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. Today, my guests are two women who've been instrumental in the shaping of portfolio practice and thinking about portfolios in different contexts in the United States and also continue to influence the international conversation. I've gotten to know them through their research and portfolio advocacy at Portland State University. Welcome to the podcast, Dr Candyce Reynolds and Dr Sonja Taylor.

Candyce Reynolds: 0:53

Thank you.

Sonja Taylor: 0:54

Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:55

Together with Dr Melissa Shaquid Pirie, you published an article recently which is the focus of our conversation, but more on that later, and I hope to be able to catch up with Melissa some other time. Now, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do? And let's start with Candyce because you have brought everybody together at Portland State University in Oregon.

Candyce Reynolds: 1:21

Currently, I'm the Director of University Foundations at Boise State University, which is our general education programme. I know your education systems are different, but we have general education as part of our curriculum in the U.S. Prior to that, I had many positions at Portland State University, and one thread that went through all of the work that I did at Portland State was working with ePortfolios. We started doing ePortfolios in the general education programme at Portland State in 1998. You can imagine that that was very, very clunky...

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:58

and very early!

Candyce Reynolds: 1:59

... very, very early, but I was sold on the fact that ePortfolios really advanced student learning. So it was really important work, and a lot of my career has centred around researching and writing and using ePortfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:17

Thank you, Candyce. So for 1998 were you then actually already using the internet or was that still more portfolios on CDs because the internet became a bit more prominent around '94 in the States, if I remember correctly.

Candyce Reynolds: 2:34

That is a really interesting question. And actually, I think we had some of it on the internet, but I think we did have a lot on CDs. When I left Portland State, I had a whole box of CDs of people's ePortfolios [laughs]. Students were learning some basic coding, HTML coding, to be able to create their ePortfolios, as well as really clunky software.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:56

When were you introduced to portfolios yourself?

Candyce Reynolds: 2:59

Portfolios in general, probably in the 1990s. The general education programme at Portland State really decided, as they were doing reform in that area, that they wanted to include portfolio assessment. So we were really wedded to that idea already about using portfolios, but we found that students collected all of their work for a year - it's a year long course that first-year course - that it was really hard to sort through and make meaning of all that material for students as well as for the faculty reviewing the work. That's where the idea of ePortfolios and having the ability to hyperlink became really important. That was a big success really early on.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:43

Thank you Candyce. Now Sonja, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do?

Sonja Taylor: 3:48

I am the director of a dual credit programme at Portland State, which is the last year of high school, first year of college blended. We're actually a course that team teaches in the high school. There's two high school faculty, one college faculty, and we do the same year long seminar course that's offered on campus, the first year seminar for Portland State. I teach in the programme, and I'm in charge of facilitating the programme in other areas where we have it, and we're at - this year - eight different schools. I think that Candyce is the main person who introduced me to ePortfolio in the way that it stuck and became meaningful. I remember when I was mentoring for other classes those CDs, so it's funny to remember that[laughs]. But I also have taught online since about, I think, 2008, and I was part of an initiative at Portland State to bring ePortfolio to the sophomore level. That's where I really worked out a lot of my strategy and ideas. And then I, of course, use it in my senior class with that year long inquiry. I use it myself for my own professional life, both for doing annual reviews, performance reviews, for my teaching practice, and also I use a professional portfolio for when I go to conferences and stuff. I share with people and I update it. It's kind of a work in progress. It's fairly current right now. I think it has AAEEBL and Pebblebash on there right now the last conferences I went to [laughs]. So it's current for that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:21

Fantastic. Sonja, you already mentioned that you're using portfolios with your students for the senior inquiry and also for your own professional practices. It's wonderful to hear that it is part of your annual review process. Are there any other contexts in which you use portfolios?

Sonja Taylor: 5:39

Yes, related to teaching, I run two bridge programmes, and the summer one is a grant funded two-week residency for high school students who are going into their last year of high school, and I use portfolio there, and then I am the lead faculty on the Summer Scholars first year bridge at PSU, and I do the professional development for the teaching faculty or teaching academic courses in the different pathways, and I have them all do an ePortfolio as part of the process. So in that sense, I get to work with faculty to help them create an artefact for students across every discipline on campus. So students coming into every discipline are going to have this one experience with ePortfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:22

That is fantastic to plant that seed in them very early on in their university career. Candyce, you've been using portfolios also with your PhD students at Portland State University. In which contexts do you use portfolio practice right now?

Candyce Reynolds: 6:39

I used it with doctoral students, and I also used it in a master's programme that I taught in at Portland State University. It was their culminating assignment was to create an ePortfolio that highlighted the work that they had done throughout their experience in the master's programme. Right now, in the courses that I teach at Boise State, I use ePortfolios and all of my classes, and I am currently in the process of recruiting more faculty and departments to consider the use of ePortfolios. We're getting ready to do some pilots at Boise State that are more programme based. I'm excited about that. Like Sonja, I keep a professional ePortfolio, too, and it's the first thing that I provide to students whenever I teach them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:27

Leading by example in both of your cases. The reason why we're having the chat today, not just because I really wanted to catch up with you, since I haven't seen you since last year's conference, but is also that you've recently published the article 'Folio thinking and digital literacy: Integrating social media and ePortfolios' in the journal 'New Directions for Teaching and Learning'. In that article, which I highly recommend everybody to read because it is a really, really good read, outlining very well how you went about working with your students and also how you integrated portfolios in their learning and how you engage with them. In there you make, in particular, the connection between social media and portfolios, or rather, in a way, actually portfolio practice by incorporating folio thinking into activities for students to work with social media. What prompted you to undertake that work with your students?

Candyce Reynolds: 8:26

Sonja and I, and then soon after Melissa, Sonja, and I have been talking about this concept for a long, long time. This is one of the dreams that we would actually write this article and get it published. You know, I think all three of us are users of social media, and people often complain about social media, but we really understand that social media can be used for good and is actually a place where folks can reflect and get feedback from others and engage in understanding themselves and the world better. Sonja and I started a conversation about this at an AAEEBL conference many, many years ago. That sort of led us to develop more of these ideas. And Dr Pirie joined us as time went on, in thinking about these ideas. Anything you want to add, Sonja?

Sonja Taylor: 9:19

Oh yeah. It was the summer of 2016, AAEEBL conference, Boston. I wish I had the napkin that I wrote on, but[Candyce laughs] Candyce and I were sitting together, and I think it was the last keynote, maybe the Batson Lecture, which you gave this year,where they were talking about curating and different steps of ePortfolio, and I was sort of like mapping to different social media platforms. And I was like,'Candyce!' She said, 'Yes!'[laughs] We had this idea for an article called 'Hashtags, tweets, and status updates', and I think we wanted to name this article that, but we were overruled by our editors. So we're like [laughs], here's the place where we get to say that's what the title should be[laughs]. We just kept talking about it. I think we did a webinar on it, and also at that time, Candyce and I had been Facebook users together, Facebook community, and we both got really intentional about our own use of social media. One of the things we talked about was this idea of the skills that students bring with them, 'funds of knowledge', is sort of the academic framing for that now, but we are like'Students are doing this work. They're doing it, not intentionally, but they're doing it.' And so could we maybe make a connection for them in the classroom that helps them understand that they're actually doing this work, and maybe some of that doing it in the classroom could carry back over into the social media world and have an effect on how they use social media in that sense. One year, when I was second-year teaching at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, I had a very clear like, 'Here's your digital identity, and here's a comparison between social media and different audiences.' And I had students actually, they were friends with me on Facebook, and I saw that they were incorporating this in what they were doing in their social media practice. And so I think it's a really effective tie for the generations that are coming up with social media all around them, and similar to AI, it's here. We're going to have to deal with it. How do we make it constructive, and how do we make it serve us?

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:25

I really like that you tied in the idea of folio thinking into the work that you're doing and making that connection so explicit, and then also focusing on the process of the portfolio rather than the end product. Can you please tell us what folio thinking is and how you incorporated it into your classes with your students who would not have heard about it before?

Candyce Reynolds: 11:51

One way of thinking about folio thinking is first, it's a process. It doesn't necessarily require ePortfolios though I think it's best if it incorporates ePortfolios. It's a process that actually encourages students to collect and to organise and reflect and make connections. By doing that, it can lead a person to being able to really talk about their life and their work more intelligently, and really be able to tell a story about their own learning experiences and what they mean, what the value of those experiences are, and I think most importantly, how they relate to each other. As Sonja was saying, thinking about social media as part of the process is, you know, this is not 'Here's my life outside of school and social media, and here's my life inside school doing this portfolio.' We really want students to be able to see that everywhere they're reflecting and growing, all of it is connected, and that they can be intentional about that kind of work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:55

Sonia, you mentioned earlier that because some of your students friended you on social media that you'd see the updates, and also that blurring of the lines between the personal and the professional. Do you have a short example where you have seen that growth in the students that they become more reflective and also make those connections more intentionally themselves?

Sonja Taylor: 13:17

I have two examples, really. One where a student put something in their final portfolio for me and talked about it, and it was clearly me that was the audience as their instructor. A few weeks later, I saw their graduation post, and it was the same elements that they had provided as evidence for me, but with a different description and the tone because they were talking to their friends and family. That was a really aha moment for me, of like, 'Oh, it actually does work [laughs]. I'm not wrong.' The other was a student, more recently, who, after my class, developed their own professional portfolio and then shared it to LinkedIn. In both cases, I really saw them bringing more of their academic self into the social sphere that they inhabit. I also will see students talking about their work and school life, like 'Here I am,' then they're referring to things, and I think they might do some of it anyway, but they might do it sooner and more often if they're prompted to make that connection, and I think with more intention.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:26

So you also see that transfer of skills from one area into another, personal into professional, and then professional back into the personal.

Sonja Taylor: 14:34

Yeah, I had a student who I did an interview with for another project, and I asked her about the ePortfolio process and how it was helpful to her. She said she had never realised that her lived experience could be relevant to her academic life. That was really powerful for me because the blending of your experience over time and what you're learning and your scholarly pursuits, it all comes together in who you are. That made her lived experience more valid for her to be able to bring it into that space. And so I just want all my students to know you're choosing, you're weaving, you're becoming a storyteller of who you are, and here's some tools to do it. And whatever you want to be relevant is relevant.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:21

That is also, I think, part of DEIBD: diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, in particular in this case, and decolonisation so that they see, yes, they have a space. They are not an outsider. Yes, they really also belong in there and their experiences belong. That is wonderful that your student has realised that, Sonja, on their own and is taking that forward now for the rest of their professional life.

Candyce Reynolds: 15:48

I think that's so important, Kristina because we haven't in the past as much helped students include their identities and include their understanding of their world and how it meshes with what they're learning at the university, and our world is going to be much richer and our ideas are much richer because we're helping students now see that what they have to offer, in addition to what they're learning at the university, is what makes a difference in the future.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:15

I also like that you're weaving in the ideas about digital literacy, digital citizenship, and all of these other concepts that are sometimes really hard to teach on their own because you have to teach them in context and make that part of the course for the students to go through. Candyce is that, then also something that you can champion now that you're at Boise State and have all of this experience from Portland and seeing Sonja work with the high school students, but also you yourself working with a lot of university students throughout your career?

Candyce Reynolds: 16:49

Oh, for sure[laughs]. For sure. Like I said, I use ePortfolios and these concepts in all my courses. I'm actually teaching a general education course called 'Ethics and diversity in the digital age'. We are focusing quite a bit on digital citizenship principles, and digital literacy is certainly part of that, and so it continues, and will continue to continue.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:12

What I also really liked about your article is that you initially didn't really make it so much about the portfolio. You weave it in and engage your students, and then in the end, they actually do end up with that portfolio. They just don't know about it since they do not have the specific language. Do you feel that is also helping your students to connect with the practice since it is more about that process rather than the end product?

Candyce Reynolds: 17:35

I totally think so.

Sonja Taylor: 17:37

I find more and more - and this is the presentation recently, the one specifically I did for Pebblebash - where it's teaching to a different test. More and more, everything I do is geared toward the ePortfolio, and I work in a team. So I'm collaborating with other faculty, and specifically in my senior inquiry course, I work with two other teachers. What I have done is, over time, incorporated their assignments into the ePortfolio products that students are doing so that they are not doing new things. They are actually engaged in the process the whole time. I have a certain workbook that I do at the beginning of the year, which is really an exploration and initial introduction to them, and they've done five assignments that they can choose from that can fill all the boxes, and then they can reflect on why they chose that thing about that piece for them. But then it's like, 'Oh, I did this work over here. It's relevant over here, and I need to keep thinking about,' and I found that not only then did they have the ePortfolio at the end of the year, they're actually thinking more about what we asked them to do and the assignments they've done, like, 'Oh, that's why I did this. And also, what do I think about that, and how is it relevant to me?' It makes everything connect more. The more that I do that, the more that I find that. The other thing that I've done is using discussion boards more as public reflection, and I have guided engagement that they're required to do. They engage with each other around their reflections, and I am very specific about be kind, be supportive. Here's some things you might say because the comment threads on public discourse leave much to be desired, and so [laughs] I would like them to be thoughtful about there is a human being on the other side of this post, although, I mean, I know there's bots sometimes, but partly, you might be able to discover that by the quality of the conversation that you're having with the person, right [laughs]? I think just being mindful about we've entered this phase of technology where we're having all these conversations, we're not always in the room with someone, but we can still practice this mindfulness and this citizenship and then this collegiality with each other and just practice those pieces. I've only been doing that a few years now, so we'll see how that goes. What my takeaways are [laughs].

Candyce Reynolds: 19:59

Yeah, the process is the most important thing about the ePortfolio. I think we get very stuck on the outward product and all the bells and whistles that we can put into ePortfolios. For me, the focus on the process and as Sonja was saying, being able to help them see like, 'Oh, I thought about this here and that connected with this and this connected with that, and then I can present it in some kind of showcase portfolio at the end, and it can all make sense together.' Isn't that what we want our students to be able to do? That's a critical thinking process of being able to gather a bunch of stuff, learn from it, think about it, and then figure out how it all fits together, to be able to use it in the future. For me, the process is paramount, and we spend way too much time thinking about the product.

Sonja Taylor: 20:48

I 100% agree, and I think the focus on the process and understanding how the process helps us is the best antidote to overuse of ChatGPT or whatever else is coming down the line. Because if you're focused on the outcome, then people just rush to that. If you focus on the process, you get the outcome, but it's much more authentic, and it is transformative.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:13

Sonja, at one point, hopefully in the future, I'll get to see one of your napkin drawings or maybe it actually [Sonja laughs] needs to be put onto a flip chart because when you talked about how you transformed the assessment tasks of your colleagues and put them into the portfolio as well, I really had this huge map in mind where you can see the touch points with the portfolio that you also have these authentic activities included and really see that in a visualisation to make it very explicit of where all of that comes in at which stages because you're working with high school students. So they are getting that right at the start. And you're working with everybody, essentially everybody on campus, so they have these touch points very early on and then hopefully also continue throughout their university career with the ideas and with the skills and tools that they have learned in your courses. What do you take away from your article, from your thinking, from your engagements with the students, about the social media use and incorporating folio thinking methods for your future practice with other students?

Sonja Taylor: 22:27

It's interesting because right now, I have a son and a stepson that are both in high school. The way that both of those schools have dealt with cell phones is different. One of the schools has done this, 'You put your phone in a pouch, and it's locked up for the whole day.' This is one example, but in general, I think bans don't usually work well. I know that cell phones have gotten to be distraction in class. I've done classroom research projects on it. My own class, we're going to be like, 'You need to put the phone in the pocket, unless we're at a time where you can use it.' That being said, if you don't figure out how to incorporate it in some way, then you're keeping that separate of'this is my life over here, and this is my academic world over here, and this is not relevant or interesting to me, and this is what I live for.' That's how I see my kids doing that. If finding ways to productively use the technology in the classroom and social media and the capacity for knowledge dissemination is one opportunity for that. When we were at the AAEEBL conference this year, Sylvia Spears of College Unbound, who is amazing, did an activity where she asked us all to look for a photo in our phone that represented us and then talking small group about us, and then we had a very rich discussion about reflection and what that was like, and I have used that in almost all my icebreakers since then. I have this great picture of me from high school that I use [laughs]. Check this out. I'm an angsty teen. It was such a powerful and awesome move. It did require a cell phone, but also elicited conversation and discussion. Finding opportunities to do more of that would be great, especially for the population I teach with.

Candyce Reynolds: 24:13

Sonja knows about this, but one thing I tried in this class that I'm teaching was to actually talk about the role of engagement and learning, and asked the students to have a discussion, make an agreement about what it meant to be engaged in the class. The things that they said was to avoid distractions as well as inviting other people in. I mean, they came up with things I would never have thought about in terms of ground rules, and I didn't call them ground rules. It was like, 'What do you need to do to be engaged so that you can learn best? They chose'avoid distraction', and then they rate themselves. They grade themselves on those behaviours for that day. Many of them say,'I've never not looked at my phone while I've been in class. It's the first time I've done that, and I'm learning so much more.' I think the more we invite, and that's something I want to do is continue to invite students to be inquisitive about themselves and then understanding themselves.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:06

That goes to the point that you do need to try it out in order to talk about it or to know what it can do and how powerful it is. Just talking about portfolios is not sufficient. So you've been using portfolios of the electronic and non electronic or at least not online kind for quite a while now. Is there anything that you would very much like to be able to do but can't yet in your practice?

Candyce Reynolds: 25:33

I would love all the systems to talk to each other better [laughs]. We have LMSs that are pretty ubiquitous now in higher education, and yet it's not necessarily easy to always figure out how to get things easily from one platform to another platform. I know interoperability has been - people are working on that, but it's still not easy. It's not easy that LMSs are so course based that many of the things that Sonja and I are talking about, about having students be able to see the connections between things, it's hard to do that when a course closes down after it's done. How do you get to - unless you've decided to download your discussion post, you may not - you say, 'I think I talked about that,' but you aren't able to get to it to be able to use in a portfolio at a later date.

Sonja Taylor: 26:22

Having a way to automatically archive everything would be awesome for students to Candyce's point because as a faculty at PSU, I have everything. I have archived old classes, not just for me, but because I am the Director of Senior inquiry, I archived all my colleagues classes too, and just last year, a student from one of the programmes in a different school really wanted their ePortfolio, couldn't access it, but I had the archived information. So I just put it all in a folder for her and sent it to her. Just the fact that I had it was random, right? And that I could do that. There's no guarantee that somebody would be what if I was gone, you know, like I moved on to a different job, that option would be gone, and that student really wanted their work. If there was a mechanism that you could just figure out how to very easily collect your work as you're doing it for these different platforms, that would be amazing. I'm sure, as efficient that our technology is at harvesting data, I'm sure that there's a way that that could be done in service of a student and getting their learning archive together.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:30

We have interoperability again, and also, then actually, also very much lifelong learning that ideally, we have the possibility to keep a portfolio, and not just one portfolio, to keep multiple portfolios throughout and then surface evidence from many, many years ago and combine it with something new and then make those connections. That then already takes us to the quick answer round for our session today. The first question goes then to you, Sonja, which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Sonja Taylor: 28:06

I think it's untapped opportunity, undiscovered territory, in some cases, for many practitioners, reflection meets integrated learning. Candyce has excellent presentation around that that I just saw recently. So like those things come to mind. I think it is scaffolded storytelling.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:25

Thank you. Now Candyce, what about you? What words or short phrases would you use or do you use most commonly?

Candyce Reynolds: 28:33

It is about the process, and the second one is transformative, and the third word is connected.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:41

Connected or connective?

Candyce Reynolds: 28:43

Connected. Actually, you could say connected and connective. Let's do that because I can have more than one word,

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:49

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

Candyce Reynolds: 28:57

I would say, don't forget that it's really about the learning and not about the product. Just keep your focus on that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:03

And Sonja?

Sonja Taylor: 29:04

Build your own example. And this is advice for anyone, but definitely designers and instructors. Build your own example. Start small to pay attention to the process, scaffold up.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:16

Thank you. We come to the last piece of advice for today, and that is for portfolio authors, including students, faculty, anybody who's creating a portfolio, what advice would you have for them?

Candyce Reynolds: 29:28

Have fun and enjoy the process. Don't get stuck on it has to be perfect.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:33

Thanks, Candyce.

Sonja Taylor: 29:35

Look for other contexts to use the practice. Social media is one good place. This last summer, I just found a children's book that I wrote when I was eight. Now I'm on a mission. This girl needs to be published, my former self, and I have some companion pieces to add so you never know where this folio thinking is gonna show up.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:57

Yeah because it's not confined to the classroom only. We do it pretty much all the time. Thank you so, so very much for this chat today, Sonja and Candyce. I really appreciate the time you were able to take today. Thank you so much also for all your work in the many different communities that you are engaging with.

Candyce Reynolds: 30:17

Thank you.

Sonja Taylor: 30:18

I have one last thing to add because of Candyce's connective and connected.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:23

Sure.

Sonja Taylor: 30:24

It's like the connective tissue of your learning [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:28

It is!

Candyce Reynolds: 30:29

I love it!

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:30

Shall I add that as an additional phrase to yours?

Sonja Taylor: 30:33

Yeah, I think it is because I think, you know, there's connective tissue that wraps around every cell in our body and pulls it all together, and then we have a walking human. I think of portfolio as pulling all your learning together, you know, and then to tell a story, right?

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:48

Thank you so much for that last thought, and I look forward to chatting with you some other time.

Sonja Taylor: 30:55

Thanks for the opportunity.

Candyce Reynolds: 30:57

Yeah, thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:59

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Sonja Taylor and Dr Candyce Reynolds. 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.