Friday, July 29, 2011

AAEEBL Conference Reflections

The second AAEEBL Conference was held in Boston on July 25-28, 2011. Below are the slides from my two pre-conference workshops. The first workshop was led with Eileen Brennan from Mercy College.

The second workshop was lead with Cynthia Lucena from the University of Puerto Rico.
Her story about the commercial and open source tools that they tried at UPR, followed by their current adoption of GoogleApps and Moodle to collect evaluation data, is an interesting journey through a variety of different ePortfolio tools, both commercial and open source. Their decision to adopt Google Sites reinforces the message of this workshop: adopt student-centered tools that can be maintained across the lifespan, not tools that require a lot of technical support or fees to maintain beyond graduation. 


I received some interesting feedback from one of the participants in the afternoon workshop. She told me that my presentation, which tends to take a more student-centered, personal development viewpoint, was a marked contrast with the majority of the institution-centered sessions that tended to focus on accountability and program assessment. I tend to agree; my perception is that the people who attend AAEEBL are more focused on the use of electronic portfolios in institutional contexts... perhaps that is because the membership of AAEEBL is primarily higher education institutions, not individuals. This is a real contrast with the European ePortfolio and Identity Conference (EPIC) that was held two weeks earlier in London, where there was more interest in community portfolios, individual identity development, and lifelong portfolios. The draft Proceedings of the EPIC 2011 conference are online.

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