Kathleen Blake Yancey: Heuristics for meaningful portfolios

Dr Kathleen Blake Yancey (Emerita Professor at Florida State University) has contributed to ePortfolio research and practice for many years through her numerous publications, presentations, and workshops. In this interview she looks back at some of that practice, with a particular focus on portfolio heuristics and how they differ from templates.

Connect with Kathy on LinkedIn

Resources

• Kathy's web page at Florida State University and her Wikipedia entry
• Kathy's 2022 Batson Lecture 'Tracing Learning in ePortfolios'
• Guest edited volume on portfolios: Computers and Composition, Vol 13, Issue 2, 1996
• Yancey, K. (Ed.). (2019). ePortfolio as curriculum: Models and practices for developing students’ ePortfolio literacy.
• Roche, C., Abria, L., Farrell, O., Johnston, J., Penny Light, T., McKibben, A., Reast, A., & Yancey, K. B. (2023). ePortfolio to support professional development during experiential learning placements: Guided by students-as-partners theory, enabled through students-as-partners practice. International Journal for Students As Partners, 7(2), 165–180.
• Megan Mize's online workshop 'How to get started with AI tools'
• Leticia Britos Cavagnaro:
  • Book Experiments in reflection 
  • Reflection AI bot Riff
  • Webinar Supporting reflection through an AI powered reflection bot
• AAC&U Institute on ePortfolios
• AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force
• Richard Lanham's book The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts
• Yancey, K. (2023). The value of purposeful design: A case study of an ePortfolio reflective prompt. Across the Disciplines, 20(3/4), 31-49.

Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.

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Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward

Transcript

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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 00:27

My guest today is Dr Kathleen Blake Yancey, who is well known in the world of educational portfolios. She is Emerita Professor at Florida State University and focuses her research on composition and writing assessment amongst many others. Thank you so much for your time today, Kathy, it's wonderful to be speaking with you. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 00:47

It's wonderful to be speaking with you and to all the people out there.

Kristina Hoeppner 00:50

Kathy, you have a long history with portfolios and have also been at Clemson University amongst others, where you've directed the Clemson Digital Portfolio Institute. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do maybe now that you're retired more like what did you do previously? Though you are certainly not entirely out of the research area. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 01:12

Not yet, but don't talk to my husband (see below for explanation). So, as you indicated, I've been a professor for a while, although my first introduction to ePortfolio was more an act of creation than it was meeting them in another context. It's a story that illustrates a couple of points that are directly relevant to ePortfolios. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 01:31

When I was a graduate student at Purdue University, I needed to satisfy a language requirement, which is commonplace for a PhD, and I chose German, which I'm guessing is your native language. You will be dismayed to learn that I took a course in order to satisfy exam. I just wasn't going to be disciplined enough to pass, so I took this course, and I didn't do very well [laughs]. Let's just say the first test was a D or an F. It was something unacceptable. I mean, I have to do this, I want a PhD, I have to satisfy this requirement. So I went to see the instructor, who was really great. He understood something about error analysis, and he could, you know, point out to me exactly that it [the language] was very patterned, you know, and not only what I was doing wrong, but also it was clear from my mistakes, the kinds of things I didn't understand. For instance, the idea that the verb in German should come at the end of the sentence, whereas in English, you could put [it anywhere] - who knew? I should have known; I didn't. So he was very good at pointing that out.

Kathleen Blake Yancey 02:24

Long story short, or maybe medium, if I've gone past short: I did better [on] each test, which was great. And then finally, what you got as a grade was based on your performance in the final exam. My performance on the final exam was an A. Now that in terms of the way grading operated at the time in the U.S., and I think even now, that just seemed wrong because grades typically are averaged over time. And if my grades had been averaged, I would have walked out basically with a gentle(wo)man’s C, but I got an A. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 02:51

I went back to him and talked to him about this. I mean, I wasn't looking for him to take the A back, you understand, but I didn't understand: what's the logic of this? His logic was that your grades should be based on your performance at the time that the course ended. And I have to say that that transformed the way I taught because I thought, 'Oh, that's interesting,' and by then I had taught, oh, gosh, at that point, I probably had six years teaching already at various levels, college, eighth grade, high school, and it never occurred to me to do this. And I thought, 'so if I were going to grade based on my students' performance at the end of the term, how would that work?' It's a little trickier in writing than I think it is in language in that particular context in the sense that writing necessarily involves lots of genres. So the fact that you might have done well in one genre doesn't mean you'd do well in another. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 03:39

And that recommended a portfolio approach. I didn't know what a portfolio was. I just thought, 'Well, I'm gonna give them the same assignments I was using then, I'm gonna give them the feedback I was giving them, and then at the end of the term, they will choose a limited number of their assignments and give me some commentary on them, and that's where the grades would come from. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 03:58

This was in 1979. I'd like to tell you that I was five [Kristina laughs]. I was a little older, as you might imagine: I was a graduate student with several years teaching. I was making some other changes in that particular course, and I was pretty anxious about it. And my own sense was that this would either really, really change the world for me and students' learning and teaching and / or it would be a disaster. Well, it turned out, luckily enough, it was the former, not the latter. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 04:23

So that's my introduction to ePortfolios, which was as I say a sort of a self-created introduction. And I found that they worked really well; I did lots of different kinds of things with them over time. I chaired several conferences for - national conferences - in the U.S. for National Council of Teachers of English on portfolios in the mid 90s, and one of them was on electronic portfolios. I wasn't working with electronic portfolios, but other people were, and I also, after that conference, guest edited an issue of Computers and Composition on electronic portfolio. Elementary school kids were doing portfolios on CDs, for example. Okay, it was hardly anybody working on the web because it was too early, and then my own teaching involved asking students to create texts that you can't print out. You could print out a slideshow, you certainly can print out print, you can't print out video yet, okay, even now [laughs]; you certainly couldn't then. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 05:17

So then it didn't make very much sense [to continue with print]. And if I asked them [students] to do something where they were recording and saving it in a cassette--this is actually a true story--then they would turn the cassette in with the print portfolio. They could write, they could turn in a VHS, but this made no sense. You needed to go to some medium that would allow students to include all of the above. So again, it was a, you know, a sort of trial by fire. And at the time I was teaching well, two classes, really: a first-year comp(osition) class and a graduate class, an introduction to professional communication. And it was the same thing where I was pretty anxious and I thought, 'oh this is gonna backfire,' and then in the undergraduate class, I made it an option. Students could do 'e' or they could do print, and not so many chose 'e', but some of them did. And that was the last time I made it an option. After that it was always 'e'. And that was, give or take, around 2000.

Kristina Hoeppner 06:07

Did they not choose the ePortfolio because it was more complicated for them? Because at that time, of course, we didn't have the smartphone yet.

Kathleen Blake Yancey 06:15

Well, not only do we not have a smartphone [at the time], but I was at Clemson, which was and maybe still is a pretty progressive institution technologically. It wasn't so much the institution, but I--literally that first year comp class in 1999, that particular class--I had students who had never booted up a computer. So one thing was lack of familiarity. Another is that a number of them knew about portfolios from other contexts. So for instance, they might know about portfolios from art class. And so they had a model in their head that was based on print. And if they said, "Can you show us what an ePortfolio looks like," my answer is, "No, I can't," you know. So I'm not very helpful to them either. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 06:54

So that changed pretty rapidly--with students' permission--that I did begin to get some examples. You know, again, there's an infrastructure issue here because at that point at Clemson, we were developing a digital studio, which we did and then opened in 2004, which was largely a gift from the class of 1939. But when I came to Florida State in 2005, it was a similar iteration. So I was offering a one credit, optional course for students. And these students, again, were not terribly technologically savvy, and there was no place for them to go to work on portfolios. They thought they should come to my office, which I can assure you, they should not. Not for that [laughs]. So we ended up creating a digital studio, two of them, actually, at Florida State. My point is that it's all a process.

Kathleen Blake Yancey 07:41

My point also is that you can see that my particular orientation is toward learning and teaching. That doesn't mean that I'm not interested in the other models, assessment models, for instance, or career models, in fact, somebody just sent me - they're trying to develop a survey instrument related to writing--but the question that they had there [in the survey] was the definition of ePortfolio. That was "an ePortfolio is a collection of written work showing your development as a writer." Actually, no, it might, it might, but if it's a career portfolio probably [that] is not right. So they're different models. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 08:10

So that's a short account of how I got there. As to what I'm doing now, I did retire in May 2020, but my deal with my husband, which explains to my reference to my husband earlier, is that I would no longer be teaching for Florida State--and alas there goes my pay check, oh well--but that I wanted to stay professionally active, and I've been very lucky that I've been able to do that. So I'm trying to effect a balance: more personal time, getting eight hours of sleep every night, walking four to six miles a day, but then also keep in mind [unintelligible], and I've been very lucky. I've had a couple of really good opportunities; one or two of them I might be able to share in this context.

Kristina Hoeppner 08:44

Thank you, Kathy. That's quite the journey through the portfolios with your students and exploring a lot on your own, especially in regards to the technology. For the students, how did they once they've seen the exemplar, how they've reacted to the portfolios? Were they then more comfortable trying this new medium out or were they still wanting to write more? Because I feel like we see more of the written portfolio than we see any multimedia accounts?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 09:10

I would agree with that. Yeah, well, there are a couple things here. When students saw some examples, and I almost always had more than one--you know, the difficulty is, you know, showing all the one is that then they pick the task that is what they [think they] need to do, and they'll just replicate it. In general, my experience with students, I think--there is also research to back this up--is that students want to bring something of themselves [to the portfolio]. That's why it's valuable for them, that's why it's meaningful to them. So they can bring themselves in and especially what they perceive as their own creativity. That's where I think there is more interest in multimedia because they think they might be able to do more with multimedia than they can do with words on page. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 09:45

But I think it's also a case of what a curriculum makes available to them and then what making available to them seems to endorse. So what I mean by that is there's a researcher, an administrator type at University of Southern California, Elizabeth Daley. She suggested this was--oh gosh, 20 years ago--that what we ought to do in school is have some kind of media requirement or such. So the same way that we might have a math requirement or writing requirement, that media is so fundamental to the way that we behave today that we need to have that requirement. I don't think she was endorsing the idea of requirements so much as she was observing that if you have a requirement, a curriculum gets organised around it, students are supported, and then they learn about. And I'll say [this is so] not just in terms of creating relevant media, but that's the connection for us, but also in reviewing and analysing media, which students and people more generally are not always so good at doing, as we know, and which is more complicated than ever right now given AI. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 10:44

So I think if we had an environment like that, students would be ready or to engage. And I’ll just say one of the instructors that we supported at Clemson was in the College of Business. And she did a kind of trial portfolio project with students. It was basically in a career prep planning class that they took, at the very end of their career: what they reported at the end of the experience was a) yes, they were glad to have had the experience of creating portfolios, but b), they were unhappy that they were introduced to them so late in their academic career, and c) they observed that if those portfolios had been introduced to them earlier, they would perhaps at least have the time to try to do some of the interesting things that they might be able to do. So I think whether you look at my classes or you look at other situations where students think that they have support, they're more inclined to engage, but without the support, they play it safe, and you can't blame them. We tend to play it safe, too. 

Kristina Hoeppner 11:43

Yeah, that is true. So it's that then also where your interest comes around for working with heuristics and then sharing those two examples?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 11:54

I think it's got a couple of motives here. So let me identify three. One is that, I mean, like many other people I've created, actually more than one portfolio, although I did it a lot later than most people do. But it's a really interesting test of what you mean by electronic portfolio, a), and b) how much work you're asking students to do. That depends a lot on the platform, and how much the platforms will allow students to do. And here I'm singing to the choir--you know more about platforms than I do--but, you know, some platforms are very user friendly, but the ones that are very user friendly, don't allow them as much movement in terms of creativity, in terms of options, in terms of design, in terms of colour, in terms of media types, I mean, other than uploading, right? 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 12:39

Creating one myself taught me a lot about what does it take to create one. I mean, you'd think I would have known that after all this time, and I did in the abstract, but it was basically, you know, putting the rubber to the road for me, which is a very healthy exercise for all, I'd say. But the second thing is that [it] provided a really interesting exemplar because, you know, if I can pull that up and show students so 'yes, I have one myself,' and they look at me and say, 'mhh, she's a lot older than I am, and she could do this? I can probably do this, too.' So it's got a kind of persuasive effect [laughs]. And then if you have a couple of others there, so you've got akind of a range of different models that do different things. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 13:18

Now, the hitch is you don't want too many because if you have too many, it's overwhelming. If you have only one, then it's a target, and to your point about heuristics, I think the heuristic value is in a couple of things. One is seeing these models and seeing sort of what's possible, kind of maybe at 10,000 feet, but then getting close and and really looking at them and saying so what are the features that define this portfolio and how are they like and / or different from the features to find in this second one that ostensibly has the same purpose and ostensibly has the same audience. That's when it becomes much more heuristic, I think. It's just again to see what's possible and begin to think about what they want to do and why they want to do it. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 14:03

I say this as someone, again, [who] comes [to this] from my teaching experience, I created a one credit ePortfolio class at FSU for graduate students in our rhetoric and comp programme. That was like a lab, you know, and the students in that class had very different purposes. One of them for instance, would use a portfolio to apply for another school for doctoral education; somebody else was creating it because she wanted a job as a tech writer. She's going to finish with a master's; a couple of them were using them to apply for teaching awards on campus. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 14:32

So very different purposes, very different audiences, but we thought of the portfolio together, and that exercise--where I had a laundry list of portfolios that really looked very different one to the next, and they had to look at all of them and then choose some of them that they reacted to favourably, identify the features in those models, and think about why those features attracted them, and if and how they might use them themselves--is a really, really useful exercise. And in that process, they learned something about portfolio makingness without my saying a thing about portfolio makingness. So that's also a good outcome.

Kristina Hoeppner 15:08

Definitely, because yeah, as you see, if you only have one model, there's not really a lot that you can see. And we see this quite a bit though in certification portfolios, where there really the focus is for nurses, for example, okay, you have to write something, your self assessment, peer assessment, manager assessment. There's not a lot of variety in there. But when it comes to employability portfolios or showcase portfolios there, of course, is more freedom, more place for creativity, and therefore having a few examples so that students can see what it might look like, and that they also see, okay, it doesn't have to be all multimedia and to the ninth, but I can actually do something with low tech that I have available so that they can also feel more comfortable.

Kathleen Blake Yancey 15:54

I think that's exactly right. That certification model, I'm not opposed to that at all. That has a particular purpose. I think it's a worthy purpose, and it's not just certification. It's also, I know in the Irish context, for example, pharmacists to continue practising as pharmacists have to keep an electronic portfolio. So there are reasons for those, those are good purposes, [and] I am all for it. I think that's much better than the way they used to update pharmacists. But to go back to the idea, again, of portfolio makingness, in the idea of portfolio makingness, embedded is that is the idea that portfolios are rhetorical. And in some moments, you have a lot of room for creativity, a lot of control, and in other moments, you might be doing a very different kind of task, like being certified, and somebody's going to give you a template. And it's not going to be very heuristic [laughs]; it's going to be pretty templated. And that's what you need to do if you want to practice as a nurse, if you want to continue as a pharmacist. And in other models, to your point about career portfolios, which are typically pretty different than programmatic portfolios, which do tend to show development, career portfolios tend not to. So understanding those differences and then calling on your portfolio makingness, understanding the goal, create[ing] what's needed at the right moment, that's what a literate portfolio composer is.

Kristina Hoeppner 16:22

Do you find that it's sometimes difficult to explain what a portfolio is because it can be so many different things? 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 17:09

Yes [laughs], and that's, in fact, actually, on the survey that I was responding to, before you and I began talking; there was another claim there that a portfolio was a collection of work. And my comment was, and where's the reflection? You know, it's a collection of work. I mean, if it's collection of work, I think that's a very worthy thing, but if there's no reflection there, it's a folder. It's not a portfolio. Yeah, I think it is hard to talk about them without a working definition, but I think it's fundamental to have a working definition because otherwise we end up talking at cross purposes--sometimes without even knowing that's what we are doing. 

Kristina Hoeppner 17:40

Kathy, you speak about heuristics, models, and then I've brought in the term exemplar. How do you define heuristics in the context of portfolios?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 17:50

I would say referencing the discussion we have just been having, the nursing credentials model tends to rely on a template because it wants all nurses to meet the same standards. So what differentiates one nurse from the next is not the standard, but rather the experience that the student nurses can bring to bear. And I'll also point out that in our model, the template is really useful for the reviewers. I'm not sure it's so much that you're serving the people applying for certification as you are the people doing the reviewing. And I don't think that's a small task, by the way. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 18:23

I was talking to somebody earlier this week, actually--[at] a very large public institution in Florida--and he wants to do a programme assessment of the first year comp programme that he directs. One question that came up in this conversation was whether they wanted a templated approach or whether they let students do what students wanted to do, and from a review[er] point of view that during a programme assessment, there's no question but that a templated approach is going to be easier. He said, "No, no" because even though he's interested in programme assessment, he was gonna privilege teaching and learning first. That's an important consideration, but again, it goes back to 'What's your purpose?' 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 18:56

So when I say heuristic, what I mean is a set of questions that tend to be progressive that lead to insight. I will give you an example. So I have an article on an ePortfolio that is an internship ePortfolio that is part of the Editing, Writing, and Media Major here at Florida State. All students in that major, and there are basically about 400 students in that major, they all have to complete an internship, and as part of that experience, they have to create an ePortfolio. Long story about how this happened, but we were not happy with the reflection questions because they didn't seem to be meaningful. They were not even really - they weren't meaningful to us, and they didn't seem to be meaningful to the students, so why are you bothering? 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 19:36

So working with the person responsible for the programme, we came up with a set of questions that I call the reflective frame. Reflective frame sometimes means something very general like Kolb has a reflective frame, and so Schön does. I mean here a very local kind of contextual frame that is geared specifically to the students' internship experience in the context of taking other classes at the same time because they are. It works progressively from 'What do you see as something similar between things like this? What do you see as something that's different between them? If and how has this changed your notion of writing and editing? If and how this has changed anything else you see in the world at large?' So there's an openness to it. It's not just about what's going on in those two contexts. And then 'What does this mean for you in the future?' So moving from past to future. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 20:26

For that context, I think that's a pretty good model because it has heuristic value, it helps students think about their two experiences in a comparative frame;, the frame is widened. So they can think about wider impact, and it moves from past to future. And it's heuristic in the sense that I have no idea as somebody who had a hand in designing this major--I know a lot about this major, I've written a lot about this major, always with other colleagues, I should say--and we don't know what they're going to say to this because it's heuristic. It's leading them, not us, to insight. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 20:47

I don't think everything can be designed that way, but I think to the extent that we can design reflective questions that have heuristic power, that allow students to tell us what they have learned, that we might not have been able to predict, then we're doing something that's really meaningful. Meaningful for the students, and so they will want to engage, and meaningful for us in terms of understanding how that experience has affected the students, if and how we need to change curriculum to do more of that. 

Kristina Hoeppner 21:34

That's a powerful framework because it does go from, as you say, the past to the present and then also looking towards the future. 

Kristina Hoeppner 21:41

Earlier, Kathy, you had mentioned AI, and so of course, in this context of the reflective framework, I do want to point toward Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, who created the chatbot Riff, that actually takes a reflective framework as basis and instead of giving the students that laundry list of worthwhile questions at the start, that there's only one question to begin with, and then the bot leads us through the reflection. That would be interesting, I think to see and maybe we even get the chance to do that on the seventh of December when we have a workshop with her online to see how that might work, would they go through similar questions that you would lead them through by giving them those three to five or however many questions there are, or if a bot leads them through it because of course the bot can take their previous answers into consideration. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 22:32

That announcement came to [laughs] my email today; you won't be surprised to find that led me into a rabbit hole [laughs]. So I know. 

Kristina Hoeppner 22:42

And I hadn't even provided all the links to all the resources [laughs].

Kathleen Blake Yancey 22:47

No, no, but I looked her up, and I saw the book that she has, it's called 'Experiments in reflection', I'm ready; I'm wary. I would say that I'm wary. I'm eager to see. I'm eager to see what the bot can do, if and how it can be of help.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:01

That's why we've also invited her for the webinar so that we can explore things with her because Megan Mize had used it in a workshop earlier in the year and briefly introduced it to some people there. But now I hope with Leticia in the room, the maker of the technology, that we can question things more. And of course with her lots of years of research in reflection, that will be definitely interesting to have that conversation there. So look forward to having you in this session laughs]. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 23:28

Count on it. I'll be there.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:30

So besides having those many different types of portfolios and different ways of approaching portfolios that all have their worth and their standing, have you seen any trends over the years that may have come back, that maybe were only a one hit wonder and not seen any more? Where do you think, yeah, portfolios are right now or might be trending to go? 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 23:30

That's a really interesting question. I mean, one thing I would say is that, in my experience at least, the history with print portfolio is very different, almost the polar opposite, of the history of ePortfolio because print portfolios, which in the U.S., at least, out there starts really, in sort of generally speaking, in the 1980s. University of California, Santa Barbara, was an institution that fostered a lot of work, both in math and in writing. Now, I'm not sure why those two subjects, but those two subjects were the ones that kind of took centre stage. And again, it was in a teaching context. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 24:30

If you look at the history of ePortfolios, the people who were first interested in ePortfolios were by and large not teachers so much. So there's more like offices of assessment and career services offices because, I think, [when] you're in an office in assessment and you're looking at the ways that you're trying to do programme assessment, ePortfolios give you a vivid, vibrant, live snapshot that's unlike any of the off-the-shelf standardised tests, which was the sort of [the] major competitor. So you can see why people will be excited about that portfolio because you actually have real samples of work. For career services, you can see why they would be excited because they want to help students to get jobs, and it turns out, not surprisingly, prospective employers are much more interested in looking at real work than they are at looking, you know, at even like a transcript, which there's some evidence to show, they don't know how to unpack, really. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 25:24

But the other thing that assessment offices and career services offices both have, that your run-of-the-mill teacher did not necessarily have, especially in the 90s and the 00s is access to technology and access to technology support. So it makes perfect sense that people who have access to that and not only access to it, but who can talk to them one on one, [and] say, here's what you need, what would you recommend, by way of a platform and not to mention the fact that they have some money? This is very different than your run-of-the-mill classroom teacher. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 25:57

So when you look at it from that point of view, I don't think it's surprising that the initial interest in electronic portfolios came from different quarters than the initial interest in print portfolios. That said, if you asked me what one of the changes would be, well, I think there's still clearly interest in assessment of ePortfolios. There's a lot of interest in the teaching and learning. And I think that that has become more pronounced over time. I think there was a kind of working assumption among some that ePortfolios were something that you could just graft on to what you already do. And that's just, in my experience, at least in the experience of a lot of people, that's not the way it's worked. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 26:39

EPortfolios, actually, had a different orientation. They're predicated on a different set of beliefs about student achievement and student development. And so when you really started looking at ePortfolios, it was a lot to know. Somebody couldn't say, 'All right, everyone, go make an electronic portfolio, turn it in by Wednesday, we'll be done.' I mean, there's more to it than that. And I see that also in the AAC&U ePortfolio Institute where, you know, sometimes institutions can be ready to go, I mean, they think they're ready to go, and they have a lot of the things that they need. I mean, in many ways, they really are ready to go, but they haven't actually necessarily come face to face with an electronic portfolio and really looked at it unless they looked at it and they started thinking, 'Oh my, we're gonna need these other things, or are there other questions here we need to consider?' That's the whole point of the Institute. So it's good news, right? 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 27:25

But that's just to say that ePortfolio is still very much evolving. It's hardly left career services or assessment behind, but it has enlarged to include teaching and learning, especially in formal and in informal situations. And, of course, the emphasis on integrative portfolios and the capacity of ePortfolios to allow students to develop a more holistic representation of their work in themselves, to show who they are in terms of identity, to show relationships among different kinds of experiences. There's just no other vehicle that has that capacity. How we make the best use of this, we have some research, we have some answers to that. But this project is not done.

Kristina Hoeppner 28:05

It's also really interesting, I find, to see how the portfolio use differs between different countries and sometimes also institutions, but definitely countries because here in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, we see quite a bit of portfolios being used in classes, not necessarily so much in career services, but definitely embedded into classes for assessment but also lifelong learning and increasingly also work integrated learning whereas in the States there is sometimes more the focus on career education, which is definitely great because having portfolios embedded on a wider university level gives them also more power, I think, to be used across classes, across different year levels so that students, as you said earlier, can say 'Okay, well, I should have started that much earlier. Why am I only doing this now in my last year?' when he could have started collecting that evidence and reflected on their learning. 

Kristina Hoeppner 28:59

I think the other point to what you said that, that some of the institutions think they are ready but might not really be is that I always still feel that it is helpful for people to create their portfolios themselves and not just make it a requirement of the students, but also experience it so that they know what actually goes into it, that it's not just as easy as assigning a multiple choice test, but that's the pedagogy doesn't need to change.

Kathleen Blake Yancey 29:27

There are processes for creating a portfolio. I think we're still figuring those processes out, I would say. I take your point about differences among countries. Over the last three years I've been involved with a project in Ireland, and it's just been wonderful because it involves health professionals, so doctors, pharmacists, and dentists. The question is if and how a reflective portfolio might provide a workable venue for students to develop and collaborate around their basically interpersonal kind of skills. So far, it basically is a series of pilots at Trinity, Dublin. And right now medical school students are creating ePortfolio, all of them, a couple hundred as part of the pilot. So it's exciting. Major change can actually come out as a result.

Kristina Hoeppner 30:18

Yeah. What we've seen here in New Zealand with nurses who create portfolios for their registered nurse requirements is that when they moved to the electronic portfolio, they moved away more from that assessment, and 'I need to reach this goal and that goal' more to the conversations around their professional development. That came more into the focus there. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 30:38

Yeah, that's the same message: professional development as conversation and also normalising what professional development looks like. It's not just an ascent up to Mount Blanc. It's tacking, to mix my metaphors. So that's the value of being in conversation. Students see that other students, they may be having a terrible day, but a colleague’s having a wonderful day, and then a week later, their positions are reversed. That's what it looks like to be an apprentice in a field and to move into that field. I mean, in theory, they could have had these conversations before, but they hadn't. The portfolio facilitated those conversations. And what the students said to a person was this was so valuable and so important, they wanted it included in the assessment scheme. I should send you a link to the first article on the basis of this project.

Kristina Hoeppner 31:24

Yes, please. I'd love to include it in the show notes so that we can refer to it. Kathy, is there anything that you'd like to be able to do with portfolios that you can't just yet fully do?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 31:35

I think sharing is part of it. I would like to see more models; at least in the U.S., the models tend to be mostly individual. Now and again, there are some collaborative models that might come out of, say, teamwork out of a science context. I have to say, I'm guilty of this, too. I mean, in more than one class, students said to me, at the end of the class, "we shared so much of what we've done, why were we not sharing portfolios all along?" That's a really the question. And I don't think the problem was with the portfolio technology. I think the problem was that I didn't stage it that way. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 32:07

So I think, again, I'm coming back to infrastructure issues and curricular issues. So that's a big thing for me: how do you set that up in a way that supports students, but also doesn't overwhelm them? There's a balance there, and I'm not entirely sure how you strike that. But that's one. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 32:24

I also think that in general, here in the States, we still tend to have design and technology as sidebars. And I think that's a problem. I think the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force has done a really good job of highlighting digital ethics and especially, obviously, related to digitality. But I think we need more work around that. And design. I think there are questions about well, how much design should students know, and if they should know some design, where will they get it? What are the expectations, especially since - Richard Lanham is a humanist scholar, had a book called The Electronic Word that came out in 1992. And he talked a lot about how when you look at the screen was actually like looking at a Renaissance painting, you were looking at the screen, so at the surface, but you're also looking through the screen. He thought they oscillate between the two. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 33:15

Clearly, that's an observation that has stuck with me. It's something that I used in that one-credit ePortfolio course, I alluded to with the graduate students, my point here being that if that is an accurate observation, and I think it is, what it means is what you see on the screen in terms of design powerfully influences what you see when you look through that design. So, the design matters. It's important, and I don't think we've attended to that as much as we might. The people in design obviously have, but I meant sort of the rest of us. That's another issue. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 33:47

And then I think reflection is still--very much to your point [laughs] regarding bots--reflection is very much of the moment. The AAC&U ePortfolio Institute, sponsored in part by Digication, had a session with Joe Tranquillo from Bucknell, and he has a set of - you know - reflection cards that he developed, which are provocative, interesting. It's interesting to me, how would you take those and use them in this larger context? So there's a lot of interesting work going on; I think we might do a better job of connecting that work and linking it.

Kristina Hoeppner 34:21

Lots to think about for the community to further the work and have an idea of what might come next and where we want to focus things on. So that then already, Kathy, takes us to the last quick three questions. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work? 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 34:41

Integrative, meaningful, potentially transforming.

Kristina Hoeppner 34:45

How wonderful, thank you. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 34:54

The thing I would say first, first lesson is always is learn from the students. I think of students as our collaborators, as our partners, I mean, clearly they're learning from us in all the ways we understand. Well, we are learning from them. And I'll just point out, they have us outnumbered [laughs]. So, yeah, there's a lot more learning going on there in that in terms of volume, I guess it's the way I would put it. So I think it's important to ask students questions that they can answer as an authority, rather than the question that we think we already know the answers to. I think that changes the reflection game. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 35:26

I think we need to find new ways of assessing portfolios. I think our assessment practices are not as robust or as responsive to the portfolio itself as they might be. I could talk about that at another time. But I think that's something else we need to do. And I think we do need to think of them not just as a kind of benefit or treat, almost, but as integral. There's, a school of medicine, the Lerner School of Medicine here in the States connected to the Cleveland Clinic, which is a very well known and regarded hospital. That medical school curriculum is all located in ePortfolio. They are not sidebar, they're not a treat, they're not an enrichment. They're integral.

Kristina Hoeppner 36:06

That was the one where they use problem based learning and portfolios don't have grades?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 36:10

Correct, yes.

Kristina Hoeppner 36:12

I'll point to your Batson Lecture from last year at the AAEEBL conference because you did go into quite a nice detail there, explaining their context and how the portfolios work there. 

Kathleen Blake Yancey 36:22

Good. That'd be great. 

Kristina Hoeppner 36:23

And so the last question then, what advice do you have for portfolio authors?

Kathleen Blake Yancey 36:29

That's a hard one [laughs]. Well, because to give portfolio authors advice feels a little presumptuous because I don't know what their purpose is. I don't know really what they want to do. So I guess, given that absence, which I take as a big absence, my recommendation would be that they do something that's meaningful. At the end of the day, I suppose for me, the most important feature or element of ePortfolio is that they speak to and allow and represent meaningfulness. I don't think any other educational vehicle does. So if you always have that in mind and that's always part of what you're doing, no matter what you create, it will be meaningful.

Kristina Hoeppner 37:15

Thank you for that final word, Kathy. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon for you to talk about one of your joys, I think, which are portfolios because I've certainly seen you smile throughout the entire conversation. Thank you, Kathy, for reminding us about the voice of the students and that they of course, like everywhere else in portfolios that they are in the centre of the attention and that we should be looking to them and listening to them when creating portfolios, when asking them to do a particular portfolio, choosing amongst the many different types that we have available. 

Kristina Hoeppner 37:52

So now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Kathleen Blake Yancey. 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.

Keywords

ePortfolio, portfolio, reflection, meaningfulness, portfolio makingness, career portfolio, assessment, artificial intelligence, ai, heuristics, template, model, exemplar