Tabitha Parker: Build the habit of reflecting

Professionals in the workplace can benefit greatly from portfolios. They can reflect on their practice, get feedback from colleagues, collaborate with others, and tell their whole learning story while also gaining a certification.

Tabitha Parker, GradDipl HE, is an Education Consultant, Learning Solutions Architect, and Technical Lead working on large-scale change projects in the space of learning management systems and portfolio solutions who has been supporting students and professionals for many years in their portfolio work, designing programmes that fit them and that also respect the people creating portfolios.

Additionally, she's active volunteering for education projects. For example, she was the lead volunteer in Aotearoa New Zealand for One Laptop Per Child and Sugar Labs for several years, and is co-founder of the Manaiakalani Education Trust Hackers where she meets fellow volunteers on a monthly basis to further the mission of the trust.

Resources

• Quiding, J., Laidlaw, M., Parker, T., & Hoeppner, K. (2020, February 20). Portfolios come full circle in the world of work. SoTEL, Auckland University of Technology.
• Laidlaw, M., Parker, T., & Quiding, J. (2022, March 31). PDRP at Waitematā DHB. HiNZ Conference, Online.
• Hoeppner, K. (2018, July 13). Who creates open source software? ITx, Wellington, NZ.

Related episodes

• Stephen Harlow: Tell your story through your portfolio
• David Hicks: The portfolio tells the story of growth
• Zala Volcic: Develop community, relationships, and compassion
• Jaye Ryan: Showcase yourself through your portfolio

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

Transcript

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today marks the 100th episode of the podcast. So I did think about whom I wanted to have as a guest for that. Tabitha Parker was at the very top of my list for a number of reasons. I had heard about Tabitha's volunteer work for One Laptop per Child(OLPC) before I met her. She won the New Zealand Open Source Award in the category of Open Source Contributor in 2010, and that was just a few months after I had moved to Aotearoa, and so I had the privilege of being at the ceremony. And then I encountered her at Moodle events before we started talking about portfolios. So here we are today, just almost 16 years after me first learning about Tabitha. Welcome to the podcast.

Tabitha Parker: 1:20

Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:24

I want to shine a light onto your work, in particular in edtech in Aotearoa, and reflect on what you have learned throughout your career working at a number of different organisations in the country. But let's start with what you do on a day-to-day basis at the moment, Tabitha.

Tabitha Parker: 1:45

My current work is a Technical Lead. I work across learning and ePortfolios, and I work on large-scale change projects. I help bring fragmented learning systems and portfolio systems together, and I've been consolidating five learning sites lately with around 300,000 users, and we're onto the last of our merges there with two LMS to consolidate. I am bringing together fragmented ePortfolio sites and paper-based ePortfolio processes into a national solution. And I'm particularly excited about that mahi, that work, because it's co-designing this national solution to not only meet the professional requirements and administrative and reporting requirements, but to support a really busy workforce with clear processes and an easy-to-use portfolio system that integrates with their LMS. Although these projects quite large, the design question is still very human, working to make this as easy and meaningful for the person involved that they're learning, they're practising, reflecting, and demonstrating competences is an easy process. I also occasionally do some facilitation for Moodle Educator and Moodle Administrative Qualifications, and I'm a founding member of the Manaiakalani Education Trust Hackers Group. So we meet every month, and you might, having already learned a little bit about that, know that it's quite similar to Mahara with Mahara's'Create, share, and engage', Manaiakalani talk about 'Learn, create, and share'. So there's some real synergies there.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:10

Tabitha, since we have an international audience here, can you talk about what that volunteer work entails for you?

Tabitha Parker: 3:17

Manaiakalani is about the 'hook to heaven'. The trust work is supporting teachers and learners in schools, empowering those learners in schools through innovative teaching, through developing digital citizenship and community-driven education. So it's about equitable opportunities for learners, fostering creativity in learners. So they use learn, create, share because it allows them to teach children how to learn something, create evidence to support that learning, and reflect on it and share that with an audience. They use blogs through that process to get feedback and repeat those cycles of learn, create, share.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:54

Awesome! You did mention that you are a Technical Lead, but I find you do more than just the technical administration or looking at technical things because also looking back at your education history itself, you have been studying technical subjects, but also learning design and have been involved in teacher education, therefore, really bridge those two roles of technical staff, but also understanding the pedagogical side of things. That I find is really good in your role because you need to support so many different people who have a very specialised view of what they are doing, and so they need you as that glue within all of that.

Tabitha Parker: 4:37

Yeah, my work definitely sits across that bridging between people, pedagogy, and platforms. I need to be technical enough that I understand how systems need to work. But my starting point was always about that person who's using them and the pedagogy behind it, thinking about the educator, the learner, the practitioner, assessors, people who administer processes for learning and for portfolio work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:59

How did you first get involved in supporting digital learning?

Tabitha Parker: 5:04

I began in the'90s supporting teachers to effectively use technology in their classrooms. I went on to work in teaching roles myself and in supporting organisational change with LMS changes generally at the beginning, shifting from one LMS platform to another. But I continuously throughout those roles was often in spaces where I was building educator capability. Even as those systems changed over the years, I've used all sorts of LMS, Blackboard, Moodle, Tōtara, but also the portfolio sites like Mahara. But the question always comes back to the people; how do we help people use technology in ways that genuinely support learning, not just digitising processes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:44

Yeah. When did then portfolios come onto your radar?

Tabitha Parker: 5:48

They came later. Yeah. Earlier, it was really about the LMS delivery space, developing the people and the content, and getting courses online, building the educator capability to deliver. But then I worked in tertiary education, and portfolios allowed me to shift from thinking about how we deliver and assess learning through an LMS or through a classroom into how do we get learners to show their learning, the process of learning, how do we get them to reflect on that process over time? So when I think about some of the things I saw in that tertiary environment, portfolios, beautiful portfolios that showed garden landscapes. Thinking this is the space I have. What are the ideas I have around using it? What can I use from my learning to take that theory and put it into practice to design a space? What's my concept? And then building it into actually what happened when I did that? How could I have done it differently? What happened when I engaged with the people that are involved in that project, so that they take their learning out of the classroom, it's well beyond what you would do in exams and essays. Then I moved into work environments. There I'm looking at implementing online portfolio solutions for professionals. In that space, it's more about the professional showing evidence for their accreditation requirements. So another lens on where portfolios fit.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:02

Yeah, different ways of working with portfolios from more of a learning portfolio or showcase portfolio to a certification portfolio, which has much more stringent requirements onto the portfolio itself. Looking back at your work in tertiary institutions, in the workplace, and also for your engagements doing professional development, what do you think has changed over the years of how institutions think about their digital learning environments?

Tabitha Parker: 7:36

I think there has been some work in integrations so that evidence flows more from where the evidence is created through to where they can reflect on it, such as the integration with course completions from your LMS into being displayed in a portfolio. There's been more work in co-design, building with people who are involved in that workflow. So I think that's a shift from just being about what the platform is set up to deliver, but to think about how do I best support people in that process, remembering that there are people involved. And I think there's been a shift around collaboration. When I first started using Mahara to where I am now, I've seen the shift of bringing in peer evidence and having a peer contribute to that story that the portfolio is telling. We hear a lot about AI. Where does AI fit? I look forward to what the community talks about with AI and what their discussions lead to, so that the community is involved in designing where AI fits. And I think it will be really useful to support the portfolio owner in the way that they think. So there's opportunities there. They won't come directly from AI itself, but from those community discussions. I want to focus on that shift towards generally asking what the learner or the practitioner needs from their portfolio. There's a bit of a balancing act for organisations that offer portfolios or tertiary educations that provide portfolios. They can be very specific and designed for very specific narrow use cases, but they can also be tailored right down. They could be designed for more broad use, which allows a bit more of an open way of using that portfolio to let the learner or the practitioner decide how and where they reflect and how that contributes to their practice development.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:19

For you, it is important that the learners can take something with them from that portfolio, that they create also the portfolio for themselves, so that it's not just for an assessment task or to gain a certification. Do you then also encourage people to create separate portfolios, so not just that required portfolio, but also one where they might be repurposing some of the evidence that they have put into that assessment portfolio, but use it in a different context?

Tabitha Parker: 9:50

Yes, personally, I do. I think you should be aiming to build reflection as a habit, constant and continuous reflection, so you think about how you practice and include how you have professional conversations with others in a safe environment. Portfolios give you a place to critique your practice and reflect on things, try new things in that safe space, and develop yourself. Although a portfolio can be shared, many people are sharing them for compliance reasons or for assessment purposes in a tertiary setting. You can have a portfolio with the audience is just you, just you collecting your treasures, your stories, your reflections, and building constant reflective practice and developing that skill will help you to then start to see a shift in your own practice. In some cases, you might see people sharing with a trusted colleague so that they can talk through some scenarios and build their understanding together, but I think we do want to encourage people to have a space where they think in their own way about their practice and build that skill of reflection.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:53

What helps you to stay in that habit of reflecting on a regular basis?

Tabitha Parker: 11:00

I'm sure, like most people, these habits fall in and out of your life as things happen, but in the last three, four months, I have been writing every weekend. So I get to the end of my week and I reflect on components of leadership and what I've been trying, what I've read that week, and what I felt happened around me, so that I'm having a deliberate topic that I focus on in my own reflection.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:24

How much time do you spend reflecting? Do you time box it?

Tabitha Parker: 11:28

I don't time box it because it will depend on what I'm getting into. Sometimes I realise a couple of hours have gone by and I've done quite a lot of reading and asked myself quite a lot of questions and a few 100 words have spilled out, and other times it quickly becomes a 'I can't focus. I can't do more than that basic beginnings of ideas.' But it's only through that regular practice do you actually get to a point where you can write and look back and see how you've changed and what worked for you, and what you want to do next to challenge yourself.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:05

I find you are encouraging that reflective practice through the portfolios that are created in one of the workplaces that you have been supporting the implementation of the portfolio away from just a tick box exercise over to creating self-reflections or self-assessments, and then bringing in the peers and also bringing in the managers. What has that shift introducing the portfolio done for the workforce for their practice itself?

Tabitha Parker: 12:43

In the areas where I've worked closest with those delivering portfolios, I've seen a shift in the expectation that you have a portfolio [laughs] as a starting point. The expectation that it knows about you and what you've been doing, and gives you the platform to jump from, so you don't have a blank page. There's an expectation that hey, I've done this learning, present it back to me so I can build on it. Those areas where they have focused on having those conversations with the people involved, their educators, their managers, they've built a culture where it's expected that you work through those development steps and come back to this on a regular basis.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:30

So that, to me, reads like the purpose of the recertification or certification for compliance has shifted away from just making sure that you get the certificate to reflecting on the practice and making that an important aspect of the work, therefore integrated more fully, and also have the expectation then that reflection happens. Is there a particular story from one of the people that you've been working with, as really having illustrated the power of the portfolio and the benefits of that they would have then also noticed themselves?

Tabitha Parker: 14:13

I did want to share a story with you about how I see a moment in which portfolios shifted for me and the way I saw how they can be used and how people who own portfolios see their own selves in their stories. I think it's important to remember that when you are invited to view someone's portfolio, that they are choosing to share with you their story, and it's to be respected. So when people think about how you develop a portfolio, consider that there are real people involved telling their real stories. One of the times where I saw a portfolio that really influenced my view on portfolios was when someone shared their pepeha and a photo of themselves wearing a beautiful korowai. For any listeners who are outside of Aotearoa New Zealand, a pepeha is a traditional Māori way of introducing yourself, and it shares your connection to your people and your land. And a korowai is a woven cloak of flax and feathers. In this example, they weren't just being a practitioner submitting evidence for a compliance requirement to be accredited, to being a real person sharing their story with their assessor. And I had the pleasure of being invited in to see them, to support them, and I saw that they saw their portfolio as a taonga, as a treasure, that was very personal to them, and they took time to build their story, to reflect on what was happening for them as a practitioner, to provide not only the evidence that is required, but to go that extra step and make it clear that they were developing themselves for themselves, and that we needed to ensure that we provided a safe space for them to bring who they are into their practice. It's no longer just a tick the box when you see how someone's personal beliefs, values, and ways of being interact with how they practice as a practitioner.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:09

Yes, they do bring themselves in. There's always the whole person that is appearing when you go to work, so it's good to see that also in the portfolio, and not just here's the artefact, here's my reflection. But how does it fit into the entire story?

Tabitha Parker: 16:25

Yeah, and I think that that leads you to start to think, what are we doing when we decide how we design our projects? What are we doing when we think about data residency and data sovereignty? What are we doing to ensure that we treat their treasure with the respect that it's due to ensure that we keep what they've done safe, that they take it with them?

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:44

Right, and also that they can decide with whom they want to share it. Because you said you were invited into their space, so it is up to the learner, the staff member, to say whether they want to make a portfolio entirely public and have it viewed by everybody, or whether it is just a much much smaller group of people, so that they know specifically who can view things, from whom they might also expect feedback.

Tabitha Parker: 17:10

Yeah, with that, if someone has invited you in and shared with you something that they've put a lot of energy into, giving them the respect of taking the time to carefully read and consider that and to give them feedback that supports them continuing that professional development, that focus on being the best practitioner they can.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:29

It goes so much more beyond just the compliance, but has that collaboration in there and allows also engaging with each other. If I remember correctly, Tabitha, at one point you had also said when we talked about the portfolio practice at one of your organisations that the comments might not happen on the portfolio itself in written form, but that the portfolio encouraged conversations between the people that had access to the portfolio, which I find really nice because often when we think about the digital environment, everything just stays in there, and you think you have to engage digitally and work there and make a comment there or just view something, whereas you are again humanising what is in the environment, bring that back into the workplace or bring that back into an institution, and the portfolio serves as the starting point of a conversation.

Tabitha Parker: 18:33

Yeah, I think that points to a need to support all of the players, not just the portfolio owner and giving them a user guide, but thinking about who's involved in that kōrero, who's involved in those conversations, about your practice, about how you develop, how you access learning, how you reflect on what's happening for you in your workplace as a practitioner. So thinking about how do I support those who educate or those who manage people who have professional accreditation requirements, so that portfolios do become a tool for continuous growth, going well beyond just an assessment purpose. I think when we start to look at portfolios through that lens of such a powerful tool for continuing development and start to think of it as something that's very personal to a practitioner, you start to understand why certain things should get your attention. When I ran workshops for people to learn how to use the portfolio tool at the beginning, those workshops were, "Hey, this is a new tool. You need to learn how to click the right buttons." But you quickly get feedback on what really matters to those people, and you have to listen to that feedback and think, how do I develop this tool so that the user experience makes the'what do I click' almost invisible? How do I be respectful of what they need from this? So designing out complexity of the steps, thinking where does that cognitive load need to be? It shouldn't be on finding where I click, but on actually thinking about what evidence I'm building, what I'm reflecting on, what do I want to do differently now? What's next for me? So I want to get that kind of thought there that we need to really think about how we're designing and delivering our portfolio solutions to support putting the right place for that cognitive load, reducing that tension and friction, and thinking about how we be respectful of their time. When I ran those workshops in the early days, they would ask me things like, "Why are you asking me to type in my continuing professional development hours? You know this. I've got here from my LMS." So being respectful, thinking I need an integration here. I need to give them back the time, so they're not retyping stuff we already know about them. But the integration shows them what we know about them and says, "Put your time into the next step, the bit that's of the most value, the reflection, the thinking about how it changed you as a practitioner."

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:56

How do you help these busy people that are creating their portfolios see the value of the portfolio itself, that they get to the point. I'm not just here to do the clicking, but this is for my own practice, this is for my own good?

Tabitha Parker: 21:13

By framing the portfolio as being for them, for their future, it's not just for their education provider, and it's not just for their employer, but it's it's actually for them. Make sure that what you are building allows them to take their portfolio with them wherever they go. It's not tied to you as education provider or as an organisation, but allows for reuse and taking them on that journey so that they can use it wherever they go next by reducing any friction that prevents them from having easy access, get rid of all those barriers around access to your portfolio tool because frustration disengages your people. And make sure that you frame it in those stories of how they tell their story and how they reflect for themselves for their own benefit.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:57

So pretty much your entire life is an educator because you have been helping people both with learning management systems, with portfolios, with other technologies, you have been involved in the One Laptop per Child initiative for many, many years, especially here in the Oceania region. And so, besides education and open education, open source is also one of your passions, and that's how we got to know each other. Why have you been involved in these communities, Tabitha?

Tabitha Parker: 22:32

Access and equity - the idea that education and learning tools should be available to everyone. So I volunteered for One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs. I was New Zealand's lead volunteer and setting up testing communities and visiting some specific deployments in the early days of One Laptop per Child. And I contributed to Moodle community events and became a founding member of the Manaiakalani Education Trust Hackers. But what motivated me to give my time wasn't the technology itself, but it was supporting and watching what happens when you hand people tools and trust that they can shape their own solutions and that you can support their needs. In open source communities, you usually find that people show up and share what they built because they believe that access shouldn't be a barrier. It's fairly strong in open source communities that you want to remove those barriers to access. What kept me involved in some of those communities was the way that they build with and for those people, so that pedagogy was driving decisions and shaping tools for development to solve their problems, the real learning problems faced by those communities, rather than having to fit your learning into the tools that you could buy, and thinking how do we support that community directly with what they need? OLPC and Sugar Labs they threw out this idea that you hand the kids a laptop and you teach them to work in an office. Like it doesn't fit with the pedagogy. With OLPC, they took this approach that the child would own the device, that they have a relationship that matters in this. They're a stakeholder. It's about them. You give them a device. The device is built for them. They can take it apart and tinker with it, or work wherever they are. Six to 12 year olds learning whether they're in the sun or the sand or in the snow, humid places. You wanted to give them a device that would work for them as learners, and and with Sugar Labs, that platform was designed with the child at the centre. That the whole pedagogy is around social construction of learning. That learning is a social hands-on activity, and that your collaboration, this creating together in real time, was how they would learn. So you had a community that supported those pedagogies. People giving their time. They actually built a journal. It's a portfolio, an automated portfolio system. Think back, you know, this is the early 2000s, and that journalling tool it automatically logged the learning that they were doing and who they collaborated with and kept this journal of their learning, and it let them go back and resume their tasks and review their learning history together with their peers. It's quite interesting. With the Manaiakalani and their 'Learn, create, share' pedagogy, these communities they align with my values around access and being learner centred and valuing collaboration and reflection as integral parts of that learning process.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:23

Yeah, and I've benefited from you sharing the work that you're doing, the things that you're thinking about over the years, and that has also propelled us into creating new features for Mahara. That has made us think about what we currently have, what we should be having, localising features, having flexibility also, so that it's not just built for one group of people, but can also be used by others. And so that's what has been fantastic to be able to have those conversations and then try something out, experiment with it, roll it out, and then see what else can be changed, and then maybe the change somebody else is making, so not necessarily the group that you're working with. Now, if somebody got interested in sharing, communicating, connecting with others, open education, open access, what would you suggest to them of how they could get started?

Tabitha Parker: 26:21

I would say jump in. Open source communities are often very welcoming. Start small. You join a mailing list, attend a local meet-up, go with a friend, go to a conference or an unconference if that's what that community offers. Just lurk, listen, listen to hear what that community needs. Look for specific problems that you can help with, or that you might also care about that that community has expressed. You don't need to be a developer. That's probably the first learning for me when I joined open source communities was like, I don't know how to contribute. I'm not a developer. But it's not all about development. It's about support, testing, documenting for people, training and support and advocacy; these are all real contributions. Yeah, so I'd say that being part of an open source community is a real rewarding thing to do. So I would say jump in.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:12

That's a good action point that can happen at any time of the day and can be really, really small. I don't even remember what my first contribution to an open source project was, but I believe it was to a content management system that we had at a university, and we wanted to use it. And I told them about a bug that was in the system. So even just reporting a small bug or asking for a new feature, and then seeing how you, in collaboration with them, can develop that either through sponsoring the feature or expanding its use. Yeah, I think that was the first time that I jumped in.

Tabitha Parker: 27:52

Exactly. Yeah, you might notice something doesn't function the way you thought it would. Asking questions, listening to other people talk about how they use that thing. Was it a bug? Was it a feature? How am I using it? How are they using it? And if you do take that step and report a bug, oh, I'm going to follow up on that. Build the habit of engaging with that community. Follow up, test it. Did it fix what was happening for you? Tell others. Listen to how they tell you what happened. Yeah, building that habit of being involved and connecting with other people in your communities.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:22

Yeah, habits for reflection and habits for contributing and connecting with others and working together to produce something that is beneficial for yourself, but ideally also for others. Yeah, thank you, Tabitha. Now on to our last three questions that are again a bit more portfolio focused after our quick excursion into open education and open source. Which words or short phrases do you typically use to describe portfolio work?

Tabitha Parker: 28:54

Iterative. You know, it's a continuous thing. Evidence with meaning, thinking about how that evidence tells the story, that snapshot in time, snapshot of your story. Yeah, [that's] how I would describe this.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:07

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

Tabitha Parker: 29:14

Design for building reflective habits. Going to come back to the habits[laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:19

Yes, you are. Got to reinforce it, you know[laughs].

Tabitha Parker: 29:23

Yeah, that's right. So don't just ask, what did you do [laughs]? Ask so what? Ask what changed? Ask what did you learn about your practice? And what are you going to do differently next time? Ask questions that help build those reflective habits, and don't just design things for one-off documentation purposes. Try and build habits.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:41

Now, what advice do you have for portfolio authors?

Tabitha Parker: 29:45

This will probably come back to habit building, but write for yourself. Write for your own self. Don't wait for something impressive to happen or wait for that course that you're going to do. But write for yourself, capturing small, ordinary moments regularly, little and often. You're trying to build a habit. Write for yourself.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:02

So that once that big moment comes around, you are ready to reflect on that.

Tabitha Parker: 30:06

Exactly, you have the skills to take it further. Yes, yeah. The other advice I would say would be talk with trusted colleagues because within the confidentiality and professional boundaries, talking with your trusted colleagues builds for reflection that's richer, and it lets others share perspectives and challenge and extend not only your thinking but their thinking. Build habits in colleagues at the same time as building those habits in yourself.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:32

Yeah. Create, learn, share, and make connections. Thank you so much, Tabitha, for this conversation today, which comes down to habit building, habit formation, and reflection, and also having the person at the centre of the entire conversation, so that they are telling their learning story, no matter whether it is in a portfolio that they create for themselves or whether it is in one that they need to complete for compliance purposes. No matter which direction they go, it is still about themselves, about their professional self, but also bringing in their personalities and to let those shine through.

Tabitha Parker: 31:16

Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation to be part of the podcast. 100th episode.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:21

Yay! Now over to our listeners. As you think about your own portfolio work, what resonated most with you today? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Mastodon, and tag me or send me an email. This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Tabitha Parker. Make sure to check out the resources in the episode notes in your podcast app or at podcast.mahara.org. And if you found this valuable, share it with a colleague who'd appreciate it, too. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.