Oberstudienrätin (Senior Teacher) Sieglinde Jakob-Kühn taught in the German school system for many years and discovered Mahara a few years after having started working with Moodle in an innovative way with her language students. In this interview, Sigi shares a few anecdotes from her active teaching time, showing how students took to the ePortfolio in the mid 2000s, exploring this new technology with her in partnership.
Connect with Sigi on Facebook
Resources
Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter about Mahara and portfolios.
Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Oberstudienrätin (Senior Teacher) Sieglinde Jakob-Kühn taught in the German school system for many years and discovered Mahara a few years after having started working with Moodle in an innovative way with her language students. In this interview, Sigi shares a few anecdotes from her active teaching time, showing how students took to the ePortfolio in the mid 2000s, exploring this new technology with her in partnership.
Connect with Sigi on Facebook
Resources
Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter about Mahara and portfolios.
Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Kristina Hoeppner 00:05
Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with 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.
Kristina Hoeppner 00:26
Today my guest is Oberstudienrätin Sigi Jakob-Kühn, who's often called 'Networking Lady'. In the German Mahara circles though she is more well known as the 'Mahara Granny' because she had been using Mahara almost from the first hour. Now, however, she enjoys her well deserved retirement in warmer climates, mainly in Italy. So I'm stoked that Sigi agreed to talk with me today about portfolios. Welcome, Sigi.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 00:52
Oh, welcome, Kristina. Good morning. I say good morning. It's 9:30 here in Italy. It's late evening in New Zealand. And I must say I'm very, very honoured that Mahara community has not forgotten Mahara Granny.
Kristina Hoeppner 01:07
Oh, we could never forget about you. That's for sure [both laugh].
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 01:11
As you introduced me, it's right. I really was, I think the first one, not to know the software because the software there were other people before me who knew that technically, but I used it in a didactical way. So thank you very much for inviting me. And it's so nice seeing you.
Kristina Hoeppner 01:29
Thank you. It's so nice catching up with you as well, Sigi. I've just mentioned that you are retired. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What had you been doing before retirement? Why have you been using portfolios?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 01:40
Well, this is a very long story. I got hooked on Moodle. That was long before your time, your active time. And we had the problem in schools that we had very poor internet connection. If we had internet connection at all, the Internet was still very at the beginning,
Kristina Hoeppner 01:59
Just for our listeners, that was the mid 2000s because Moodle started in 2004.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 02:04
Yeah, exactly. And I was with - together with Ulrike Montgomery. She was the one who introduced Moodle to Germany after having met Martin Dougiamas on one of the first Moodle Moots, and what got me hooked on was the possibility of getting connected with my students, of giving them the opportunity to upload what they had done, to give them a forum, to work together with them. I used to call Moodle, a real virtual classroom. We used it as a real classroom. That was at the beginning.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 02:36
Well, I had to learn a lot as well because at the beginning, I also used the features of Moodle, you know, like the controlling stuff like automatic tests and things like that, that almost put off all of my students until I realised, well, it's not a good idea to start every English lesson with a cloze test just to see whether they had learned their grammar.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 02:55
So slowly, I came to the understanding that learning is different, very different from what we've been doing for centuries in the classroom. It's not teaching something, but it's about learning of the students and to give them the opportunity and the incentive of having their own style of learning. This was something that was made possible with Moodle. So at that time, I became a teacher trainer with Moodle and eLearning, and then after a while, after I had understood how Moodle should work, for example, we just started the term with a video by Barack Obama with a speech to open the school year in the United States, which was a tradition. I just played that video at the beginning of our English lesson, and they understood half of it. So they had could repeat that, put the link into Moodle so they could go back home and could listen to it and then could come up with questions and then they slowly formed groups and they really started learning. I did not really have to give them tasks. I just asked them "What do you think we could do with this video?"
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 04:05
Two of them they wanted to look up the specific vocabulary and put it into Moodle. The other two wanted to prepare interview questions and so on and one wanted to write a report for the students news paper. It happened automatically, and that was really the turning point where I understood how learning happens. Then they uploaded their results and everything and then at that point, I somehow felt uncomfortable with it. I didn't know why, but then I understood once I had come across Mahara, I understood why I had felt uncomfortable because they uploaded all their stuff, and the only one who could see that when it was in the assignment part was me, and I had never the complete picture of one single student because I had to pick from all the different assignments what they had uploaded.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 04:51
This I found very unsatisfying. So then we can talk about Mahara and then I was influenced a lot also by people like Sir Ken Robinson who talked a lot about how learning frustration of teaching in schools, and I read his book 'The element', and that really triggered something in my head. That's why I got connected with other people like Steve Wheeler and Helen Barrett, and that's how they gave me the name, the Twitter name 'NetworkingLady'. I didn't choose that.
Kristina Hoeppner 05:21
You are certainly well known in German circles and also the wider European context, especially of English teachers. Sigi, how old were the students that you worked with?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 05:31
They were in secondary school. They already had some years of English, and they were able to do this in English because with the very beginners, it's much more difficult. You have to choose a different approach. There were students in a vocational school, some of them were studying media - media design. They were very easy to hook up on these new technologies because they had to do a project where they had to go to companies twice for weeks practical training. They had to write a report on that, and they had to use Word to do this. So you can imagine media designers having to use Word that was a big advantage for me [laughs].
Kristina Hoeppner 06:07
Let's backtrack a little bit before we get to the student portfolios. How did you come across Mahara? So you learned about Moodle also in the early years of Moodle, and then if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure you said you had already used it in 2007 and Mahara started development work in mid 2006.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 06:26
Yeah, that's right [laughs]. That's absolutely right. So I came across Mahara. I had never heard about that, and I had never worked with portfolios, neither paper nor ePortfolios. I got a phone call at school from the teacher administration, and they were desperately looking for a person who was speaking English, had some experience in teacher training, was not scared of information technology - and I was teaching also the basics of information technology - and wanted to try out something new and was not afraid of really putting in some effort and some work and was passionate about that.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 07:02
So at that time, you can imagine there were not so many people who would have done that. I said one that sounds interesting. It was an European project, it was called MOSEP, 'More self esteem with my e-portfolio'. That was in 2007. Project started and funded by the EU. They wanted every citizen, every European citizen, having their own ePortfolio by 2010. Imagine three years. They didn't know what they were talking about. And that was not implemented at all in Germany and in France. They had no idea. When I tried to explain that to them, I really had to show them what it was about. And then people who really were working with ePortfolios at the time, they had a different concept. And it was almost paper, which was nice, but it had nothing to do with that openness we were aiming for. So that was in 2007.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 07:54
And then I said, "Okay, yes, I'll do that." The German partner of the project was Lehrerakademie (Teachers Academy) in Esslingen. That's where we met. There was a team of people from mostly Eastern countries, but also one from England. We met there, and then I found out that they had already created a huge amount of texts and documentation and whatsoever on all the possible situations that you could encounter with an ePortfolio, but not really usable. There was no usability in this. So I had to organise that, and I had a partner who was a Heinz Krettek. I think you remember him?
Kristina Hoeppner 08:33
Hm. He was a German translator for many, many years.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 08:36
Exactly, exactly. He was active with Mahara as soon as it came out, but in the technical way. So he knew all the technical stuff. That was really very helpful for me. The two of us, we had to set up a programme to find a way to organise everything and to make it usable in schools for teachers so that they can make use of it in various situations of teaching and learning. So to kind of really break down all these documents. It was a wiki at the time.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 09:06
So I went there and introduced everything. There should also have been the project leader from Salzburg Research, Wolf Hilzensauer. He was sick in bed, so he was there only by video conference, and I was really left completely alone, I could say. So the people who I met there, met the crew, half of them were sent by their schools because, you know, in Germany, teachers have to do some teacher training once in a while. So they were sent and they had no idea what was waiting for them. But 1/3 were nerds, they were only interested in the software, in the technical parts of the software. They were the biggest problem because they did not really buy in on the didactical part of that, but they wanted to understand every single detail of the software and eventually came across every single bug. So Heinz was busy with them, and I had to struggle to keep them away from that [laughs]. Forget about the bugs. You see the situation. Do the practical work. So it was quite hard.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 10:05
But in the end, we had a very good outcome. I would say 1/3 of the people, they sticked with it, at least for a while. But it was really only at the beginning, and it was very hard to find someone in your school to share that passion with you and to be ready. The biggest problem is that teachers, well, not all teachers, you know, my network, they are not like that. But many teachers, they are just scared of change. They were scared that if someone in their school works like this, eventually, they would also have to work like this. So my advice to anyone who would like to start with ePortfolios in school, get allies. Work together with someone and make a project.
Kristina Hoeppner 10:48
With portfolios, the pedagogy does need to change and one does need to approach the learning in a different way. And so that, of course, it's a huge change then for everybody.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 10:57
And that's the biggest change and the most difficult part of all of it there. If you've got this, then you can really use the software and the didactical change in a meaningful way. One thing I also wanted to say for anyone who would like to start, don't start without any real opportunity. I had the big chance that as I told you, my students had to do this practical training and had to write the report. That was exactly after I came back from Esslingen, after this workshop, and we immediately started. I learned Mahara together with my students. So that was quite a good experience. And I said from the beginning, you know, "I'm not an expert. We will do this thing together. I will help you, you will help me." We overcame also the objections by the administration. That was also a very big mountain to surmount, and we just did that together. So that was a very good opportunity. Don't do it without having a real reason to do something. Because then it makes no sense. I think having a project is always very crucial. Because without having a project, you don't get anywhere and you don't get the students to buy in on that. Their learning needs to be meaningful for them. And not just because they have to learn something. They need to want to do it in that way.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 12:16
The nice thing about Mahara is that it gives them the possibility to do it in their own way. I gave them a lot of freedom. I just gave them some leading questions to reflect about the company and why they wanted to go to this company and what they like and so on because reflection is a very important part of ePortfolios, but this is also the most difficult part of ePortfolios. So never tell them, "Okay, now you have to reflect on your learning" or to reflect. Just give them some good questions, some leading questions, and then the reflection comes by itself automatically.
Kristina Hoeppner 12:52
What did the portfolios of these vocational students look like, who worked in those various different companies?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 12:57
They looked very, very different from each other. Before they could start, they had to get the permission of the company to publish the pictures. And they also had to get the permission whether to publish only for the teacher, for their peers, or for the school or whatsoever. So this was set up at the beginning to be safe.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 13:16
I had two really, absolutely different students in their approach. I had one student from Thailand. His English was not very good, his German was not very good. So it was difficult for him to write texts. But he was skilled in many other ways. So he found the possibility to take pictures and to do picture stories, and then put the description on the pictures, in the blog only write short explanations, which was safe enough for him. Then I had another one. He was writing and writing and writing pages of text. And they all put in pictures.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 13:53
The concept was that they had a page and within the page, they integrated a blog. That was the important thing for me. So it was two dimensional. Most people I worked with later, they somehow didn't like the idea of integrating a blog, which I think is one of the strongest parts. They wrote their diary in a blog. So the diary had the timestamp of the day. I told them, "Listen, if you don't have the time today or tomorrow to do that, just write two lines so that you have the timestamp and then you edit it later." That was really helpful for them. Well, some of them they cheated a little bit, but well. But practically all of them completed the tasks of writing the report in their daily blog.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 13:53
The rest around, they put in pictures from the company, they put in their personal data, they put in everything that has to stay on this page. I had asked them various things to integrate, and that's what they do. So you can imagine the nice thing was really that every single ePortfolio, every single page of them looked completely different.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 14:57
Then the nice thing is also that you can share it. At the beginning, they didn't want to share it. And then they found out that it was quite nice to share it with their peers. They will shared it with me, and then we agreed that we make it public for the class. The next step for them was to make it public also for the other teachers because then I wanted to introduce the feedback feature, which is extremely difficult. Feedback is almost as difficult as reflection [laughs] because people were not used to that. First of all, I had asked the students to give feedback, qualified feedback, to each other, not just thumbs up, but really qualified feedback and write a few lines. I had also asked a teacher who was willing to work with me and always helped me defend this case in the school. That's how the feedback got on its way.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 15:47
Everything was new. It was new for me, too. And I experienced this together with my students. But this was the good thing that gave me the strength to understand where the problem zones are, and what you have to tell in teacher training to other teachers not to undergo the same mistake.
Kristina Hoeppner 16:05
How did the students take on the portfolio? Did they like creating these pages for their internships?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 16:12
They absolutely liked to create these pages because, you know, they were quite literate already as media designers. They were quite literate. There was one big problem. I came into class one morning, and everyone was very excited and angry. So I said, what has happened? And they said, well, our German teacher who is the one who has to correct and mark the reports, he said that we had to print out everything because he could not read on screen. They were very angry. I said, "No, don't worry. You're not going to print that out, and you're not going to put that into Word. I will talk to him." And then I had this other teacher of mine who always helped me and he convinced him and he said, "Okay, if you can't read on screen, then you can print that out for yourself, but not the students." So that was solved then [laughs].
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 16:58
It also was a problem because he said, "Well, but I cannot mark the mistakes!" Then I had to explain him that it's not about the mistakes to mark, but that the concept was different. They are looking for mistakes, they're not looking for the good things, but first of all, they're looking for mistakes. Funny enough the students as well. So when one of them showed the page in class, then someone said, "Oh, there are a lot of mistakes in there." So I said, "Yes, okay. He will look at that later." You see the concept of making something correctable.
Kristina Hoeppner 17:04
That's I think where the portfolio is really nice because it puts the student into the centre, and as a lot of people, especially in the German community, always say, the learning management system is theirs, but the portfolio is yours.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 17:41
Exactly.
Kristina Hoeppner 17:42
Did your students actually also shared a portfolios with their internship mentors?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 17:47
Yes, absolutely. They shared it with their internship mentors, they shared it with the company, and some of them, for example, the student from Thailand, he used it also for getting his next job. What they liked was that everything you put in, you can reuse it, you can mix it, you can complete it. It's easy to set up a new page specifically for applying for a different job. So that's what they did. That was really appreciated.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 18:13
Then at the time, we had that secret URL, and that's what they used a lot to apply for jobs. This class, they really saw the sense of it. And they liked it. Before I had worked with them already in Moodle, and they like Moodle from the point where I stopped to use it as a control instrument to do tests before I started the lesson.
Kristina Hoeppner 18:34
How did the internship company then react to these student portfolios and the reflections that were in there?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 18:41
I would say half of the companies were interested. They had a look at it, but I don't think they read everything. The other half was divided between the ones who were not interested. The other - there were about, I would say 30%, who were really interested, and the students also got feedback. This guy I had placed with a former student of mine with the building engineer. My first student, he has a digital marketing company at the time, and I have placed Sunny in his company, and this guy was really helped. And Jörg, this former student, he'd sat down with him, and they went through on a daily base on what Sunny had done. So this was perfect.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 18:41
But you know, everything was new. It was new for the companies. What I tried to do was. you know that vocational students, they have to write the so called 'Berichtsheft', a report what they are doing during the week. It's so boring for them because they just have to write on paper what they're doing. So I had the idea I spoke to responsible persons, whether it would not be nicer to have an ePortfolio and to have them do their reports in a blog embedded in a page which would be nice. So they could also put it pictures. No way. No way, but maybe If I had been there another 10 years, maybe I could have moved something.
Kristina Hoeppner 20:04
Well, but over the years that you have been using portfolios and since you've retired, what trends have you observed in the use of portfolios in the community, primarily, the German speaking community that you're active in?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 20:18
The ones I followed are the ones in Kassel. Christine Dülfer, what she is doing. She is one of the most organised persons I've ever known, really [laughs]. I think you had an interview with her.
Kristina Hoeppner 20:29
We did last year, yeah.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 20:31
This is really very elaborate what they are doing and on a very practical basis. She has kind of combined all the features of Mahara from giving responsibility to the students, from doing the assignments, from presenting - everything she's using in a very structured way. And the other people in Kassel, they are doing it in a very sophisticated way with tables and everything and self assessment and things like that.
Kristina Hoeppner 21:00
So it's very much embedded into the classroom work so that they're using portfolios with full classes.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 21:05
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And they all do this because they are also doing their practical training. I have another student, a friend of mine, you also know her in Czech Republic, Linda Pospisilova. She's become the Czech Mahara lady. Absolutely. She's been teaching other teachers. So I think in Czech Republic, it's done very well, at least in Pardubice [laughs], and in their teacher training.
Kristina Hoeppner 21:28
So looking back at your portfolio practice now with a number of years of hindsight, yet still a keen observer on the sidelines, what was the most memorable thing about portfolios, about the portfolio practice for you, Sigi?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 21:44
The most memorable thing, in fact, was when I came back from Esslingen after this chaotic teacher training to put together a concept for teaching when my students immediately bought in and started and worked with me. That was, for me, the absolute highlight. Another highlight was during teacher training, you know, open days at school and so, I had my students present their ePortfolios themselves, and they were so proud of that. That was much better than if I had presented what my students had done. Take along your students, let them do what they can do, and just help them to scaffold. They really were proud, and they liked that. That was for me, a very big highlight that they started immediately with me with all the difficulties we had, and we had a lot that only didactically, but also technically, getting a room, getting connection and so on, getting permission. Let's not talk about getting permission by the administration. I never got permission. I just did it. 10 years later, it was permitted.
Kristina Hoeppner 22:44
Well, I think that shows really nicely when the students have the ownership of their learning and they can decide what they want to do and know the boundaries and also know why they are doing it so that they can get excited about it.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 22:56
There are some people who don't even use Moodle any more. They use Mahara because he got all the features also in Mahara, especially with the communication part, which is one of the really most important parts: communicating, getting connected. One thing I would have loved at the time was that was one of my big struggles that to make sure that the students were not kicked out because at the time, you had to install it at school or on a level where you had, for example, five schools or so. Then the IT people, they wanted to kick them out because they hadn't understood the system. They wanted to kick the students out once they left school. So that was one of my big struggles because would you put some effort and work into a project that is cancelled once you leave school? No, you wouldn't. So that was very important for the students.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 23:43
That's why I tried to create this mahara.de together with Ralf Hilgenstock who finally agreed to that. That was a big help, I must say. Finally, we had a German wide platform where every school who was interested could have access to and people could move their ePortfolios to this platform, which was not possible at the beginning. But that was a huge progress when you could really pack your ePortfolios and unpack them in a different place. So this is one of my biggest concern. If you want people to work with ePortfolios, you have to make sure that they have access even after leaving the institution.
Kristina Hoeppner 24:20
I think the export feature came into Mahara 1.2, already early on in 2008/2009 probably. That of course facilitated things quite a bit to move from school to school if you didn't have that countrywide or statewide Mahara instance that of course some states have.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 24:37
Never happened.
Kristina Hoeppner 24:38
Well, some states like in Hessen and also Baden-Württemberg and back there are efforts to have more overarching instances to allow that multiple schools just share one Mahara.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 24:48
In Hessen, they're much better organised, but also thanks to people like Christine. In Baden-Württemberg it came late.
Kristina Hoeppner 24:55
And also quite a bit through Ulrike Montgomery's lobbying and perseverance there, right?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 25:00
Yeah, yeah. We were called in several times and told off, "What are you doing? You are not allowed to do that!" So we said, okay, okay, then we went home and continued [laughs]. There was a great partnership with Ulrike.
Kristina Hoeppner 25:12
Yeah. Always in the service of the students.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 25:14
Yeah, exactly, exactly [laughs].
Kristina Hoeppner 25:16
So Sigi, we are already at the point for our quick answer round. And of course, the first question now is kind of a difficult one for you because you've been working with portfolios for so long and can of course talk about portfolios endlessly, tell us many more stories, but if you needed to boil it down to three words, or three short phrases, which ones would you use to describe portfolio work?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 25:39
You should start with collect. Collect the artefacts in a meaningful way, and not just collect for the sake of collection. Then create something from these artefacts. Create something meaningful, adopt it to the situation, you need that. And finally, once you've come up with that, you have to share it with your peers or with other people who would like to see that. So collect, create, share, that's the learning process for me.
Kristina Hoeppner 26:06
You've already shared a number of tips for the students and also for teachers who dare to colour outside of the lines, but do you have a final tip for learning designers or teachers who create portfolio activities?
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 26:20
Yeah, I think they should not worry too much of creating a setting. I think they should just create some scaffolding, some basic tips, and then give the students freedom, and see what they come up with. And then correct that, help them, but give the students freedom. Just tell them there's an outline, which you have to respect, but within this outline, you can create your own way, as long as you meet the final requirements.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 26:52
The second tip is get connected. Don't be a single worker, but get connected with other students, look what they are doing, talk to them, write to them. And well, networking lady is talking.
Kristina Hoeppner 27:05
Exactly.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 27:06
The third tip would be, I talked about this before, that people are a bit shy to share something which they think may not be completely correct or perfect. It's like learning a language. When my students, you know, I had also adult students, engineering students, and they were used from their former school to make absolutely correct sentences, the correct pronunciation and all that, right? First thing I told them, "You know, language is made for communication. If you make mistakes, doesn't matter. We'll look at this later. But you have to make yourself understood. So don't be shy to make mistakes."
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 27:44
And the same applies to ePortfolios. It does not need to be absolutely perfect. Depends on the situation you create it for. Well, if you apply for a job, then it's different. But start, don't be scared, share it with your peers, and they will give you feedback and tell you "Look what you've done there is really good, but then maybe you should work a little bit on that," or I've give them feedback, but don't make them want to be perfect.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 28:11
That's a wealth of tips that you've shared; more than I could ask for. So thank you very much for all of those tips, Sigi, and also, thank you so much for your time today.
Sigi Jakob-Kühn 28:22
It was so nice talking to you, Kristina.
Kristina Hoeppner 28:25
I'm pretty sure we'll find another opportunity to catch up again [laughs]. But before we do that, first over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Oberstudienrätin Sigi Jakob-Kühn. 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 it so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.