Inaugural international ePortfolios Conference in Boston
The following blog post is adapted from an AAEEBL press release.
The worldwide Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (www.aaeebl.org) is holding a major international ePortfolios conference in Boston, USA, on 19-22 July, 2010.
The conference theme – ePortfolios and the Emergent Learning Ecology – brings together world renowned ePortfolio leaders from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Finland, and Australia, including the Australian Flexible Learning Framework’s E-portfolios Business Manager, Allison Miller as a ‘featured speaker’.
ePortfolios are vitally important to learning in today’s learning landscape because they provide a means for students/learners to be mobile and lifelong learners. The ePortfolio is therefore a critical tool for the transition of education from last century to this century’s very different learning environment.
ePortfolios allow students to store their work in a permanent online repository which allows them to collectand organise their work, selectively present their work (as in a resume or for a result in a course), set permissions as to who can see the work, and to continually integrate their work over time through comments and reflections, thereby developing meta-cognitive abilities.
This AAEBBL conference celebrates the coming-of-age of the ePortfolio movement as more than half o f all American colleges and universities use ePortfolios in one way or another, and many K-12 school systems are also adopting ePortfolio practices appropriate for those ages.
The reason why this conference is so important is that ePortfolios provide a permanent learning space for students of all ages, providing continuity from course to course, from institution to institution, and from one degree to the next and on to periodic professional development or workforce development activities throughout life. The technology is a revolutionary technology that has gained major traction around the world as a way to learn in this century.
The conference will provide 95 presentation showing the many ways that ePortfolios are used from early childhood to graduate school, from vocational training to digital story-telling, and from course portfolios to institutional assessment management systems.
Terrel Rhodes, Vice President for Quality, Curriculum and Assessment at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) said of this conference: “ePortfolio technologies help colleges and universities re-organise their curriculum for this century. At this world conference, AAC&U’s VALUE project, which produced prototype rubrics for higher education that were just released, will be featured. We’re delighted to be a part of this important new conference.”
“From Rutgers University to Brooklyn College to Connecticut’s Norwalk Community College, our Making Connections campuses are very excited about this conference,” said Dr. Bret Eynon, a founder of the multi campus Making Connections programs and Dean at LaGuardia Community College, who will be the key note speaker at the ePortfolios Australia Conference 2010. “Our 32 Making Connections campuses have been learning from LaGuardia’s ePortfolio successful experience and, increasingly, from each other’s pilot projects. Now they can learn from ePortfolio innovators from around the world.”
The keynotes include: internationally known “Grandmother of ePortfolios”, Helen Barrett; Director of Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship; Assistant Provost, Randy Bass; The Kellogg W Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University and co-director of the Inter/National Center for Electronic Portfolio Research, Kathleen Yancey.
AAEEBL is a year old association that emerged from the existing world ePortfolio community. It is funded by institutional memberships and by corporate affiliates. AAEEBL is a non-profit organisation with a Board of Directors and By-Laws. AAEEBL’s goal is to help educators and institutions make the transition to a portfolio-based learning paradigm, while also helping to expand the market.
For more information contanct Trent Batson, AAEEBL Executive Director, trentbatson@mac.co
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