Kristina Hoeppner: 0:29

Today I'm speaking with Jack Rice from Acadia University in Canada. We've mainly connected at MoodleMoot Canada over the last two years and then also electronically on social media. Since he's not just a fan of enhancing learning through learning management systems, but also through portfolios, I invited him for an interview to hear more about his perspective on portfolio practice and how to incorporate that into a learning environment. Hello Jack. Welcome to the podcast.

Jack Rice: 1:03

Thank you so much, Kristina. I'm very excited for our conversation today. Thank you so much for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:10

I also look forward to it. What do you do at your current university, Acadia University?

Jack Rice: 1:16

My title is Director of Digital and Extended Learning. Our unit runs all of the online courses for the university, and also we're involved in a lot of continuing education, extended learning, graduate programmes, anything else that's in that basket of anything outside of the undergraduate four-year experience. It's great. It gives me a lot of chance to play and experiment with different things.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:43

For how long have you been using educational technology, facilitated through the internet?

Jack Rice: 1:49

It's really difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when was first contact, when you first used it. But I was probably, at the time, amongst my peers a bit of an early adopter in online learning and using educational technology. I found it to hold a promise that I was looking for in education at the time. Whereas some of my colleagues were quite against using educational technology, I seemed to gravitate towards it for particular reasons. So I would say it was certainly more

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:20

Do you actually remember what was your than a decade ago. favourite tool when you started out?

Jack Rice: 2:27

I'd say it was VoiceThread. I love the power of asynchronous sharing. The fact that I could put a prompt out and I could speak to it, and I could present, and then someone else could speak a prompt into the screen, either audio or video, and then students could respond to that prompt, and all of a sudden we just mushroomed. That was really powerful for me. So I really enjoyed using VoiceThread. I've been using it for over a decade, and in a number of the classes that I've taught. And then relatives of VoiceThread, things like Flipped Grid, which became Flipped, and all these kinds of tools, but I've always really enjoyed the multimedia exchange of rich media content.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:11

That does get you away from just typing things in so that you really make good use of the technology in speaking, rather than only needing to write like you would typically do in a blog post or in a forum post.

Jack Rice: 3:26

That's right. The real cocktail is the asynchronous element of the learning. Because in education, we spend so much of our time on stimulus and response, stimulus and response, stimulus and response. The thing that I have to let people know is that learning does not happen at stimulus, and it doesn't happen at response. It happens either in between, sometimes afterwards, sometimes a week afterwards, a day afterwards, 10 years after the initial stimulus was shown or the initial first response was given. This is really important to me, and it's really related to how much I love portfolios because in our education system, we value the accuracy of the first response. We don't look at the process of learning, the growth in learning longitudinally over a period of time. It's the space between the spokes in education that we really have to concentrate on, the moment between stimulus and response and what happens afterwards in the learner's mind.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:31

That's an absolutely fantastic way of looking at the portfolio work because I like that idea of the learning in between stimulus - response or afterwards because you do need to digest first what you have heard or think about it a little bit more and sure, we might be reflecting directly in the moment or having a response, which, of course, is based on what we have heard, what we've experienced, but then the bigger impact will happen afterwards. Do you remember when you started using portfolios and why you started working with them?

Jack Rice: 5:05

I remember a story. I was the headmaster of an elementary school in Australia. When you're the headmaster of an elementary school, you worry a lot of times about risk management. One part of my process was that I always would look at all of the report cards before they went out to parents. You know, you'd be doing a multitude of things that you'd be working on, and you'd have a stack of report cards, and I remember looking at reports that a teacher had provided, and it seemed very thick. The folder was very thick, and I thought,'Wow, that's going to take a lot of reading.' I saved it to the end. I saved it to after lunch. I took the teacher's work and I started flipping through it, and I couldn't see any words. I was looking for the prose. I was looking for the comments, the descriptions. All I could see were these photographs. My first response was, I was furious, absolutely furious with the teacher. They had not created a report card for the student. I remember I took the folder, and I marched out of my office, and I started slamming my feet as I walked down the pathway to confront this teacher. I was organising my thoughts and my response, and for some reason, I went back and I looked at it, and what I realised was, this was not only a report, it was the most sublime and beautiful thing I'd ever seen because what it did was it captured the student in photographs, actually doing the work that was in their programme. What she had done is she'd annotated it and connected all of the different artefacts to the standards that the student was supposed to achieve. As I started looking at it further, and I realised that some of the artefacts were things that the student had produced, by the time I got to the classroom, I was almost in tears. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and it was so much better than any report that I'd ever experienced. It was at that moment that I really started to get interested in portfolios, and I used them more in K-12 education, and it was that teacher that inspired me to show me a different way that we could view assessment.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:19

That's a story from about 15 years ago.

Jack Rice: 7:21

That's right, well, 15 years ago.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:24

It still stuck with you. So it has definitely been a very impactful experience.

Jack Rice: 7:30

It was a profound moment in my journey as an educator because, you know, when I first started teaching, I was a high school teacher. In my first couple of years, what I had done was I had tried to figure out what all of the skills were that students would have to learn in their mathematics course, and I created quizzes every single day that matched to those particular skills. So it was just quiz, quiz, quiz, quiz, test - quiz, quiz, quiz, quiz, test. I got to the end of the semester, I gave out a final examination and the students knew nothing, they didn't know anything [laughs]. I was so forlorn. I was so forlorn. I remember the department head of mathematics was watching. He was just an absolute brilliant educator who'd been teaching for 30 years. I was trying to explain to him. I said, "Look, I taught all of this material. I don't know why they can't produce it now on this final exam. Look at these tests and quizzes," whatever. And he looked at me, and he said, "Jack, maybe you should have taught the students instead." And I thought, "Oh, yes, of course." I was so focused on the actual quizzes and tests, I forgot to look up and I forgot to look at the students, and I was not looking at it through their experience. That was very profound for me. Of many moments in time that I've thought about how we should think about assessment and assessing learners, what is the project here and what we're trying to accomplish? Those moments early in my career about the disconnect of the constant testing and why it wasn't achieving the results that I wanted, and then later on, these educators that showed me a different way to view assessment more longitudinally, which is so powerful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:14

In your position then, as headmaster, Jack, did you then also change how other teachers submit their reports. Did you encourage them to create similar portfolios for the students?

Jack Rice: 9:28

I did, but I'm always very cautious when I work with teachers. Just as in my example, I needed to go through the process to get to the end and result and then create that sort of feedback loop for myself that said, 'Ah, it's not exactly what I want,' and move in in a particular direction. I've always been apprehensive about dictating to teachers in elementary school and higher education about this is the way to do it. This is going to work for you because part of it is, we're all on a different journey. We're all creating our own portfolio as educators. So our destinies with the learners are entwined. They're creating their portfolio. I'm creating mine, and it's a dance that we move together. Everybody's on a different edge of that spectrum. But absolutely, I would show those artefacts that were produced, and I would really try to explain why this is a really powerful method to assessment, and a number of the educators picked up on that and started to create different forms of portfolios in their own assessment, which was wonderful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:29

What does your portfolio currently look like? What do you have in it?

Jack Rice: 10:35

You know, it's funny, my own portfolio, when you look back after you've been in a career for X number of years, you start to look at moments, really transitional moments for you in your career, and you become less ashamed, more aware of moments that didn't quite go so well. So actually, what I stack in my portfolio, I think, is growth and elements of growth for myself. You could imagine a learner that's in their second year of learners to do that because we have learners competing with university. You ask that learner, 'You've done 15 different assessment pieces, what three or four would you like to put in your portfolio?' I would suggest to you that that learner is going to put in the four top grades or the four top marks or where they hit the rubric the best. But the question is, is those the pieces that showed the most growth? It's a reframe to the project. each other. Therefore they must put in only their best work. Oftentimes, our best work is not where the growth comes from. There's a lot of things in that portfolio of mine right now that I love to share because I'm in a position in my career where I can share those failures.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:09

Do you have a particular way of encouraging your students to get into the habit of doing that so that they also feel safe, or, in some cases, maybe even brave, to share those moments?

Jack Rice: 12:20

A lot of it is your sense of humour about your own learning, about their learning. I went through this process one time in a graduate level class. One of the things I will admit about my teaching career is I have the worst time trying to remember people's names. You know, it's absolutely atrocious, really. I would go a week, two weeks, four weeks, and sometimes in a class, I may only have them in a graduate level class for eight weeks or 10 weeks. By the time I learned their name, they're gone. So I ashamedly had to create name cards for my students. I mean, it's really bad, but I would get involved in what I'm doing, and I would look out, and there'd be 29 people there, and I just couldn't remember. What I did was, if you can imagine a Christmas card, a card stock paper that's folded over with their name on one side, 'Please put that in front of your desk,' and then it would look out and go, 'Oh, hi, Kristina. How are you?' Whatever. Well, one night, I realised that the student, we'll name Kristina, had given a really great response to a prompt, but I did not acknowledge it at the time. It wasn't until I drove home that I realised that the response was so brilliant. What I decided to do was I thought I had all the name cards. I collected them after every night, and I'd hand them out the next week. Inside her name card [laughs], I wrote down my response to her response, and I said, 'you know, I really enjoyed that' blah, blah, blah. The second night after I picked those up again, she had responded inside. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. So I had to run this experiment a little bit longer. So then I took the other name tags and each side, in these other Christmas cards, I started writing in something maybe they had put on the LMS, maybe something about a comment that they had made, or a piece of their work, etc. And so I wrote it. I didn't say anything. I just handed out the name cards again. Well, they responded back because this was personal to them now. I was trying to get to know the students. Start with a name. This was just a change in attitude towards the class. Here I had, very quickly, a portfolio in front of me inside this little name card that was a record of our conversation throughout the entire term - go back and forth. There was all kinds of marks in it, and thank you for this, and I like this, and there was personal things that would come up a back and forth, and I learned the student's name so quickly that way. I started to realise that this is something that we could replicate in the digital space.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:54

That's VoiceThread, just in a written form, right?

Jack Rice: 14:58

That's right, it is VoiceThread. And what was produced as artefact at the end, this marked up Christmas card laughs] at the end of the day, was a portfolio. It was a portfolio of their work, of their thought, of their process as they move through it. I remember the first time I met you, and I was like, probably standing in front of your table, and you were talking about Mahara and then the project and this portfolio work. And I just thought, that's really the first time as an instructor myself, I really understood the power of a portfolio. I also remember that I was grading exams, I think, at the end of that first class, and the student wrote in the exam, "Hey, Mr Rice, do you still remember the name of my cat?" And I responded to it,"Congratulations on the A-. Mittens would be proud." So again [laughs], just sharing back and forth that sort of attitude. Being playful with students, I think this is really important. And of course, it's very difficult. You know, you need to be guarded and really understand not to abuse that sensibility. I think we've lost a little bit of our playfulness in education. If you look at a portfolio and suggest to a student, I want to see your rough notes in there as well. I'm not going to judge it. It's not my job to judge another human being [laughs] and the way they come to their learning. I've always said that the modern teacher needs to think a lot more like a lawyer than a judge. My job as an educator is to make a case for my student. I'm advocating on behalf of my student. So I'm going to work with you, and we're going to pull out different pieces and put it into a portfolio. We're going to annotate it, and we're going to really be reflective in our learning and our practice. My job is to create that case for you, to make a case that you've met the standards that are in this programme. I'm an advocate for you. It's not necessarily my job to judge as it is to be that advocate. The idea of portfolios really plays into that sensibility.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:03

Did you actually take photographs of your name cards?

Jack Rice: 17:07

Ah, you know what? I probably didn't, but I probably still have artefacts of them, like the actual artefact of name cards that I had over the years because these things end up in boxes. You go through them as you move around the world, and you unpack boxes and you look and go, "Wow, that was a memory." I'm sure there's a student or two over time that I still have those sort of name cards, but the idea is that it moved past name cards after two or three years for more in the digital space of like, how can we accumulate a space for these reflections and these sort of metacognitive experiences where the student starts to understand how they are progressing in their own learning, and they start to own it? Once you can get a student to own that learning and own that process - so important.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:56

That's what I really like about Mahara, where you can put up your artefacts and also create your portfolios and then have the possibility to interact with the viewers in the comments, to hear their feedback, to further your learning that way, to engage in a conversation around the artefact or around the reflection, in order to not just make it look like a web page that is only there for display, but really continue that learning process.

Jack Rice: 18:25

That's right. And I know that Mahara has been used in teacher education programmes. I believe at Athabasca University, it's used in teacher preparation programmes. I think that is such a great well placed use for Mahara in the portfolio process because throughout your teaching career, you'll have moments of embarrassment and you'll have moments that things didn't quite go so well, but, you know, hold on to them. Keep them. They're part of that tapestry that you look back, and it becomes that sort of overarching teaching career. So to learn that process for yourself in your teacher preparation programme and then also sharing that with your students as they're learning becomes really powerful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:04

Yeah, Professor Dr Debra Hoven and also Dr Rita Zuba Prokopetz have been teaching in the Master in Education in Open, Digital, and Distance Learning, and also in the Doctorate in Education, where they are working with portfolios. They've definitely done good work there incorporating portfolio practice, introducing teachers who then go back into their careers to portfolio work.

Jack Rice: 19:31

Just so many examples of educators that are using it in very inspired ways. It's wonderful to see.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:38

Beyond your name card portfolio that you've collaboratively created with your students, Jack, how have you used portfolios with your students throughout your illustrious career in your various positions?

Jack Rice: 19:52

I've used them, certainly, as repositories. But I think what is exciting for me is I realised in education at a point in time that here I was instructing a group, and I never once saw any material, any work, a sample that the student had ever created prior to visiting with me [laughs]. Imagine like if I'm teaching a student in grade 11, and it's a new student to me. I never saw anything that they've ever produced in grade 10, grade nine, grade eight, grade six. I don't know anything about that student in their journey. What became really important to me was being able to produce something that the next instructor could use. So almost like I want to introduce you to myself as a learner. Here are two or three or four work samples that I've annotated, that I've reflected on, that I'm really proud of. What a way to introduce yourself to the next instructor in the programme. What excites me about portfolios is that they can live past your own class, and they can start to move into another class in that programme. If you think about where I taught a lot of times with graduate programmes in educational leadership, it was nice you took all these different courses. But in graduate programmes, you not only take different courses, you take different professors. I'm taking this professor now and this professor now, and I'm gleaning something for each of them. So it's such a head start for a professor. Imagine on the first day, "Hi, I'm Jack Rice, and here's parts of my portfolio that I'd love you to look at and reflect on yourself before I start in this class." It gives you such a heads up. That's how I started to encourage learners to create this kind of material for the next instructor.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:36

That way you encourage your students to be seen as a holistic person because they don't just come to the class and that's when their personality or their learning starts, but they come with all the experiences that then this new instructor can incorporate into their class.

Jack Rice: 21:53

Yeah. I remember one of the other instructors say to me [laughs], "Jack, why are you giving me homework on day one[both Jack and Kristina laugh]? All of these students are giving me all of this material, and all of a sudden I have to do this homework?" I would say, "Look, this is a learning community. Sometimes you're a learner, sometimes you're an instructor." Why is it always the older folks that are doing the instructing and the younger folks doing the learning? If this is a learning community, it should be both ways, right? I should be learning, and they should be instructing. I don't think that a learner should be able to get through a programme at a university, any learner, not just education, any learner, without actually teaching something. Here's a Moodle shell, you teach me something. Whether it's to how to change a light bulb or a tire on a car or whatever you're interested in. But again, it's that sort of metacognition about the learning process and how it works for you, and how you would explain something to someone else that becomes so valuable. If the portfolio, and this, I think, has been the flaw in portfolio, that it's an artefact which does not live past the end of the class. If that's what it is, and you're just submitting this to me for this classroom exercise for me to grade it that has some utility, but it's not as powerful a utility as if it follows the learner throughout their career and throughout their programme. That's what is really exciting to me with Mahara and tools like it is that you're really looking at programmatic assessment as well as learner assessment and following it through the learner's journey.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:24

I feel also that when you create those portfolios for assessment, that they then, after the assessment is done, can become an artefact within the bigger learning portfolio that a student might keep, or they can pull artefacts out of that assessment portfolio in order to incorporate it into that wider learning story that they might want to present to somebody else then in the future.

Jack Rice: 23:48

It's all about starting conversations. That's what education is. It's about something that I can provide to the learner that will start a conversation that provides that reflection and that space for growth in between stimulus and response. The portfolio becomes even a more powerful exercise to have it live beyond that first interaction, but really to start a conversation. So the biggest part of a portfolio was not measuring against a rubric at the end, but it's the last office hour before the final assessment or before in that final portfolio is assessed. It's more about, "I noticed on this artefact inside your portfolio, you said this, how did you come to that? That's so interesting." To allow that student to then elaborate and that student to help organise their own thoughts in their own process. That's the real beauty and the power of learning. That's deeply embedded learning that's happening at that spot.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:44

So you know all of those things about portfolio work. What do you students think when they're creating portfolios or maybe even in hindsight realise things about their portfolios?

Jack Rice: 24:55

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of unlearning that has to happen. Students have gone to school from the age of three or four and been told that they have to compete. And you can say, well, we don't really have a lot of competition for students at that young age. If you walk into a classroom of learners that are the age of seven and say, "I want you to line up in order of who's the best at mathematics and who's the worst at mathematics," they will line themselves up perfectly based on the grades that they were receiving in the class. This happens at the age of seven. Imagine what happens by the age 17 or the age 27 or imagine what happens over 170 years of this educational project. The pervasive competitive instinct that we artificially put inside education, and we just come to even accept it. We don't even question it any more that students would get gold stars or grades or their name on their board if they act up, or all of the different competitive systems that we create inside our classes. When I have students come to me and they're maybe in second year university now or in a graduate programme, they want to know, what do I need to do to achieve a B+ in this class? For them, oftentimes it's well, "I know that I have to like, I'm going to get a Starbucks and I'm going to walk into class, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to smile at my instructor. I'm going to laugh at their jokes." Like this is a whole exercise that they've been doing since they were young, and they've took them through high school and into university. Asking them to create a portfolio of their work over time, annotate it, reflect on it, and think of it as their own project and not a competitive project against the other people in their class, that's incredibly challenging. You're asking them to change a paradigm of learning that they've been in since the age of three or four. Can I change that paradigm in eight weeks in a classroom? Likely not. But if I can get them to understand that their work is their own work, and it does not need to be compared against anyone else, that it's being prepared against their own growth throughout the term, and if they can start to just lower that level of competition a little bit amongst the class that I think is really powerful. Think about different ways of assessment. It's very confronting for the students who are very embedded in a game that we've made them play their whole lives. But I get excited when I can just see glimpses of students trying to collaborate, trying to cooperate, trying to work together, trying to think about their growth rather than their best first effort that's going to be graded. That's really exciting. I take very small wins. Sometimes it's not something that happens in front of you in the class. Some things happens 10 or 12 years later. That is the impactful piece. If I'm demonstrating for them the commitment towards portfolio assessment, I know that's going to happen later on in their career. They're going to understand, I understand why he was trying to get us to think that way. I take heart in that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:05

Do you think that project work can help with that when a small group of students works together on an individual task which is different from the project that another group is doing, so as to reduce the amount of comparison in terms of what they are working on, what they need to

Jack Rice: 28:24

It's a great point. I love to see students having the explore? agency to choose the projects that are most impactful for them. If we as educators, if we can just stop judging that for a moment [laughs] and saying,"Well, that's really interesting. You want to look at video games? Great. Can we look at a project about how video games are made? And really exciting, really interesting." First, you might think, oh, you know, Johnny is going to ask, do video games again? But really, our job as the educator is to try to find the higher purpose in it for the student, and not judge so quickly what the individual topic is. Also really having students working together in a project based learning is difficult to facilitate. It is exhausting to facilitate group projects amongst a group of people, and that's where, again, you have to really understand the wins that you're looking for. Sometimes the wins are not them producing exactly what you want them to produce. Sometimes they're producing something that looks quite different. You have to be an improv expert or a air traffic controller and land all the planes on time and things like that, looking out amongst the class. But I love that idea of having students choosing their own projects, working on different projects, discrete projects, coming together and working together. When you look at the final project that they've produced, ask them about their learning along the way. "Oh, I really want you to see this. Don't you see this? We produce this, and it works 100% of the time." I'm not so interested in that. "What I'm interested in[laughs] is this moment because I know this moment about week two, when you wanted to pull your classmates' hair out. How did you get past that?" You start probing, and they're thinking like, "Why do you want to talk about that? I thought you wanted to talk about how this electrical circuit is perfect." That's not what I'm interested in, right? I'm interested in different parts of the learning along the way. Students get quite curious about that and why I might look at different things on their journey, but I think over time, they start to understand that value.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:26

That gets you beyond that summary of the task or of the activity into the reflection of the why and now what you're going to take out of that for you going forward. Jack, you've held various positions throughout your career, in if I counted correctly, three different countries, Canada, the states and also Australia. You've been a classroom teacher, dean of school at a college, and executive director of the Maple League of Universities, amongst many others. Has there been a red thread of portfolio use at these various institutions or did you need to reorient yourself every time or try something different every time?

Jack Rice: 31:09

I think that every time you go into a new experience, and I've had a lot of them, where someone has come to me, "Oh, we have a challenge." And I think, okay, I can help you with that, and off I go to the next challenge along the way. I get really excited about learning things new for myself. I always view it as an opportunity to grow as leader. Each time I go into a new experience, this is the opportunity to see what elements of my leadership style will work and what also I can incorporate that is new and learn from other people. In each of those situations, I've learned something new about myself. Often, when you go into a new circumstance, you initially want to challenge. Why do you do it that way? We did it this way over here, and it worked quite nicely, and now you're doing it this way. Here, this is the solution. I want to tell you what the solution is right now. But you have to try to prevent yourself from that. Stop go back, ask yourself some questions and ask other people questions. The most important leadership exercise you can have is to lead with questions. Someone once asked me to calculate my question to statement ratio[laughs]. Take 10 things in a group of people, how many of them are statements and how many of them are questions? And you learn really quickly, oh, no, eight were statements and two were questions. Let's flip that around. Let's be more inquisitive about what happens there. I would say that the through line in my career is how focused I am on human development. The purposes of education, which have become cultural and economic, those two forces in education, people talk to us all the time about the cultural project, how we do things around here, what are the new skills? What are the new cooperative strategies, etc, that we're going to need to participate in the economy and the future? Those things are really, really important. But the thing that we've lost along the way as educators is the focus on the development of the individual human being that's in front of us. That's where all of the lost potential is in this human project. For me, that switched on at various times in my career, to understand that no matter what you're teaching, you are in the faculty of human development, that's what you are [laughs]. You have humans in front of you, and you are trying to get them to develop to their fullest potential. I mean, if you've taught for any period of time, students will come back to you. I happened to meet a student that I taught almost 30 years ago. They are now in a similar position I am at a university, and here we re-met. If you ask that student,"Can you tell me one thing that I taught you about the quadratic function?" Absolutely nothing at all [both laugh]. And you think, oh, did I do anything good? But they will talk to me about a story that I told or a situation that I handled with grace that allowed them to learn something new about themselves and apply it into the future. This is the great thing again, and you're tying it back to portfolios, this whole thing, the whole project on education, is really understanding the development of the human being in front of us. It's really the job that we have portfolios become a tool to upset our thinking a little bit and move it into that sort of developmental project. And it's so important.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:39

What challenges do institutions of higher education face when they want to increase the use of portfolios?

Jack Rice: 34:47

The thing that we don't do very well is subtraction in higher education. We're really good at addition. When somebody talks to us about instituting portfolios in the classroom, it's always something that's in addition. Okay, that's great. We're going to do portfolios, fantastic, but we're still going to do six quizzes, the midterm, the final exam. We're going to do all of this work, and at the same time, on top of that, now we're going to implement this portfolio. The portfolio becomes performative. This happens in education all the time. We have a great idea, but instead of implementing that idea fulsome way, we do half of it, we do like a quarter of it, and we get to the end, and well, this didn't work. You didn't really give it a chance because what you did was you put portfolios as an addition on everything else that you were doing. It really requires this moment of thinking about what we need to give up. My thinking is, if you have instituted portfolios properly in your classrooms, and then you can look at a learner's growth longitudinally, there's a lot of things that you don't need to do in the classroom, right? You can say to the learner, and this is the most important thing about a portfolio, is the learner agency. Now as a learner, I'm in charge of what goes into that portfolio and what I want to show and who I want to show it to, and when I want to show it to them. I would say that the most important moment in higher education is the office hour. If you want to change one thing and you want to increase something, increase the participation in the office hours. You can disarm the students and chat with them, have great conversations, and so the portfolio becomes a way of getting you to the office hour where we can chat and reflect and have a conversation about it. If you're an instructor, and no one comes to your office hours, but everybody is there for your midterm and your final, then I would say, you know, shift that a little bit. Let's try to change that a little bit. Maybe portfolios are a tool that can do that. But the biggest challenge, I think, is layering portfolios onto everything else that an instructor has to do, and not being able to take some things or reframe what the project is in front of them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:00

By just adding things, it only increases their workload. In regards to the office hours, thinking back to the office hours that I, of course, also had at the university level when I was a student, we really only did it

Jack Rice: 37:11

Here's a world of possibility that I would love to when we thought we had a problem, rather than also live into. If a student came to me because they had a midterm continuing the conversation with somebody. So it was always more coming up the next week, and came to my office hour and sat seen, "Oh, you need to go to the principal almost" [laughs]. at my table and we chatted for half an hour, and we had a great, you know, fulsome chat about the breadth of the subject and provided a ton of examples, on the way out the door, I would say to the student, "Don't even bother coming to the midterm. I already know it. You've shown it. You've demonstrated right here. I have a recording of this, I have notes, I have artefacts. You come to the midterm as a celebration of what you already know. But whether you put that midterm grade or that midterm performance into your portfolio or not, that is up to you. You have the agency to do that because as far as I'm concerned, this conversation we had was far more valuable than that midterm." That is a possibility that I would love to live into in education.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:22

So Jack, where do you then see the future of portfolios?

Jack Rice: 38:27

I wonder, if in the future or 20 years from now, whether it's with AI or some other tool, we will be generating portfolio we won't even know we're generating it. There will just be a conversation thread throughout my career as a learner that is gathering samples and evidence over time. So what I think is it'll become a much less onerous process to gain all of these different artefacts. We'll be able to embed these sort of reflective exercises into In the future, learning will be lot less about the clock. Right learning. now, everything that we do in education has a clock associated with it, and it's the most competitive instrument that mankind ever made. Just imagine the possibility. I've always wanted to walk into a lecture room on the first day, put up a ladder, take down the clock, and just throw it out the window and say, "All right, now we can start." In what universe does everyone[laughs] have to get to the same concept exactly the same time? Why does this have to be eight weeks? How come a semester is 15 weeks? Who made that up? What is a credit? The credit hour was established in 1908. We've evolved [laughs] slightly since 1908. Why are we still talking about credit hours? These are traps that we made for ourselves. In the future, I'm hoping that in education, grade one will turn into grade two. It will just sort of happen. We don't have to have these artificial definitions and along the way, we're always building our portfolio of learning that we can reflect on and demonstrate. That's a powerful place that we could get to in education, where we could realise that all of these time based constraints - we made it all up. This is just invented [laughs]. There's no meaning to any of this. But what is really meaningful and impactful is that individual human growth and development. So let's celebrate that, and portfolios become one tool that we can use that to do. Imagine that you finished year and you didn't even know you were creating a portfolio, and all of a sudden you had a portfolio created for you[laughs] that you could reflect on. Not that it wouldn't be an active process along the way, but it would just be less onerous to actually create the artefact at the end.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:48

That's important to have in there, that, yes, the storing and the collecting of the learning evidence can be facilitated by the technology, made easier, and also artefacts being arranged. In Mahara we offer that in the way that when you tag individual artefacts, that you then can create a portfolio based on those tags. You don't have to go and find all the five or 10 blog posts that you have written or the three or four files in a folder structure three deep in order to then pull them all together in one portfolio, but you have everything presented and then can curate over that. Because I still think that the active process of curation and also reflection should not be outsourced to an AI, but the rest can be facilitated.

Jack Rice: 41:37

Yeah, that's right. I absolutely want it to remain a very active process for the learner. That's so central, but at the same time, if technology can de escalate some of the performative issues and operational concerns around it, so much the better.

Kristina Hoeppner: 41:52

That, I think, is a good segue over into our last three questions in the quick answer round. The first question is, Jack, which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Jack Rice: 42:06

I would use 'follow the learner' as a quick phrase because every one of those is really important to me. It's the fact that I'm following and I'm not leading, but I'm following the learner, taking me in a direction, and it really emphasises the learning process and not some attempt that they made that was that I'm supposed to judge right off the bat. To me, it is about following the learner. That has been my philosophy for a long time now. When portfolios are done right, that's what's happening.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:35

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

Jack Rice: 42:43

The fundamental piece of any learning design is to understand who the learners are. Oftentimes, we skip that step in learning design. I know what happens here every day. We're in a rush. We start getting down the process of designing, I was tend to say, "Well, hold on, hold on, just wait one second, what's the name of their cat? On their Facebook page for this student, they have a kitten or do they have a dog? I think it's a kitten. What's the name of their kitten?" And then everybody rolls their eyes and goes, "Right. We should be thinking about who the learner is before we create this experience for the learner." I think that just even with any kind of learning material that you're putting together, any process, any assessment, have that real intentional conversation early about what are the profile of the different learners that are in my group? That leads you to how I would introduce portfolios to them. Like, what part of the journey of portfolios are they on? In education, we tell students,"Well, just collaborate together." Well, collaboration is a really difficult thing to do, right [both laugh]? So what are the preliminary exercises that we need you to get you to think about before you can do this massive task called collaboration? Portfolios can again be very confronting for a student. "Okay, I need to create a portfolio like, what do I do?" So understanding like, what are the real simple preliminary steps that we can really demystify the process for them and make it simple for them to connect with? It comes down to understanding that what level your students are at, is it coming into the classroom, what experience you've had with portfolios in the past, and what are those sort of like formative pieces that can get them to a more robust, self reflective exercise about their learning?

Kristina Hoeppner: 44:29

That aligns perfectly with the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principle that we have on DEIBD - diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and decolonisation - so that in any of the activities that are created for the students, the students can see themselves. They realise, "Yes, I'm welcome here in the classroom. These activities are for me. They are fostering my learning," rather than just have a very generic thing where they don't know how to connect the dots to their previous learning experiences or also their personal lives and all that is going on around them. Jack, last question for you today. It's been fantastic hearing all of your stories, and so I'd like to know if you have any advice for your students or for any other portfolio creator. It might also be some of your faculty members?

Jack Rice: 45:21

I would just encourage them to be messy. Be messy, make mistakes, and just get started. In education, we've made students fearful of presenting things that aren't perfect. It's difficult to be a 13-year old or a 15-year old, and you know, feel that you're really being judged by your community and people that are around you and going through these difficult changes in your life. Same thing students come here in higher education, there's still sort of later adolescence [laughs] n a lot of cases. They've got a lot to worry about. So don't give them one more thing to worry about. We do this all the time in education, we think that we need to make them create cortisol in their bodies to create these high stress situations, and this is what's going to get the best out of them. It's absolutely unproven by any research whatsoever that this has any sort of positive effect over time. Much better to sort of de-escalate the process early on. Allow your students to experiment with it, be messy about it, be imperfect about it, and just to sort of get going, and then just meet the students where they're at, and follow them along in their journey. If you do that, you learn a lot more about those students. You're going to fill up that Christmas card, and you're going to learn a lot more about yourself along the way. Have a little bit more fun.

Kristina Hoeppner: 46:38

Thank you so much for that final advice and also for all the stories that you've shared today that give us a good insight into parts of your educational practice, not just with portfolios, but also beyond, so that we can also see who is that person Jack in their whole practice. So I really appreciate the chat with you. It was wonderful catching up and have that conversation with you and not just hearing a presentation of you. So really appreciate your time, Jack, so thank you so much.

Jack Rice: 47:11

Thank you, Kristina, always a delight to chat with you and look forward to many more conversations over many more Moots and other events in the future. So look forward to it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 47:20

Me too. Thank you. Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' with Jack Rice. Head to our website, podcast.mahara.org, where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. Our next episode will air in two weeks. It would be wonderful if you told a colleague so they can listen as well. Until then, create, share, and engage.