that Master's in Education and how they're using portfolios in there. So it's wonderful to also have you then, one of her students on the podcast.

Tom Worthington: 5:02

So I was in the first cohort where they introduced this structured approach. We actually had the choice. We could have done it the old way, where you just do it yourself, or the new way. I just grabbed the new structured way with both hands because I knew I was going to struggle otherwise.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:18

How do you use portfolios with your students? In which contexts do you use portfolios with them?

Tom Worthington: 5:25

For the last eight years, I've been helping with a capstone for the computing students at the university. So these are a mix of undergraduate students and master's students, and they do lots of technical computer courses. They have to do some courses on how to write and how to present, and then at the end, they have to do a work experience unit, work-integrated learning. Some of them do an internship where they go off to a company or a government agency, and some of them do group projects for a client. For all those students, they have to, at the end, write up what they've learned and how they apply that professionally. For eight years, I've been struggling in exactly how do you do that for STEM students? So these are not people who are learning to write artistically. They are not generally people people. They are technical computer nerds. To get them to reflect on what they've done is really hard work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:26

How do you help them reflect?

Tom Worthington: 6:29

The people who self select to do STEM subjects and computing and engineering in particular, are not the people who are self reflective. So they're about analysing the world, structuring the world, having objective, external reality, and an inner monologue is not their sort of thing. The other part of it is we reinforce this with the courses where we say, 'We want you to do this, this, and this, and we will compare your answer with the correct answer.' So we're not saying to them, 'Think about the nature of the world in the main.' So even if they are reflective, we might be driving that out of them in this form of instruction. At the end, we say to them, 'Now we want you to talk to people and work in teams,' but we haven't trained them how to do that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:18

So how do you then help them to get into that reflective mindset?

Tom Worthington: 7:22

There's some techniques we've used. For example, we have Professor Stephen Dann at the Australian National University who has been trained in how to use LEGO for this. And we've used that with the computing students, where he will give each student, and there's hundreds of them sitting there, a small number of Lego pieces, and asks them to make something and then describe. The trick is because they're physically making something, it distracts them from the fact that they're expressing personal views. And so typically, in this sort of class, we say to them,'So what do you envisage your role is in the team you're in? And what do you see yourself doing in the future?' When you see two members of the same team building thrones and putting themselves on it with crowns on their heads so they're the king, you know, you've got a problem in the team. You essentially distract them with something else. So if you just say to them, 'We want you to reflect,' they go blank. So you've got to get them working on a task, which they're engaged in and interested. The one we've been using for the last few years is we get them to apply for a job. We don't say, 'You're writing a reflective ePortfolio.' We say, 'You're writing a job application, which has a cover letter, a CV, samples of your work, etc. And in that we want you to provide evidence of what you've been learning is relevant for this job and how you see your career going.' They're all reflective questions and the sort of thing you do in a portfolio. But because these students are about to graduate, and they'll be looking for a job, or they'll want to apply for a PhD, or set up a company or something, that's something they need to do and want to do, therefore they understand why this portfolio will be useful and relevant to them. Whereas, if you say, 'We want you to do this assignment,' they go, 'Well, why would I want to do that?' If you say, 'We want you to write a job application for a real job or apply for a PhD or a government grant to set up a company,' they go, 'Oh, yes, I want to do that.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:17

So I'm kind of hearing two things that help your students become those reflective people, is, number one, that it is an authentic learning task and they are also interested in so that they're not just doing it for a grade, and then number two, that you might also not really want to rely on portfolio specific language that might not really say anything to them, but phrase it in such a way that it is a question that they can respond to without using the terminology that is available. Would that be a fair summary, Tom?

Tom Worthington: 9:53

Yes because these are not students of education or humanities, and so you use the language of their discipline to talk about what they're doing. The other part of it is you don't just say to them, 'Go and reflect.' You give them that scaffolding that I had when I had to do such a task. And so you give them little exercises to do, to practice along the way. So this semester, for example, we're having three workshops, and for the first two workshops, there's a small number of marks associated with the task to get them to focus. Another part of this is I'm not the one who teaches them this. I look after the assessment part of it, but we have career vocational professionals delivering the learning. So these are people who you would normally go to if you want to get a job, you want to improve how you do an interview. At the university, we get those staff to do the teaching. The students don't say, 'Oh, you know, he's an academic. He's got a tweed coat on, what would he know about getting a job?' So we get people who talk to employers all the time. We get employees in to talk to the students directly and also former students who now have jobs, and say, 'Look, you know, when we're interviewing people, don't worry about all that. Nobody looks at that. This is what we want.' That makes it very immediate and relevant for the students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:14

Have you then actually over the years seen an uptake in employers appreciating more of that portfolio approach where they can see the work of the students, read some reflections of them, in order to also understand better who they are as people, rather than just looking at the CV and the grades?

Tom Worthington: 11:32

I think there are two conflicting things happening. One is we're having increased use of automation where what they write gets ingested into a system which analyses and decides the short list of candidates automatically. And the other part of it is, once you have a short list, a more nuanced analysis of the candidates where you do look at what their views are because you want a long-term employee, not just someone to fill a role. There is a danger that can get out of hand with people complaining about having to go to interview after interview, and it's quite common in the computer industry to set the applicant a task which might take hours of work for them, write some code, analyse something. After a while, when you've done some of these, you start to think, 'Am I just providing free labour for the employer?' Usually you're not, but it can get a bit overdone. But yes, they want to see they've got a person because typically you tick all the boxes on the application to say you've got this technical skill, you know, that language, you get the job. When you arrive, they say,'Oh, we've got this other task which doesn't involve any of those things we selected you for,' and it's really the fact that you articulate and you can reason and you can solve problems that is useful to the employer, not a particular technical skill.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:49

Yeah, it's those transferable skills. How can actually institutions support students getting into that reflective mindset early on? Is it that scaffolding? What is it for you, specifically in your area of computer science?

Tom Worthington: 13:06

I think it applies to any qualification related to a job, whether it's computer science, engineering, medicine, law. I don't think it makes a difference. One of the issues would be about introducing this early on at the start of their studies, rather than leave it to a capstone at the end because if you teach them more of these skills, it will help them with their studying, I think, as they go along. Another one is if there's some way you can integrate that through the programme, the problem being, you say to the students, 'We want you to work in teams and talk to each other,' but the university staff don't do that. They just run their own little course and leave it up to the students to connect the dots. So if we had a little more design that causes problems, because that then limits the students in what they can do if there's some sort of underlying structure through a programme and not just a collection of courses. If there was more work-integrated learning throughout programmes, I think, that would also help. It's a lot easier to do with postgraduates than it is with undergraduates. To do my Master's of Education, I had to be employed in teaching before I started. So the work integration is built in. I designed and ran some units for the Australian Computer Society, and similarly, you had to be a practising computer professional in a job to enrol, and then you used your work experience to help do your work. Add a little structuring, but the danger is you can end up over scaffolding and driving the students crazy when you tell them they have to do this little bit, this little bit, this little bit. So you have to have the option where you can say,'Well, we can see when you know what you're doing. Just go for it. Let us know when you need help.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:43

So purposeful design and then also sometimes probably removing some of the scaffolding after some time once you realise that they do not need all of those guardrails any more. Tom, is there actually anything that you currently can't do with portfolios that you would love to be able to do?

Tom Worthington: 15:02

I have to admit, we've been doing this approach with write a job application for eight years. And when we started, we used Mahara because the Australian National University has Moodle, and Mahara is like the default option for any portfolio when you've got Moodle. We had it, so we used it. A few years ago, we stopped making it compulsory and say, You can use any tool you like. We want you to submit something as one PDF file, which we will mark at the end so you can export from Mahara' or most students use a word processor now to do this task. And so I'd like better tools. I guess I had this vision that we would and Mahara and other tools have and Moodle have some tools to do this, this vision that you'd say to the student when they enrol,'At the end, you have to have all these skills and knowledge, and here's a big table of what you require,' and the table might come from your professional body, which accredits the university, and say to them, 'By the end, when you've filled in all these boxes, you will graduate.' This is actually literally what I had to do when I did a vocational education thing at the Canberra Institute of Technology to be qualified to teach in the vocational sector. I was actually handed a sheaf of papers, and I had to be able to tick every box with evidence, either by doing a course or evidence from work or experience. And when I ticked them all, I graduated. I guess, I'd like to see something like that and say to the student, now, 'We'll help you design your programme, and you can cover all of this with formal courses if you want. Some of it'll be by work-integrated learning. some will be by past experience, or it might be something else you think of, and we want you to submit all the evidence, and if you will use this tool to check off you've got everything.' So I'd like some way to be able to, in a very detailed fashion, be able to carry out that exercise using an ePortfolio package. They claim to have it, but it doesn't quite do the job at the moment.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:02

Have you then explored SmartEvidence in Mahara for that?

Tom Worthington: 17:06

Yes, that's what I was thinking of. It's not smart enough.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:10

Then at some point we should have another conversation around that and see what is missing for you in that area because that is one possibility to work with competencies. Now, Tom, is there anything else you'd like to share around portfolio use, either from your personal side or with your students?

Tom Worthington: 17:30

A missing factor is experience. The first time I was brought in to help do this eight years ago, I sat down with a couple of professors, a dozen tutors who were teaching the subject, and I looked around the room and I realised there were two of us who were qualified in education, and probably the only two had ever used an ePortfolio. The others had never had to be a student using this approach. And I think that's part of what we need. If you're going to have people using these tools for teaching, they need to have done it for real, either as part of some in service education or as a normal student. Now, I help out the Higher Education Academy, mentoring people, applying for that, assessing them, and that's a similar exercise where you have to address specific skills and knowledge and give examples, explain how you did it. I think another part of it is to bring in other ways people do things in terms of social media, video, and that sort of thing. Otherwise, the portfolios tend to just look like an electronic version of the folder I used to have, which is very static.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:39

Since the electronic portfolio is online, there are those possibilities of embedding content or adding a video or sound recording and things like that to make it more interesting.

Tom Worthington: 18:49

I guess one of the important parts of all this is the performative aspect. One of the things we do with the computing students is because we teach them to talk to clients and make presentations and answer questions live, face-to-face where they're quizzed, 'Okay, in slide six, you claimed that the software you built does the following. Where is the evidence?' And they have to answer there and then. That's an important part of the portfolio. Rather than think of what is a document you submit and somebody marks it, it's something you have to demonstrate to people, show you understand the detail, can respond, and that's why you have these places where students have to present their evidence. We face the AI challenge. For the last few years, I have been going to seminars, workshops and so on, almost every week about AI and what it's going to do. This is before ChatGPT was a thing. This is part of the answer that if you assess students by giving them exams or just telling them to write things, it's going to be very hard to do to work out whether they did it or the computer did. But if you say to people, 'We want you to not only show evidence of your work and the reasoning behind it, but we're going to question you using that live to see you thought about it, and also to make sure you understand it, to just check whether you really wrote it.' I think is another important part of this.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:20

How do you manage that then with your many students, with hundreds of students? Do you then just have them talk to those future employers, or do you also have tutors or lecturers sitting in those conversations for the marking?

Tom Worthington: 20:36

Professor Charles Gretton and others have written papers on this there's a complex process. What you do is you have a lot of tutors, and you get everybody to comment on everybody else. So you get students, if they're working as a team, you get their client to comment on how they're doing. You get another team to look at what they're doing and comment on, you get the individuals in the team to assess each other, you get the tutor to assess what they're doing. So you have a lot of that feedback. That's also a valuable experience because when you're working in a job, the hard part is giving feedback and also tell your boss when he's doing the wrong thing. It's actually a lot easier working for military officers because they've all been trained in how to give and accept feedback, which is not the usual thing you get in a business environment. Lots of formalised feedback and using tools where it can analyse what people are submitting and things like you say to the students, 'We want you to give each other a mark. If you all give each other the same mark, that's not going to do you any good. We're not going to be impressed by that. You have to honestly say what you think of your colleagues' work, and you have to learn to do it politely and respectfully.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:53

Do you give them some guiding questions then that they can use to provide that constructive feedback?

Tom Worthington: 21:59

Yes. And also, you have tutors who do that live as well. An interesting part of this is when you first say to students they got to do all this, they go, 'Ah, that's all that soft stuff. That's really easy.' And then when they go to do it, they realise that this is really, really difficult. It's something they're going to have to work at.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:18

Do you can have a framework that you employ?

Tom Worthington: 22:22

For the what we call ANU TechLauncher Programme, which is the group projects, we have a framework for that, and essentially the same one is used for the internships as well, and the same assessment structure and the same feedback process is used. There's nothing particularly novel about that. It's derived from industry practice. I guess, the other part of this is using industry tools. So we're teaching computer students, and so they use the same online tools for working in teams and communicating that they would use in the workplace. Those tools are designed to scale up to having 1,000s or tens for 1,000s of people. So they work quite well with this. And it'd be interesting to integrate some of the educational tools with that a little more. It's fun to just keep up with what the students are doing as well. Part of it is the students are building bespoke software to help with the process. So we have teams of students who write and maintain software that we use for giving them feedback.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:27

That's great to see that then tools they built will help future generations of students in their own practice and then continue with that, improve, and iterate over it because those are all practices we do in software development, code review and so on, so that you don't always start from scratch again at point zero.

Tom Worthington: 23:44

A lot of this is similar in things like medicine where they are drilled in how to provide feedback because it's life and death there. But I wonder if some of this could be introduced to other disciplines and taught at universities. I've got a question for you...

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:00

Sure.

Tom Worthington: 24:00

... since you look at all these things. What is everyone else doing? I mean to me, this is all just normal work. I kind of just assume everybody does this stuff as part of higher education.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:14

I wish everybody would be implementing portfolios in one way or another. I'm not saying that every single course should now have a huge portfolio component. What I really like is what you said earlier, Tom, that sometimes the portfolio language might not really be the one that should be used, but really to integrate it into the courses so that it is another task that they are doing, that they get questions that help them reflect without saying, 'Okay, now we are reflecting,' so that it's not this extra bit, but that it's really integrated. What I'm seeing more and more, especially in Australia, is that they are taking the programmatic approach and programmatic design of courses so that portfolios introduced at the start, and then meaningful assessments are also created throughout the study programme that build on top of each other. So that is fantastic to see, and also to see that the portfolio assessment is being used as a central part, and you did mention AI just a little while ago, of course, also a bit to offset some of those problems that could come with it because the reflection is done by the students or should be done by the students because it is personal. It is not knowledge that they are just summarising in different words than what is in the book. They really need to apply that knowledge. Those are a couple of really nice things to see, but of course, there are still lots and lots of study programmes where the portfolio does not play a role at all, where then students potentially still do some sort of reflective tasks. It's just not portrayed as a portfolio approach, per se, so that they might not be using a portfolio software or something like that to reflect, but they might still be using practices. I think it really comes down to having those practices rather than needing a separate tool for it because sometimes it can also just be part of a Moodle assignment or part of the submissions that the students do, or part of the essay that they are writing, that one of the questions is to reflect in different words, of course, to reflect on what they had done. We do also see it outside of the classroom that portfolios are being used. Increasingly, I find for career purposes because also we as employers, for example, I don't just want to see a cover letter and a CV. I really want to see what they have done. Is that something that I would like to have replicated at the team, or can they work with existing code? How do they comment their code? But even outside of computer science, if I were to hire a team member more on the consulting side of things, I would very much like to see what their presentation skills are, what their skills are to produce learning material and things like that. And for that, I think the portfolio is very well positioned because we can see those artefacts and then ideally, also have that reflection on them, so that we know why that artefact is in that showcase, why this particular piece that they are showing to us is so important to them, why we should need to take a look at it, so that it's not just here are the artefacts. I leave it up to you to interpret them, but that there's also that narrative around it, why it is so important for me to showcase this particular piece here for that particular job that I'm applying for or have somebody applying for.

Tom Worthington: 27:49

I think another interesting area which I'd like to explore is doing this in very short units of learning. Universities are dabbling with micro-credentials, which I think should really be deci-credentials because they're like 1/10 of a degree. And the danger is that those things will end up like old fashioned distance education, very, very structured things. And could you use portfolios to do those more flexibly? The other one is that I've been helping out with a few years, things like hackathons where you spend 72 hours with a team of students working on something. So rather than six months or a year, you take them through everything very quickly. So could you use these techniques in shorter ways? For years, I've been helping out with hackathons in various areas, and during the pandemic, those switched over to online delivery and worked extremely well. And some of them were for the military, so they weren't just play exercises. These were defence industry people and serving military officers learning to work in a team. Could you use the portfolios as part of that where they think about the skills they're learning? So I think there could be opportunities in the ideation space for this sort of thing where you would need to do it quickly and not with so much structure as you would if it's, you know, a six month course or a university degree. This is something where the vocational sector could teach universities. They're used to saying, 'What have you already got? We'll give you credit for all that,' whereas universities are, still in the main, reluctant to do that and tend to do it in sort of an ad hoc fashion. One of the tasks I was given a couple of years ago was to assess students for credit for prior work experience or studies or give them exemptions from courses. They all want to get out of the soft skills sort of courses, and you have to assess, are their communication skills good enough and their teamwork that they don't have to, but that's kind of seen as,'Oh, we're giving credit, we're giving exemptions,' and it could be structured a bit more.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:58

Especially also when we get more mature students who already come with a wealth of experience.

Tom Worthington: 30:04

Some of these students, I think, oh, you should be teaching the course. They'll say, 'Well, I have three years experience as a team leader at,' you know, 'Microsoft Research Lab Bangalore.' And you think, right, we're going to get you to help teach you this course. But there are a whole lot of specialist tools, which the administrative staff at the university use for assessing students' experience and qualifications, and a lot of it has parallels with the ePortfolios and how we might use that in a structured way, and it'd be nice if we could bring those two ends together and also involve the students more than we're just it's not they submit a form to apply for something, but actually get them to explain. What I suggested that we introduced a few years ago is the students have to write a few paragraphs explaining how their prior experience and studies are relevant to what they're learning now, and therefore why they should receive exemption or credit, but we do get them to write a little thing about that, which is, in effect, reflection. I think we could do more of that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:08

I do know you need to run to actually talk to some of your students, Tom, so let's get to our last three questions. Which words or short phrases do you typically used to describe portfolio work?

Tom Worthington: 31:22

I will use words like job application, curriculum vitae, samples of work, relevant experience, those sorts of words. So I'm using language from applying for a job, not from ePortfolios. I will not tell them they're doing a reflective ePortfolio in particular because it doesn't mean anything to them. The other thing I do is I don't claim that what they do will be useful in their career in the future because I'm not convinced that's true, and also it is not relevant to the student what they do in the far distant future they want to complete the course, graduate, get a job. If it's not about that, it's not important to them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:07

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

Tom Worthington: 32:15

Don't create a portfolio activity. Create a relevant activity which incorporates assessment. I think one of the keys is to include assessment because that's something students focus on and break it up into pieces. Don't say at the end of this unit or degree you will have to do a portfolio because they'll all leave it till the end. So you have to deliver it in chunks as you go along and tie it to whatever they'te learning at that point in time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:46

Full integration into the course and leaving the lingo go out. Now last question, Tom: What advice do you have for your students or anybody else wanting to create portfolios?

Tom Worthington: 32:59

I guess the same advice. What do you need to meet your aims right now? And if you're wanting a job, then what is that particular employer wanting? Tailor your portfolio to what they're asking for. You might have done something you're very proud of that's very large and important, but if it's not relevant, it's a waste of time. The other part is, remember extracurricular things you've done in life, which will be useful and incorporate those as well. An example was an academic who was giving a seminar applying for a job, and I said to them, 'So what leadership experience do you have?' And they said, 'I haven't got any.''None at all, you've never done anything where you lead people?' And they said, 'Oh, well, I was the head of the alpine mountain climbing team at the university.' And I said, 'So people trusted their lives with you to lead them up a mountain. You know, that's very relevant experience.' The other thing is, don't forget, there's a whole lot of students we haven't talked about, who are research students and where I think they could do with some of this as well. Otherwise, they just spend their lives writing papers, writing a thesis, and not thinking about why they're doing this. In some faculties, sociology, journalism, you will have some of that self reflection, but particularly in the science faculties, they're sort of trained to leave the human being out of what they're doing. I think it would be useful in those environments to incorporate more of these techniques.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:29

Thank you so much for your time today, Tom, to talk with me. I like that you have given us some ideas of how to incorporate portfolio practices into classes for STEM students, in your case, in particular computer science, where they might not be so familiar with the lingo and just making the reflective activities part of their activities, giving them strategies and also providing scaffolding in order to become these reflective practitioners without necessarily knowing the language, so that they are not inhibited by it.

Tom Worthington: 35:09

Thank you, and hopefully we can meet up at some conference somewhere.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:12

Yes, that would be wonderful, after a few years now, to see each other in person. Now, over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' with Tom Worthington. 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.