 Yeah. Thanks everyone for showing up. Like I said, I'm really excited about this topic of portfolios on either WordPress multi-site or domain of one's own. I think the topic of portfolios comes up a lot in education and ed tech stuff in general, and I'll say personally, one of the things that was initially exciting to me when I first even heard about domain of one's own was the idea of people making really authentic, meaningful stories, way to tell their own story on the web in a very web-native way. And so I thought we would do this to talk about folks that are encouraged folks in this call to share strategies they've helped people with when working on portfolio projects or maybe directly working with students or faculty, things they run into. If we've got examples to share, that's all great. In addition, talk about what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing this. This is not the only way either domain of one's own WordPress multi-site two different ways with their own strengths and weaknesses. And of course, there are other ways too, but I kind of want to get into all of that stuff. So I don't know. That's up preamble. Jim or Amanda, do you have anything to add to that to my preamble before we kind of get discussion rolling? Be careful, Amanda. Once you start me, it's like when you invite the vampire into the house, you'll come back. Be careful how much you wind it, you know? I will say though, to your point, Taylor, and for others out there who probably have a similar story, portfolios is what my core field referred to as the Trojan horse to get a WordPress multi-siter WordPress into a campus. And I think it's interesting because, you know, Martha Burris, to quote someone who I think is awesome, said that if you put 10 people in a room talking about portfolios, you'll have 15 different ideas of what a portfolio is. And I think that's a great way to kind of try and capture some of the complexity and, you know, what that term may mean to different people at different times. So that's one way to think about the complexity around the term and how people are using it might be of value to discuss a bit. But I'll shut up there. Well, and, you know, I'll say for me, that's kind of one of my favorite things about doing portfolios on WordPress multi-siter domain of one's own is that it usually allows more flexibility for the people doing the work, right? Creating a portfolio for themselves to kind of decide and define that that can be scary to support sometimes, or you run into like issues where you'll have a discipline that wants to use, say, in domain of one's own, they say every person doing this major is going to make a portfolio. And then they go, well, we have to assess them and go, how do we assess them, right? And, okay, that's a whole thing, right? But I think there are ways to do that. You know, you can set, you know, guidelines on what this thing needs to have, but maybe not in the way to do it. And that's one of my least favorite things about like e-portfolio systems is there, I think, too prescriptive almost all the time. So that's really great thing that there's a freedom. But of course, you know, with limitless possibilities, you can also paralyze folks when creating things. When they're just starting, they don't know where to start. They don't know what's possible sometimes and overloading them with too many possibilities doesn't usually help. At least that's my experience. So even though you've got this great open-ended tool, and you want people to do almost anything with it, how do you get them started? When almost anything is possible, how do you get them going with something without saying, here's a template, and we've just made an e-portfolio system inside of domain of one's own? I mean, not that a template's bad, right? But if you don't let people bust out of that template, I guess. So I'm kind of curious, maybe we start there is, how do we get people started, right? Like making a portfolio and when almost anything is possible, and we like that creativity potentially, where do we start people? It's a big question, I suppose. At the beginning. Well, I'll jump in. If I may, I'm Anali. I'm at UCLA. I've been wrestling with this. UCLA. Bruins. Go Bruins. Wrestling with this. I'm in the humanities, too. So somewhat late comers to technology and yet kind of also doing lots of really interesting things. And we have people like studying languages and doing digital humanities projects and all this. So there's all kinds of use cases out there that also vary just within my own scope of work. But what I wanted to suggest as a starting point, and this is probably not what you're getting at with your question, but I think it's important to have a conversation with the students about what is it that your portfolio is going to do? What is the purpose of it? Was it going to show? To get them to think sort of critically, forgive me, about why are they creating this thing rather than just plugging it into something and dumping stuff there and moving on and saying, oh, go look at this page. Like get them to think about what they want to show and why and actually make it a kind of an interesting thought exercise for them to play. I think what that would do is encourage them to be more exploratory and a little more creative in how they might approach it and not feel wetted to fitting into a fitting into a template or some kind of cookie cutter thing. It doesn't have to be anything. It can be what you need it to be. Or maybe actually having the instructor kind of think about that first and suggest different possibilities for it. So that's kind of what where I was coming from to start. I know it doesn't get into how do you start them in using the thing, right? That's kind of what you were more getting at. No, I would say I totally agree because I think the problem is less technical than it is philosophical. I agree that the context is super important. I always like to, when I've had the opportunity to get in front of students who are doing this and say, here's why we're doing this, not just here's why we're making portfolios, but here's why we're doing it in this way and this is what it can offer you and what you might want to think about how you represent yourself. What is this identity you're creating? How does this fit into that? I would build on that a little bit. One of the things that was interesting to me about portfolios when we were doing it with our blogging platform at UMW was it would be contextual. You're an art student. There are a bunch of people doing really practical portfolios to display their art and it wasn't just like here's my artwork, grade it and then I have it and there it is. But what does this mean for your identity online? I think that critical literacy you're talking about, I always love WordPress as a specific tool because I think it provided that space, that kind of like palette to write who you are and what you're doing and so the portfolio for me was always an expression of identity in relationship to a specific what's your major? What is it you want to do? If someone was to read this site and learn about you, is it just a static like here's my CV or is it a conversation with that unmet friend or employer or whoever? So there's a lot of interesting ways and we never approached it from the assessment piece. In terms of like this is a programmatic assessment of our students, maybe blind reviewed, but more like an expression engine for the students themselves. This is Moe Grinnell. I think starting from the place of identity would be great. In reality, I think most of our students, the default is to wake till their last year and it's more of a transactional thing. Getting ready to go in the job market or I gotta apply for this fellowship or this program or grad school and so at the beginning of fourth year, you know, our career service department has some explicit programming for people to help them do that. And unfortunately, we haven't created the kind of partnership with them that I would like, so they usually push people toward Wix because it's, you know, they got a lot of stuff going on in fourth year. And, you know, it's not necessarily a priority to have a sort of digital identity for the long term. It's more, you know, this is something that will help you take the next step. I mean, from my perspective, the idea would be we start at first year. We start trying to find ways to infuse into programming and to tackle these mindsets that, you know, don't wait till you're close to the end to start kind of building this archive of documentation and reflection and metacognition and making connections about your learning. But again, there's so much stuff already packed into kind of, you know, the first year tutorial and the first year experience. It's like, you know, and it's kind of a chicken and egg thing, like you were saying, you know, if the faculty are not sort of, you know, making some explicit reference to this, it's, that makes it harder to get the students to think of it as something important to start at an early point. Quinn, we'll let you jump in, obviously, if you hand up. Then Jim. Well, I really think that what Mo was saying is, you know, I can reflect out here at the University of Texas because, you know, one of the things we found out from students who have been working with these is, you know, when they're about to graduate is not the time to start this process. You know, they have way too much to deal with. We're also faced with an interesting situation here where we've kind of got, like many people, gotten bait and switched with Google. And, you know, so we're kind of in the process of evicting Google from the campus as much as we possibly can. And it's been difficult to do, but you also have to understand that every child, every student in the entire state of Texas comes to the University having spent 12 years with Google. And so breaking them off of that, and, you know, our solution is the lesser two evils, you know, Microsoft 365 is already a process that we're in. And that has to occur first year. You know, my argument is, why don't we go ahead and come in with a digital portfolio solution there and get them started early and think about it. And much like Jim said earlier, you know, the use of WordPress multi-site as a trojan horse is a really good thing because we have to get that covered first before we can even start thinking about or integrating anything about Domain of One's Own, except for our digital humanities people who won't wait. And that's okay. We'll work with them. They're great, you know, but we have got to get the vast majority of people on WordPress multi-user. And we have students coming to us now that are on Wix and already on other things out of high school, you know. And so we want to explain the advantage of this to them. But again, you know, I mean, Taylor said something about philosophical. This is a political battle. It always has been, you know, and the politics of it also have to deal with the reality of faculty life, which is the faculty generally won't work with things they're not comfortable with themselves. And so we've got to approach the faculty that understand the value of a portfolio and get them used to using it and support them. But, you know, when you've got 13 colleges spread across, you know, one university, it's like herding cats on steroids. You know, it is not easy to do and it takes an enormous amount of time. But we continue to plug away with it because, you know, the students want to do it. And they want to learn more. And we see obvious educational advantages, you know, to working with the main one's own going forward. But, you know, it's real, it's real difficult politically when the leadership's not clued in. Not only not clued in, but, you know, our vice president of researchers know one of our big departments decided to spend a whole lot of money with a website portfolio provider, you know, and we found out about it. And I read the terms of service and I nearly fainted and said, what lawyer looked at this? Because this is nuts. Absolutely nuts, you know. And I haven't heard anything about it since, but, you know, it's just hard to get people to read the fine print and understand. And you would think here at UT after what Google did, people would read the fine print. But they don't, you know. And so, you know, that's the nice thing about trying to roll this out in a multidisciplinary fashion with people in each, you know, department joined in because getting people to use this more and more is not an easy thing. And WordPress is, you know, can be daunting to students. But it's also a learning opportunity. And we're here to educate. And so we have to drive that educational aspect really hard too. So, you know, a lot, you know, the main thing that ties back into what Mo was saying is you cannot start at the end of the line. You guys start right off the bat. Go for it, Jim. There's a lot to respond to that, Quinn. And hopefully we will. But that's great. Okay, first of all, for a lot of you that may not know me, I'm Jim Luke and I work at Lansing Community College. And we're in theory at Devana One's own school. We have an account. But what we do is, we've been playing with this work and I, I've been working at my ass off for cheese since 2015 on this. And what we started out, we do a lot of good things. But what we started out with and my colleague in crime at that time had great visions of essentially student portfolios. And, you know, because we'd heard all this great domain of one's own stuff from Mary Washington and Oklahoma and all these other places. And, you know, the original thought was, can you do this at a two year school? And, and the short answer to that is no, we failed miserably at that aspect of it. We had a few faculty who were very, who tried a lot of stuff. And we're going to take another run at that aspect of getting students into their, a lot of their own blogs and their own in effect portfolios. But I think along the way we, we've tried different stuff and I, I will reinforce what I've heard here so far. But I would emphasize at times it's kind of a subtle shift in semantics. But I think it's very, very powerful. Put your, the students coming in are extraordinarily transactional. That's what K through 12 has trained them on. The LMS trains them on that. All the other faculty train them on that. It's you earn a grade by turning in, turning in this product. Everything is a product and they have zero agency in the world. And I think when we talk about, I mean, we know what we mean by digital identity. That doesn't mean squat to these students. What we need to do is rephrase that and, you know, take a little time to help them think through. What are you, you know, between, like if, if this is the beginning of their career, their college career, and you want to get them started then, likely is if we talk about portfolios and collecting your work here and collecting your work, they're going to think of it as product transactional. What you've got is WordPress multi-side is just an additional complex drop box to replace what's in the LMS. And why would I want to do this? Well, it's because I'm going to have to show an employer. And then, you know, six months from now, when they find out that employers never ask for a portfolio, you've lost everything. But if you can get them starting to think about their own agency, how do they want to go through college? How do they want to connect their own classes? You know, wouldn't it be cool to have your own stuff? You know, wouldn't it be cool to be, be a creator and have stuff? You know, identity is a nice word, but you know, it's, it's you could be somebody. You know, because they could probably relate more to influencers than they can, you know, creating a portfolio. And so my last comment along this is going to be, so how do you get them started? I think what you do, and this is why I like multi-site and we have my, we have shifted our thinking towards getting them started with, if necessary, just a class website, WordPress site, that the profs set up, and they all contribute so it becomes kind of a class blog. Now, if you can get other faculty, you know, if you can sell them on the ideal guy, wouldn't it be great if you just had your own and you could just carry it on after this instead of being fancy Dropbox. The nice thing about multi-site is that you can ease them into it, but you don't have to throw this huge WordPress powerful tool at them. You can set up a multi-site and say, here, pick a fee. But you know, the reality is, is we've already curated a modest selection of themes good for starters. You know, we're not going to put C-box and press books, you know, or some sort of, you know, something like that in there as an option to pick. Yeah, they can still, you know, they could pick some plugins, but you know, don't let them pick crazy stuff that's going to be overwhelming. Later on, they can add that stuff or they can also migrate. So, Jim, I think one of the things, and you touched on a couple of things, but one of the things I'm particularly interested in is that idea of the identity as it relates to the institution and as it relates to what they're doing there, right? Like, I think there is an agreed sense that when students come to a two or four-year institution, they're there to get a degree and to learn about certain things or, you know, expand their mind in some way. I think that is agreed upon now. The transactional piece probably varies depending upon school, student, a whole bunch of other things, right? So, that's, I mean, it's kind of easy to say in general, but I'm not sure it applies in, you know, for all told. But I think one of the missed opportunities with these publishing platforms, whether it's WordPress or something else and thinking about portfolios is focused projects that students can point back to that they create with other people, right? Like, I find that those are the ones that students are like, why is the site down? It's on my portfolio or it's on my CV. Like, that's something I'm proud of having built because it's not just, you know, an isolated assignment that you wonder if anyone will read, but it's a focused project that a whole community kind of was behind and other folks will read. I'm thinking of like, you know, literary journals for various classes or an art exhibit on Venice. These are student-created projects, super powerful, still there, and still kind of linked back to. The other piece that's interesting, and I'll finish in a second, but the other piece that's interesting to me is we have this platform that could arguably work across classes to your point, Annaly, and how a faculty using it is like, we have the best possible platform to highlight the amazing work happening across the university. And the fact that people feel like there's no connection, no one comments, there's no sense of community, I think is a failing of coordinating this across disciplines and classes and faculty, but also coordinating it as part of your university identity. Like, this is kind of in many ways a publishing platform to highlight the really cool work. Now, there are questions of privacy and stuff, and people would have to be able to opt into that in a platform like that, but could you do that? Yes, easily. Would it be remarkable for you to come to a university driven website using WordPress Multisite that showed all the cool work students were reflecting on and thinking about and doing it? Yeah, I think, I mean, we're so, I've always felt, now this is for almost 15, 20 years now, we're so close to that dream of having people actually publish something that they believe in that's relevant and it's within a broader community, so they're not alienated and isolated by the idea of put it in, do the transactional posting and be done. So I wonder, like, does anyone have that experience on their campus where they're starting to feel like there is a sense of, like, not just one class or one mission, but a broader push to make this work? Funny you should bring that up. So for everybody else, I'm not just a crazy ed tech punk faculty developer. I also play a teaching professor half the time, and because somebody asked if any of us were faculty in the in the chat. And yeah, I've been using it in my own class. Now, my classes aren't particularly writing heavy. I teach economics and sometimes economic history. But exactly what you talked about, Jim, is most of my stuff has been heavy on me authoring and they using, although there was some stuff they authored and project and I've been stunned the number of times where, oh, you know, I just leave it up because I'm lazy. And then I find out of three years later, I get an email from somebody saying, I'm applying for a scholarship in my senior year at University of something big or, you know, some, you know, outside agency or something like that. Do you remember that project we did? Can it can you find it? And I, you know, and I go, yeah, it's still at the URL. And, you know, they've gotten they've gotten that stuff. So yeah, and I would just your last point. I think that's important for all of us. We don't sell it enough. I think in when we talk about stuff like DOO, and that stuff is all the stuff we're doing isn't just in the classroom. It's the space between classes, both in time and physically, you know, and mentally. And I'm now getting I can't say we've done a lot yet to demonstrate, but now I'm getting a lot of interest and demand from faculty. We want sites that help us as faculty and help students pull together stuff from different courses. So, you know, we're shifting into more of that space between which, you know, college isn't just a series of individual classes that you take. No matter how much that's what students kind of get told. So we do have, I forgot, we do have a nice thing on that as somebody was talking about their UCLA doing the undergraduate research, we have a our school nickname or whatever the stars. And so we have a undergraduate or well, of course undergraduate, but we have a every semester. Starskeeps used to be in person until the pandemic. And it was like, you know, big fair festival, you know, folks do kind of the science fair started in science and do the science fair kind of thing, you know, for big projects they've done in class. And we've migrated that to online now in websites, and it gets a lot better participation. And then the stuff is up for good. So people are able to look at build off of previous semesters and contact each other. And I haven't been deep involved in that, but I'm hearing a good stuff and it gets a lot of good activity. Other ideas on portfolios. I mean, I like, Annaly, what you're saying about like the undergraduate research, but also like bridging that with a sense of community, not only posters, but like trying to get a broader community thinking like, this is where we can talk about a variety of things, whether it's a club, whether it's a discipline specific, who else? Anyone else want to jump in here? Anyone ever hear of the of the portfolio, the person who was really early on in talking and conceptualizing portfolios, Helen Barrett? Anyone ever heard of Helen Barrett? Go look her up online. She wrote extensively about this in a kind of what might be considered a more traditional role of portfolios and identity in higher ed. But I always appreciated her early stuff. Another thing I'd love to hear from people about is, so we talked a little bit about getting started, but obviously getting started has its kind of fingers into almost every part of it, right? But I would love to see examples too. One of the things that I always kind of firmly believe is a good thing. Like if you get the opportunity to get in front of students or whoever who are going to be doing this portfolio stuff, and you can and you do have the opportunity to talk about them about what it might mean for them and what, you know, the idea of digital identity and what this could be a part of. I kind of think the most the next thing to do often is to share examples with them. And I like to share lots of examples that don't fit any particular mold to kind of illustrate the first point, which is like this is a reflection of you or it can be if you want it to be really is kind of how I usually phrase it. But I'd love to hear from folks if you have specific examples or even just types of things that you've seen that you find effective. You know, obviously a portfolio can look like this is my name. This is my like resume. And that, you know, that that's a portfolio. But it is cool to see kind of folks who inject personality in millions of different ways, obviously you can do that a lot of different ways, or how they actually showcase that, you know, I've seen folks who do kind of creative things with if they've got a project that's maybe lives on Domain of One's own on a course website or WordPress multi site in in a course blog or something. And instead of just linking to it, they may actually I've seen people do like a little landing page that describes their involvement and then links to it, which may sound like a small thing. And but I don't know is always completely obvious. So I'm kind of curious to see what what do people interesting things people have done or things that they like to encourage folks to explore and specific examples that we've got any. And of course, feel free to unmute and talk or throw it in the chat, whatever works better for you. Sorry, Taylor, I guess I that was you just spoke, right? Yeah. So you're asking us to comment on what I'm just sorry. Yeah, I tend to ask questions in that very unclear way. I'm kind of curious if folks can bring either specific examples of cool portfolios they've seen people make or even like examples of I see this kind of thing a lot. And I really like when students do X or Y, you know, either escape because I, you know, obviously, not everyone's going to have specific examples at hand. Here's a URL kind of thing, but I'm interested in both because I think both those specific examples and sort of types of things that you see people do are one of the more powerful ways to get people started and just showing them what's possible. Yeah, in the spirit of that, I put it in the chat. But here's a good one from Andy Livy Smith. She's a faculty at UMW. Jerry, I'm sure you're well aware of this site. But I just love this site because not only is it like a almost like a magazine, like, you know, blog where she writes about various things, but it's also a portfolio curriculum vitae. But then it has all of her courses and all of her resources linked right in there. And it kind of is a place for students to go and not only learn about her and read what she thinks, but also see the syllabus and be able to access the resources. It's a really cool kind of marriage of both the idea of a portfolio as well as the idea of a teaching resource to the point earlier about, you know, how would a faculty maybe use this. So I do dig that example. Hope you all have more. Thank you for sharing that. That's I've got some faculty who are using other resources for this purpose that in ways that they should not be using those resources. And so we need to provide them an alternative to be able to achieve what you just showed us. And so thank you. I'm going to definitely hang on to that example. And it's a pretty straightforward WordPress theme, but I just it looks so elegant and it marries her identity, talking about identity and the trickiness there as a faculty member, as a thinker, as a researcher. It really does it well. And it's a point you brought up earlier Emily that like, how do you model that as a faculty? And do you talk? And I think that's kind of like students go to her site to actually get their resources. So the model is like built into the whole equation. It's really beautiful. Yeah, I was just going to say that it's a great way to show to each your own dog food as an instructor in a way, right, if you want your students to do portfolios to kind of have one yourself. And kind of implicitly to, I would say, I don't know this person at all, but clearly they value sort of like open openness of their teaching materials, open education, maybe in general, potentially, right? And I know that by looking at the menu of the site, right, like without even going further. And obviously, I can go further. But I think that's one of the kind of cool things about portfolios in this way is it's not it's not a it's not a static document, right? It's a whole structure that's been created. One of the one of the other things and I'm going to totally call out Amanda from Reclaim here for a second that I like to see and is kind of like simple about pages on sort of home, you know, like you can have a blog and use it for whatever. But I love a good about page is sort of like this is what I'm about. This is what I value and then has like a couple links to some things that they've done. And I think Amanda's is a pretty good one. And if you want to drop a link to your site in the chat, you can. But I it's one of those things I don't really have anything like that on my own site. And I probably should have made something like that a long time ago. But I think even that's powerful too. Like these things don't have to be massive and expansive. They can be a simple kind of here's what I'm about in a personal way too. I also think that going back to just really quickly, I was referencing Jim Luke, about the idea that, well, I think it was Jim and Mo had mentioned this. You can't you can't start all of this at the end of a student's career. And so, like, making those building blocks, right of like, okay, we'll start with your about stuff or just start an archive, like keep track of everything that you've been doing in a really basic, maybe even unattractive way, and then build that, you know, it can be intimidating to be like, I got to make a perfect site right away. So with nothing. Jim or whoever brought up examples, I mean, I mean, granted, this is starting at the top, but I just put in the chat. One of the best examples of a identity page is Dean Chris Long at Michigan State. And I think that plays in because I can't think of particular other examples, but I've seen them. Now their domains program is very heavily oriented towards graduate students and researchers and faculty. So they're kind of the other opposite end of the line from us downtown. But Chris has got a great example. And it's tied to his blog. And he's active with his blog. And he I think what it shows is, if we want students to have portfolios and develop an identity, we've got to really push on faculty and leadership to have their and do their own. I think in the last 10 years, you know, as blogging has been eclipsed, you know, I think, you know, a lot of faculty have gone away, you know, they all went to Twitter or something like that. And it's pretty hard to get a student to say, why should I develop an identity site when, you know, faculty don't do it? And and that'd be a great inspiration. You know, they will follow, they will follow an example far more than they will, you know, from leadership or from their favorite faculty than they ever will follow directions. Yeah, I, I taught a course at one point where part of what students had to do really the only thing students have to do throughout it was make a personal site for almost any purpose. It wasn't necessarily a portfolio, they had to pick from like, five categories, it doesn't matter. But my point being that one of the earliest things that they had to do in there was collect examples, and then sort of critique their examples and say, like, I liked this about this, and I didn't like this about this, and then kind of go from there and that structure. And I think you're totally right, Jim, that like, though, getting those examples in front of students, and also in just like encouraging them to look at it, right? So, so many people, I think, will look at this blank canvas canvas and go, I have to create something entirely new that is like not can't look even a little bit like anything that I have looked at so far. And that's just not reality, right? Like that's, or at least it's not going to be a constructive way to start, you know. So I think kind of putting those, you know, having those out there, it's I think really important that faculty be kind of practicing what they're asking students to do here, but also being explicit with students and saying, like, you should look at examples and see what you like about them and don't like about them and decide what what of this you want to emulate and what of this you don't. I think it'd be really cool to, if I were if I were teaching, which I'm not right now, I have in the past, but put dump a bunch of my stuff in literally just dump it in a really kind of ugly or unstructured way. So put the content somewhere in a in a domain site or a monthly press site and have my students suggest how to organize it and how to display that. Because then they're not messing with their stuff, they're messing with mine, right. And maybe the students also give you some pretty cool ideas if you let them, right. I think that would be really, really fun, since I don't actually have a professional site like that, other than LinkedIn, which doesn't count. So yeah. That's awesome. I love that idea. And the reason I really like that is because I can't get other faculty to do this, but maybe if I model it, they tend to focus on the aesthetics rather than the content. And that what that does is it's starting with the content like I've already decided this is my most important content. It's got to be somewhere. Help me figure out how to display it. Yeah. And then you're walking them through that process and you can do it all as a group together, right? Yeah, potentially. Or you could have them do it individually too. But I love that. And you could take that a million ways too, right? Like if you were a faculty member and you wanted to do something like this, it doesn't even have to be a real person, right? You know, you could quickly in one class session do this for a hypothetical person and as an exercise to say, this is kind of how we like to think about these things or how you might work too. Or even riffing on that, like, okay, this week, we're going to focus on help us organize it for this kind of a person, right? And now use that same content. And it's actually this kind of a person and they want to their audiences, these, these audiences now reorganize it. How would it be different? Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that so much gets to kind of what, you know, what the strength of this is, is that you can kind of represent yourself in the way that, you know, it's, I think students do get some of this, but, but you can't in, in like an undergrad. But, but they could always use it more, which is like, you know, how you represent yourself really matters the context of that in terms of who you're trying to talk to or who you're trying, who you're hoping will be impressed by this or what and put an emotion here, right? Like if you are applying for X kind of job, if you are going to be a K12 teacher, your, your portfolio may look like this and probably should talk about, you know, your teaching philosophy and what that means to you as a future educator and things like that. But if you are hoping to get a job at a company that has this kind of vibe, you know, name a discipline, it may be different in what, how you represent yourself will be different. It also kind of helps them come to terms with like sort of the undergrad experience, I think too, which is sort of my favorite thing about good portfolios, right? Like I put from before Reclaim that I was working at St. Orbert College, which is a liberal arts institution. So it was very much like my thing there is I was like, can you imagine a more liberal arts digital project than, than asking students to come to terms with what they've done here in their four years and how their comp side agree relates to their philosophy classes and what that might mean, right? And obviously some of that's a little bit pie in the sky, right? Because students that aren't going to by default do that. But this is a place they can and if maybe we can challenge them to, right? Well, I got a couple of comments, if you don't mind. I've been listening to this conversation and I understand I sit in a pretty privileged position here at UMW where we've had kind of a long history of doing this work. And but I, but I think in some, in some ways, focusing on one thing sometimes it makes it harder, right? So I posted a link in the chat there for workshop series we're doing with our faculty this year on creating digital assignments. And many of those digital assignments, the one I posted is one that we're doing for web base. But if you go to the bottom, like down the side links, we did one for podcasting, infographics and video assignments. And the thing about something like this is we are working with faculty develop those assignments. And then how would we get them out there in the world, right? So like whereas WordPress becomes a vehicle to do that. And then if the students are using the vehicle, it's not like this kind of thing build this portfolio, which may mean now I have to learn a separate thing to do this. It's like it's like a chicken and a game, right? I have to learn the thing to be able to do the thing. If they already know the thing where they've had some exposure to the thing already, the thing being WordPress, then there's an opportunity there for them to, oh, look at this example. Oh, look at this example. Look at this example to be able to, to see it in their own mind. Because if they don't, I mean, if they don't have time or they don't want to do it, they have to see the value for themselves in some way. You know, the, we, we had domain of one's own in our strategic plan for a while where every freshman will have one. And that did not actually go that well. You know, so because it, it's, it's trying to find that value for everyone involved and by the way that we approach it with these, these digital assignments is we work with the faculty, we provide the technical support around those assignments through our DKC. So we're trying to coordinate all these pieces that we have to help the faculty know you can do a digital assignment and we'll handle the, the stuff where you don't feel you have to be the expert anymore or things like that. Then that gets the students into our DKC and then they see other things. And the way we market that now is not how to, you know, do digital or digital literacy, it's be a digital creator. You know, and I think that resonates more with the students now too. Calling it blogging, that's not, students are like, what's a blog? That's not what my dad did. So, you know, is that some riff on vlogging? I've heard of that. All right, I will be quiet now. That's awesome. I think you're right. Like, you know, blogging is just about cats and politics, they said, but to go back to the idea of politics, even at UMW, right? Or to your point, Quinn, one of the big pushes was owning some of your data, right? Like doing it in these platforms where it was portable, and you could take it out of them. That Google question you pointed to Quinn is an interesting one. And just as we're all building out these platforms, there's got to be investment in faculty development, student helping students understand the platform, but then also ensuring that that stuff can go with them. There's archive or has a place, because I do think there's a whole now history of learning through these digital tools as valuable. So, yeah, there's there's so much and we really haven't even defined portfolio yet, right? Because it is such a complex, big idea. But it sounds at least with this conversation is it's about a space where students, learners, people reflect and create a space of their learning a trace of it. And then how does that conversation happen at a university through these platforms, rather than I worry about the isolation, that's what worries me the most is doing this stuff. And people feel like no one's going to read it, it doesn't matter. And it's just it's throw away, it's an assignment, rather than feeling like there is a community behind it, that is pushing people up that is responding that is offering real advice, real critical thought on what they're talking about. And that's I don't know if any technology or any what's going to build it I think a UMW has done it really well for years, because they focus both on students and faculty and developing that kind of space that this is an important part of the classroom here and of the whole university experience. And that's key. Yeah, it's a big investment, not just and the smallest investment is probably in the technology, it's a much more large investment in supporting it, right, things like the DKC at UMW and making sure that faculty feel supported, but also supporting it in the sense of talking about what this is and what it can do and why it needs to be part of or should be part of, you know, a classroom experience and a non classroom experience, right, those between things. All of that is a lot of boots on the ground work and just talking to people and sharing examples of things. Well, yeah, one thing we got a couple minutes left to know some people have to run and that's that's cool. One other thing that I am kind of curious about, and you know, we'll keep letting the conversation go where it is, but I just want to bring this up to get again, gather examples if I can. But I'm also curious to see if anyone has had success or strategies for folks that are doing portfolios. And then, you know, Jim, you mentioned earlier, like we kind of didn't go in the assessment direction, right. And in my experience, sometimes that's cool. And sometimes you go, we can't, sometimes you'll be working with usually like at the discipline level to be like, that's great, but we can't do it if we can't assess it, right. And so I've had strategies for that and how to like sort of talk with folks and think about what they want to be looking at and even nuts and bolts things like, you know, how are we going to collect these and what are they going to, what will they look like in four years when the student is gone, right. Things like that. But I'd be curious if anyone has experience with that, I can share things, but I'm more curious about what other folks have they've run into that sort of that sort of institutional assessment angle and what they've done with that. And maybe it doesn't come up as much, maybe it was just a me thing. But I'll say one of the things I did is a simple thing is I just helped them make a form to collect, of course, the URL of the student's website, but also the discipline I worked with wanted to have like, hey, these students need to have these six things like these six things must exist somewhere in the portfolio. And their original idea was let's make them have six pages that all have these titles. So it's easy to assess. And I was like, no, like I don't want to do that. I mean, they can, but like, wouldn't it be cool if they could choose where those things go? So we just made a form that the idea was they could simply go on there and have students to say, Hey, one of the things your portfolio needs to have is this thing, what page is that on? Please put the URL here. And that may sound like a dumb idea, but it was one that took me a little bit to arrive to and then ultimately work pretty well for them, because it also kind of served the purpose of getting students to explain what they just made, even in a small way. So that was good. But I wonder if anyone else has kind of had to problem solve around some of these other things that portfolios can do that are sometimes more institutionally focused? Our experience with the assessment aspect was back some years ago when we were getting started and we, and I did have some a handful of faculty who were very interested in getting students to either write on projects in class or try to create their own kind of quasi portfolio. And we were just coming off a period where our first year comp program, which in a community college is the largest program slash department you have was transitioning away from having had a portfolio assessment system where every student at the end of comp one or comp two turned in a three essay portfolio on paper and it was random blind reviewed by all the other faculty. And if they didn't, you know, if your portfolio didn't get a pass, you couldn't pass, you couldn't get the professor's grade that was going to get. Anyway, so I was actually thinking I could piggyback off of, you know, as a possible digital replacement. And at the same time, our school's you know, the academic affairs institutional part, institutional assessment was making noise about wanting to go to a portfolio based assessment. And I showed them, look what we can do and how it can work. And they just, yeah, they just put the kibosh on the whole thing, because it wasn't in the LMS. It was too hard. They perceived that it would be too hard and too much trouble, not for the students, but too hard and too much trouble for the institutional office of assessment. And they didn't want to bother to learn. And you know, I tried to say, look, I can configure these things to pull it all together. And no, just no. But so then the ironic part is, they never actually did it in the LMS either. So we got nothing. I've seen that too. And a very similar thing. It's like, we prefer to do this all the way. It's a tricky word. Yeah. Students can collect all kinds of work. Sure. We don't call it a portfolio or a blog. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting too, though. One of the things you brought up, Quinn, I want to return to a bit was the idea of people using Google sites or other tools, probably as part of a lifetime like that, maybe in third grade, sixth grade. And there would be some sense of, oh, and then you're at university and you could use that. Like that trickiness of the full pipeline sale that Google did. And I remember it was 2007, 2008 when Google and Microsoft started to kind of sneak into the email and then sneak into the publishing. And then now they've done the bait and switch. That whole discussion is fascinating to me, Quinn, because it does suggest a long history of what we did see early on. It wasn't like we were oblivious, but it was just like, no, let's save. Let's not worry about that. We're going to give it to the experts. And then at a certain point, the very product we created and provided was in some ways like offloaded. And that became even more so with MOOCs. And I wonder if there is a kind of a lesson in that and an interesting, very interested in how the University of Texas is kind of now trying to rethink that. Or if it's, like you said, have there been lessons learned? Or is it the same thing, just a different product? I'm fascinated by that discussion, by the way. Yeah. And I am as well. And to me, it really goes back to economics. I mean, you've got to hand it to Google. I mean, it was brilliant. I mean, they got their tentacles into every school kid in the freaking state of Texas for very little money or free or whatever. But we all know, there's no free in this world. We know what was given up with that. And I think, somebody mentioned it earlier, and I think it was Jim. As more people realize what's being taken away from us, when our data is being taken away from us, what I really see is a huge educational opportunity, particularly in universities. But then again, you've got the whole money thing. And so, you can do this great project and somebody doesn't like it. It's out of here. Our whole diversity and inclusion stuff here in Texas has just been tossed away because the governor doesn't like it. And so, efforts like that make it real difficult. But again, I think it goes back to educating the students about what they're doing and why they're doing it. And of course, of here, a lot of it is to get a job. But then you've got to look at LinkedIn and what they've done and how they're playing in that space. There's just a lot of education that needs to go on for people to understand it. And I don't know that, A, the educators are aware of it. That's one of the big problems. And not too many people want to touch it. And I think it's an evolution of the society that we're in right now. And I hope it evolves in another direction over time. But this is kind of where we're at right now until we realize and have more laws respecting our privacy and the value of our information. People are going to be standing at every street corner trying to take it away from us. And it's a real difficult thing to do, you know, balance. I think Quinn has just spot on there. And also your comments too, and right now I look around like I've just been appalled just in the last few months. You know, at times, even what you think our faculty that should be the biggest allies, I mean, it's like, oh my God, how many folks over the last 10 years have just, I mean, groups that are supposedly critical pedagogues, teachers that do critical stuff. And, you know, but when push comes to shove, man, they just pull up that Google Doc. And, you know, they do meetings in Google Docs. And then they, and they'll do meetings in Google Docs by choice, because it's easy. And the point of the meeting is to complain about big tech taking your privacy away. You know, and we're seeing it all again in the last few months. I mean, Google took a long time to do the bait and switch. Microsoft, you know, look, how many folks are complaining about chat? I guess he said the wrong word in the wrong place. Exactly. He has been censored. We actually are, we're sponsored by chat GBT. So we had that once he went that way we had. Yeah, we had to kick him from reclaim clouds. It's good to know you, you know, I hope you pop up somewhere. He would be one to laugh the loudest about this probably, you know, but it's so typical, you know, and how we kind of work beyond this and get people, you know, to realize what's going on. You know, it's, you know, it's one of those things that may have to get worse before it gets better. You know, it's good to see the, the Europeans getting into it. It's good to see the stuff coming out about the tracking cookies and making people more aware of that because, you know, you go on to one of these sites and it's like, Oh, click, click. Oh, you're doing this and you're doing this and you're doing that too. How about no, no, no, no, no. You know, there's some things that are coming out that make me a little bit more hopeful about it, but, you know, more of it needs to start in academia and, and, you know, you know, Google, like I say, they did an absolutely brilliant thing. They got in there. They made it easy and they got it, everybody infected with it. You know, we're in the, we're in the bizarre position of trying to move people out of Google into Microsoft 365, you know, and it's, it's, it's good software. I mean, it works much better than it did. It's, it's a great thing and it's a lot more open and usable, but still at the end of their time here, the students are cut off. You know, they don't, none of that's with them anymore. You know, and it's, it's a big issue. It's tricky because this stuff is cultural, right? Like it's, it's, it's, it's sort of built into, you know, people use what they're, what they're used to using and there's not, you can't really fault people for that, right? Like, and so that, that is at least understandable, if not frustrating, right? And, and like, let's be honest, not all of this stuff is easy to replace, right? Like we're a hosting company. We're not hosting our critical email infrastructure ourselves, right? Every time for a lot of reasons. Not that you couldn't, but it is difficult and we'd be chasing that and probably running into a lot more issues with it, right? And yeah, we, we, you know, we are hosting like this call, right? Great. So we're, we're hosting this and it's not, this is getting easier, but you know, a couple of years ago, the idea of a self-hosted video platform like this would have been like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of this stuff is getting easier, which is cool, but it's a slow process. And even then you're still fighting that cultural thing of like, well, but I'm used to Zoom, right? And it's like, okay, well, that's, you know, Zoom is a good tool, but there are these things about it that maybe we don't like or don't want. Yeah. But even the point you made, Quinn, about making it part of a curriculum, like a more integrated curriculum, because it affects now every discipline. Yeah. And like, there would be a real place to say, okay, what, what is the implication of the digital on higher ed and how do we reclaim our position of, of value in that chain? I mean, I was blown away during the MOOC moment when so many universities were willingly giving away their, their logo and their brand to a, you know, for-profit company that promised them very little in return. So it was, it was a bizarre moment where it almost had, you know, jump the shark, higher ed's idea of itself a little bit. And it's a kind of reclaiming process, I think, to return to a more critical relationship to these companies. And it's interesting that even Texas, the biggest university arguably in the country, right? UT Austin, is that one of them? Maybe Arizona? But like, it's crazy that they can't even, you know, like get away from one of the two giants. Yeah, we end up just, you know, switching from one to the other. You know, the one thing that gets me not so much, and it is on the technology side as well, but I'm also on an open educational resources working group here at UT. And you know, the big problem there is the creation of OERs by faculty is not something that figures well in tenure and promotion. And that's something we're trying to change. And in a batshit poor state like Texas, when it comes to education, you know, we've got to do it. We can't afford to educate all these people, you know. And so it's going to have to be open. And here at the end, you know, I really see a tie in between for faculty members presenting their own digital identity in relation to the open educational resources they produce, you know, I see a tie in there because, you know, OER takes capitalism out of it. Yeah, you know, so once you remove capitalism from it, you know, then, you know, your own site, you know, hosting, you know, telling who you are in your store becomes more important. You know, and I think it's going to take a while to evolve that back down, you know, what you're saying just about made me cry, Jim, because I work at the School of Information, which is for Merrill Library School. So all of our values and everything we brought up with and everything are all spot on to what you were talking about, you know, we should be teaching every other discipline what they're doing. You know, I could, my Dean came from Oxford, you know, the Oxford Internet Institute. If I could, oh, we're taping this, I better not say that. Anyway, nothing is happening. Yeah, it's like they don't freaking get it. And they, but the other thing is they don't want to do the hard work. You know, we just started an undergraduate curriculum. You know, it was all on UX and data science and user interfaces, you know, and I kept saying no. And it's an informatics curriculum. I said, it's, it's bone stupid. It needs to be internet informatics. Okay, what happens with information in the internet world writ large? And they're not buying it. They don't get it. You know, so maybe somebody will sometime, but I don't know, I just keep plugging away at it and hoping for the best, you know, and I'm real grateful for the work you all have done as well because it's, it's, it's amazing. And I think if you stick with it long enough, you know, the tide will turn with it, but it really has to do with, you know, the real thing about portfolios to me is when we can get students doing things with the digital tools you make available that they cannot use at a university and then putting those into their portfolios to show employers, that's the holy grail that I seek, you know, because then not only do students write something a resume, they can do it. They show them. Yeah, they can do it for sure. And you can't do that without like, you can't do that with a portfolio of the non e type, right? No, you really can't. There's no way of a non e type. You can do that, you know.