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>>  Hello everyone.  Welcome to the first session of the exploring ePortfolio Technologies sessions.  We are really happy to see everyone here today.  Today's session will feature the technology, [on the board].  And we will get started with that in just a second.  My name is Patty and I am here from ePortfolio California.  I am part of a wonderful team made up of wonderful representatives from various organizations.  As you can see on your screen, we have some wonderful pioneers in the world of electronic portfolios.  On the line we have (participant list).  

This project is really a collaborative team effort, spearheaded by the organizations-and it was inspired from the feedback from the community this past spring.  And really just from the years of talking about, talking with committee members about which technology is right for them.  We will be asking our vendors to give a brief overview of their technology, and then we're going to dive into the pedagogy inherent in their tool.  

One of the goals for this series is to develop a series of resources.  These the webinar archives, along with the vendor information, technical information and other questions related to teaching and learning, as well as an interactive forum-which we will guide you to at the end of the session.  We will guide you to a file that has all this information on it.  

Without further ado, it is my great pleasure to introduce Gary Brown, [on the board].  He will be our host for this session.  Gary is the director for the Center for online learning at Portland State university.  He is also a senior fellow of the Association for American colleges and universities.  And he is also the co-director of one of our sponsor organizations.  I will now turn this over to Gary.  

>>  Thank you, Patty.  Hello everybody.  What a special treat we have today, to lead off this series with Jeff from Digication.  I have known him for a number of years and he has an exciting product that he is going to share with us today.  While we will do is we will have him take us through and give us a high level overview of the application.  And then we want to talk a little bit about the thinking that is the underpinning of the development of this tool.  After that, we will open the floor and take your questions.  We hope to get to as many of them as we possibly can, as Patti suggested; but just as a heads up, we will have a forum and Jeff will be on that forum as a moderator for the next couple of weeks.  And then at the end of all that we are also going to ask all of you for a survey so that we can learn more about your experience, what you hope to get out of this and other presentations that we made.  Jeff, are you ready to take control? 

>>  Yes.  Can everyone hear me OK? Hello there.  

>>  How about a smiling face if you can hear Jeff? 

>>  OK.  I see them.  Great.  I am going to share my desktop here, and I will show you very quickly what this product looks like if you have not seen it before.  What I am going to do is tell you a little bit about who I am and how I got started.  My name is Jeff, and I am one of the co-founders of the company.  We started back in about 2000, 2001.  That was a time when I was teaching with my other co-founders Kevin at the Rhode Island School of design.  I was teaching a few different programs.  Architecture, Digital Media, and an education program.  Through that, we both were looking for tools that we felt would be good for our students.  Coming from a design school, we had some very specific needs.  Instead of booking at what was available then-which was really primarily learning management systems like blackboard and WebCT-for those who still remember that-we ended up building something for ourselves.  And it went from something we thought was going to be a we can project, and I guess it turned into a tenure project now.  

 year project now.  

Let me show you a little bit about what it looks like.  This is our website [on the board].  I am assuming everyone can see my desktop now.  I am going to show you very quickly how ePortfolio is created.  Now what you should see is a screen that a student potentially would see when they log in.  So this is my student, his name is Matthew, and you can see that he has many portfolios.  One of the things the project does, we support an unlimited number of portfolios.  Because we see that students may want to use portfolios for various reasons, depending on what it is, what the student is doing, and why they are greeting the portfolios.  

To create a portfolio is pretty simple.  Click create, and I have a little form that I allowed.  There is my title.  I can choose from a template.  There can be any number of templates that you can use.  Schools very often also customize their own templates.  One of our customers has I believe over 100 different templates now, through the different programs in their school.  We have different abilities throughout-the ability to select different themes, styles, etc..  And of course you can always customize the look and feel if you want to.  

And then, very important, is that you can make something private; public; or some combinations of private plus, for example, the inclusion of a colleague.  For example, I am going to search for my colleague Kelly, and you'll now see that Kelly is part of my portfolio.  But I can do something more advanced by searching for the name of a course.  As you type, the search will happen, and as you click on the results, dashed in this case we have actually added the entire course, faculty and students of the digital media in artwork course to my portfolio.  So this is a quick and easy way to add people and give permissions to those who really need to get access to your portfolio, obviously.  

And then, finally, we have the ability to allow for people to tag or not to tag your portfolio.  So is created like so.  In my case, I am creating a portfolio based on a template, and you see that we have a number of sections that are already here.  (inaudible).  Any time a student can still come back in here and do things like this.  For example, I do not think I am quite ready to show this at the top.  So I am going to drag this to the back.  And in fact, I think I want to do it more something like this.  [on the board].  And to delete something is fairly simple.  And you can always go back and forth then go into the different pages as you see fit.  We have a generic section here called My Work.

perhaps I am going to put in here, my writing.  if I have any sort of work that I want to show, in any links that I want to share, any files, I can simply up load it there.  And another thing that we have done and put all lot of effort into doing is making it so flexible.  Allowing you to add modules to the pages if you wish.  In this case, I want to add a gallery, which is a very popular module in the product.  As you can see, I have my text at the bottom and the gallery at the top.  If I want to rearrange that, I can drag-and-drop.  I can go to the gallery, but some content into this.  When I go to my computer, I can select a number of images all the same time.  These are images that I have taken with my camera, with my telephone.  And you can see that is loading the files for me.  It will even do all the necessary processing of the files, so that you do not have to worry about Photoshop and understanding DPI.

once again, drag-and-drop philosophy.  Everything is built this way.  Literally this is how ePortfolio was built.  Once you are done you can go ahead and publish it.  And it to see what ePortfolio looks like.  This is a very simple page that I just created.  Obviously with very little time and also very little thinking.  But I think you get the idea. -but how something like this gets created.  You have the ability to except comments if you want to, and you can also approve them before they are shown to the rest of your intended audience.  

So, as far as a demonstration is concerned I will try to keep it very short.  This really, I think, shows you a quick overview of how a portfolio is created.  Of course we support imbedding of video, if you want to load and MP3 file we support a player.  One of the really interesting things also is that when you create a portfolio, ePortfolio automatically is added into ePortfolio directory, unless you are instructed not to do so.  And I will show you in a moment what that looks like.  One other thing I want to show, and I know all lot of people are concerned about this, at any time you can always click a single button and download the entire portfolio to your own computer without any difficulty whatsoever.  You get a zip file with all the necessary HTML and the source files that you need to run in your own browser, offline, put it onto a flash drive, and do what ever you need to do with it.  

Let me show you what it looks like, let me show you quickly but other schools have done using this method that I have just shown you, in terms of building a community of learners at their respective schools.  This is at Boston university.  You concede that they have a public ePortfolio directory.  Literally, 21 seconds ago, one minute ago, people are working and putting up their portfolios.  There is a community of students from all fields-so far they have shared about 670 pages of this.  And if you go through this you can start to see what other folks are doing.  One of the things that I have been impressed is the popularity of these portfolios as well.  I can sort by the number of hits.   Here is one that has over 2 million.  So they really are all dead, and we are obviously very proud of the fact that the students are doing such amazing work.  

(speaking rapidly).  In a similar way, most of you probably know that LaGuardia Community College also is an absolute leader in ePortfolio community, and they have something very similar.  Lots of different portfolios, and various directories of their work.  And so, every school-if we can help build these learning communities at all the different schools, which are pretty happy.  

So, I would like to pause and stop my presentation now, and perhaps ask Gary to join us, in terms of perhaps looking at, asking some questions and having a conversation.  Gary? Did I do OK? 

>>  Great.  Thank you very much.  There is a lot to think about here.  Let me ask you an easy question first.  You talked about tagging portfolios.  Can you explain what you mean by that, and imagine how it might be used by a student? 

>>  Sure.  Tagging was made popular I would say around the middle of the 200 2000 when flicker and some of these other companies came around.  Essentially it is labels.  So when someone puts up a picture or a portfolio page, you have the ability to label it as something.  If I found someone who is a writer, who built a portfolio page that is about his poetry, poetry about war.  I might add that page with the appropriate tags that I see fit.  One of the things about it-the reason that is used a lot is because you do not really need to the structure of all lot of labels.  Because content changes all the time, and for tags to have that level of flexibility, it allows people to label things as they see fit.  And then later on you can do a search by those tags, and come up with, you know, aggregate content that way.  That has really worked out very well for a lot of the social networks.  And I think it will work very well for portfolios as well.  

>>  So that is a very simple technology aspect.  But it has some interesting implications, because it implies that a modicum of reflection by the student to think about the larger category that the work connects to; and it implies that there will be sharing involved with this portfolio, beyond just sharing it with a teacher or a faculty member for assessment.  So, in that very simple design choice, there is an implication of a teaching philosophy, or an underlying philosophy, that you have taken to the design of the product.  Can you talk a little bit more about your thinking that underpins the design of this application? 

>>  I was wondering when you were going to ask me that question.  I think that the absolute focus on students and, sort of, the importance of learning, for us is absolutely paramount in using any technology or tools.  For me, as I said before, I went to and talk a design school.  One of the things that we have become very attracted to is something we call studio-based pedagogy.  What that means is that in a studio environment, what a lot of us do it is that we, we work on open spaces where we produce work on our desk, and the open space on the wall.  We produce something physical that other people can see right away as you build them.  And they looked at it and a chat with you and they will have conversations about the work.  We will do that all day and night long.  And then we go into a critique.  typically panels of critics will come man who will ask you to tell you your experience, as a story, and then they will observe and tried to give you feedback.  Many times I like to look at this as a very great learning community being built with a very sort of social pedagogy, a Social reflection by everyone.  And everyone participates in that, in Building that sort of community is extremely important for us.  

And so, I knew that was something that was happening in the design field.  I was specifically trained in architecture.  But that was something that we've also had large implications to education as a field in general.  And of course, the ability to make something flexible, and having the use of a variety of multimedia, and so on, the expression-the sort of freedom of expression is very important.  It that, I am going to show you a couple of examples, if that is all right.  

This is the Rhode Island School of design-this is my school.  [on the board].  I love them a lot.  They also have a very rich ePortfolio directory.  And I am going to be gone may be one portfolio here.  This is a student who had just, I think, finished the first year of architecture, which is the sophomore year.  She created this, to me, very elegant portfolio page.  But one of the things you may not get to see-I went to her and I looked at her first course here.  By the way, for those of you who do not know, those architects and designers, they do not like to write very much, me included.  

She started to write about her experience, her ideas.  And you would probably never expected an architect to, this sort of, oh most,-(inaudible) objects.  The students are exploring spatial relationships and materials.  They are practicing pulled in making things.  And they write about the pieces of thinking that goes into the work.  (inaudible).  She illustrates it with all of these different things that she does.  

And of course, this sort of process and inquiry and discovery-based learning is, for me, really important.  And that is why we have designed this in such a way.  Because it allows students to have almost a sort of constant panel that allows other people to go and visit and be inspired and give feedback.  

And the other thing, I have an example of a student from Brown university.  This particular student had a education degree.  And is trained to be a history teacher.  He is an historian.  But I know that most historians, in know, I shouldn't even say that.  I know many historians myself who love to write.  And that is great for them.  This person, however, was quite intelligent about the way they are using images and multimedia for his class's, as a teacher.  But one of the things that I needed to share, is that almost every single page in his portfolio, he has an audio reflection, in which, if you want to, you can just go to that page, and literally play it back right there.  I am going to play just a few seconds of this.  

(audio file plays).  OK.  I am not going to go through the entire audio here.  But I think, I would just say that my feedback when I saw and heard this portfolio was bad, it is so authentic and it tells me so much about this person.  This excitement, his passion about teaching, but about, in this case, primary source selection.  So being able to do this selectively is so important.  And I believe that students have a right to do this.  And in many ways I think they have-(inaudible). -which is the ability to express themselves in so many different ways.  The technology in the 21st century has started to recapture that through various audio and video-sharing applications that we all know about.  So for me, that is a very important part of the design process.  And of course we have this entire application to really and make deep reflection shine through.  So it is much more about learning how to learn, and not so much about content acquisition.  I think that is another part that portfolios need to address.  So every part of our design process really meets and we tried to meet those parts.  

>>  To me, it looks like you are out on the spectrum of the student and learning-centered spectrum.  You are pretty far out there in promoting student agency, as you say.  But most of the still work in these-most of us still work in these institutions that have some very practical assessment needs.  Can you talk about how you support assessment? 

>>  Yes, I can.  I think that was one of those questions that I probably would not be able to answer if you ask me five years ago.  Because we could not figure out how do we did something so flexible tube map to something that is is essentially extremely structured? Is that right for me to say that? Very structured? And I have gone through accreditation and myself, with the institute where I worked.  Just to give a little premise here, most schools have the obligation to fulfill and also approved a certain learning outcomes that have been established have been achieved by the students.  And they want to see and not just the fact that they did a great, but what it is that the student actually did.  

For us, what we have is a very simple mechanism.  I'm going to open another window here, [on the board], and I am going to go to that student that we were looking at before, Matthew, who has the portfolio.  And I'm going to show you something very quickly.  Remember that we just created this piece of work together.  I am going to go into this portfolio tool, and there is a button here, submit.  This allows students very easily to submit something to a particular project.  It can even decide if this is a draft, or what ever process or work flow that you want the students to go through, in order to complete tasks.  Once you do that, we allowed for the students to decide which pages of the portfolio they want to submit.  Sometimes it is perfectly normal to submit the entire portfolio.  But other times it just doesn't work.  Sometimes it is just this particular project, and those particular goals.  That is because everything has a different specificity.  I believe that different assessments situations, that changes as well.  

For example, you are booking for something that fulfills a particular project, that also fulfills a particular standard blight critical thinking.  Where this particular student wants to show Project No. 1 but not No. 2.  Because it is not quite as strong.  And of course the student can leave a comment and submit this.  One of the things that we have done, once you submit that, we do a permanent digital archive of that with a time stamp.  And the meta data.  But the other pieces of information, all that is put into a database.  We have all the steps in the process that are established, so that the faculty members can now see, OK, they have submitted something.  And if they want to, they can even go all the way to being able-let me very quickly-I don't want this to take too much time, but this is a professor going into a course, going into the assignments, the scene that meant you just submitted some work.  Clicking on that, seeing the work, and being able to go all the way into looking at the rubrics.  So all that is completely integrated, so we know all this work is really designed, for example, to address the written standard were learning outcome.  And in this case this has been scored previously.  And it also happens to address at the same time the research and information literacy as one of the general education requirements.  And doing the assessment right then.  At all of this can be aggregated and generated as reports as well, aggregation for an institution or a program.  

Does that answer the question? How we have lined up something that is So free form into something that has structured? 

>>  It does.  But we have some qualifying questions.  As a student, I determine what samples of my word will be shared but, where are they shared? That is determined by the institution, by the faculty member, where do I have some opportunity to share my work more broadly,? 

>>  Absolutely.  As a student you have every opportunity to share it how you want.  Publicly, etc..  But from an assessment standpoint-I have found that many of our students will have different portfolios for different reasons.  But then many of them will have a portfolio that will start out being a sort of course-based portfolio.  They did something that was interesting.  Second semester, they do something else with it.  By the third year, they may turn it into a career portfolio.  From an assessment standpoint, what happens, those changes over time is being captured, with a very context-back.  Sort of a degree.  Because as students submit ensure that back into their courses, to their faculty members, to a particular assignment, to a particular step of an assignment, even-it allows all of that to be captured in time, frozen in time, so that all those folks only need to see-in this case, Matthew submitted three years ago.  They don't want to see what he submitted today, up from a standpoint-Ubuntu you can absolutely change or increase or expand the level of sharing that he wants on his portfolio.  Does that answer the question? 

>>  Yes.  Thank you.  I own my portfolio as a student.  And I can download it.  I see the question in the chat window-what ever-what other alternatives do I have to maintain my portfolio after I graduate? 

>>  We truly believe in a lifelong learning.  One of the things that we had done, called for all our institutions that subscribe-for all of our institutions that subscribe, the alumni get to use the product for free for as long as the institution subscription exist.  What that means is that you will never have to worry about the cost of having to support, you know, the alumni accounts, as you move forward.  However, the alumni, we just really believe that if we can help them with this, with the development of a lifelong learning habit is so valuable, for us, we are willing to take on the task of giving them free access.  Because we believe that we are partners with the schools.  And we believe it is the mission of the schools as well.  So that is built into the costs.  

Now some people may ask that would give for whatever reason the institution no longer has a relationship with the company? What happens, each individual has no obligation but the option to continue with their own independent subscription with us, or $19.95 each year.  We think that is pretty reasonable.  Even then, did they do not need it, they can always download it and have a copy of everything they have done on the application.  So those are the various ways that we support the graduates.  

>>  Great.  Do you have any other examples, or a student testimonials that you can share with us? 

>>  I have so many, Gary.  That me show you what I believe is a wonderful example.  [on the board].  This is a portfolio that I really feel dashed when we talk about student-centered learning and approach.  This is a student who is in a writing course at Boston university.  In this portfolio, she started writing about the process that she goes through when she is writing.  And then she documents through digital images-in this case, it is a handout that she wrote on, and she took a photo and started writing about it.  This is about herself, as a writer developing-literally reflecting on something that she did during class and, afterwards.  Right? 

The and then she went and put in an image of her notebook, based on this idea.  And she talked about organize, organize, organize.  

But I would like to challenge the most people, do you really have a disability and level of care to your students that you look at what they do before they submit through all this process? And I would like to say that this is one of the students-and of course, supported very well by the professors who teach these courses.  And we can see that by knowing if you go to these other pages-very quickly dashed you will see that this is not just be the first assignment.  She develop these habits by doing it over and over again.  One of the reasons I was so happy to see this, I started at the beginning had-not this person has never done anything like this before.  Right at the beginning-reflection is just something natural, that we do, isn't it? She did that, [on the board], she introduced the essay.  And then she put up the estate itself and she has a bibliography.  So it is as complete that she needs it to be, but for me is all the processes that makes it really worthwhile.  I have shown this portfolio in many places because I believe those kind of process these really need to be celebrated as much as possible.  (inaudible).  Because this is where the exciting moments happen.  As a designer, I often find that to be the case.  The final product may not be as exciting as when the first idea was captured in a sketch book somewhere.  

>>  That was a great image of making active learning visible, looking at the scribble draft.  (inaudible).  

>>  I was going to ask Patti to bring our poll and open it up to what is happening in the chat window.  

>>  OK.  And we can always go back to that application.  Let's go back to the white board.  [on the board].  OK.  Thank you.  

>>  Here is the poll question for you: Do you think your campus is ready for the kind of reflect a practice that we have been discussing and looking at? You can give us a green check mark or the red letter x at the bottom of the participant window.  (pause). --reflective practice...

moderators, what questions have you seen going by there that we need to ask Jeff? 

>>  First of all, thank you so much for sharing those wonderful examples.  I think the issue of assessment is really in the foreground for many of us, including Greg and Tracy.  from the administrator perspective, we did get a point of view, this idea of generating reports.  In institution-wide, degree outcomes.  Being able to mine the data that is being generated by the students.  I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the idea of using these portfolios for the idea of the institution accreditation, and what you have seen from the clients you have worked with? 

>>  Absolutely.  I absolutely agree that is one of the very most important parts of assessment, especially when it comes to accreditation.  Because you really need to show this data in an aggregate form.  But the things we have is the ability previewed to retrospectively go back and look, using different criteria, whether it is the major, year, whether a particular submission is designed to address certain learning outcomes.  And then aggregate those bangs retrospectively, and then put them into a group.  We also have the ability to let you sample that data.  And then in essentially create a panel of folks who will then be given permission to go and score them with a rubric.  

And of course, taking a look at that, you can take that report and look at the data, and then using it for accreditation.  And a good example, something I did not get to, but there was a tweet that I received from Professor Elizabeth Clark at LaGuardia Community College, where she said something along the lines of, I am on the plane using the wireless system, and I just finished doing all my assessments.  

>>  Great.  Judy, do you have a question? 

>>  I was looking at the question from Kerry at the University of Michigan, and she was wondering about technical support for institutions, and how institutions get the subscriptions? Also, somebody else asked how do people know when their institution stops supporting this product, if they are an alum and? I was wondering if he could answer those questions.  

>>  Sure.  I think the first question was from Kerry, and it was about technical support.  All our users receive unlimited e-mail and Web-based support, through our portal page.  We also tried to put useful information there for people who need help as well.  We believe that we are opening a community channel there for her folks to have an ongoing, on-line discussion, about things they would like to share with each other.  The other things that we also do, for all administrators and folks that are actually running the projects at the institutions, we provide unlimited telephone as well as a webinars to them.  if you would like, I would be happy to give you names and numbers-they would probably be happy to tell you that we have done a pretty good job.  

In terms of getting subscriptions, it is something that they just need to e-mail to me and we can start the process.  And I can obviously tell you all lot more, a detailed questions about the details, support, integration, etc..  And you can reach me at jeff@digication.com.   and I think there was a there question.  

>>  The third question had to do with people longer having subscriptions at their institution, and how do the alumni get informed? What happens at that point? 

>>  All of our user accounts, we have the ability to have e-mail addresses, both from the school as well as alternate e-mail addresses.  Certainly we would have to already know how to get in touch with the user, the very typically through e-mail.  For us, we have the ability to announce such a relationship change in that way, so that they actually get to know what is going on, and be informed about the changes.  In addition to that, we are also going to start in Maybelline other forms of authentication as well; meaning that-there are books I know that just want to associate their account with, for example, Facebook or their Twitter account.  We are exploring those avenues now, knowing that those accounts are probably going to keep up.  They might want to use those as ways to receive some of these announcements.  

>>  Great.  Any other questions from the moderators? 

>>  Gary, this is Patty.  I have a question and it actually came up in the chat window.  It is about the products integration with Google apps? Maybe he could briefly talk about that, and we did move that over to the form of for more details.  

>>  Yes.  We are actually really proud and honored that Google-Google gave us a call last fall around this time and said, hey, we're going to start Google applications for education.  We would like to be one of the first 12 applications to go on there.  We thought it was a pretty cool thing to do it, and so we did.  What that means, for people who are using Google applications for education for their institution-meaning that you are using Google Mail as your school address-the those people it is free of charge for them to go in and enabled the product at their school.  They will get on limited electronic portfolio for an unlimited number of users, including students and faculty and administrators and alumni.  There are catches.  

One catch is that they have a relatively low storage limit per account of twenty megabytes.  For many students, that might be just enough, because maybe they are just putting up a document or a couple of images.  For people who feel like they are going to be really using it on a much larger scale, they have the ability to pay for additional storage.  And that is part of the Google integration there.  There will be other forms of integration that we are working on, and hopefully will be announced in the future, that has much to do with Google documents and other types of integration with other Google services.  

>>  So the question is asked again, to repeat, who has free access to this Google version? 

>>  Any school that has Google applications for education installed, that are using Google applications for education.  They have free access.  

>>  OK.  And that raises a question that I am thinking about, especially as we're watching the polls closing in a few seconds.  Can you talk a little bit more about your future directions.  We have had the concern about, what about students who are attending multiple institutions? It sounds like a product user will have access to Facebook, Google-what other directions might you be taking this application? 

>>  Sure.  I think that we can talk about many different bigger pictures, and several directions.  I think one of the things that I had been personally and very excited about is to really go a step further in the social pedagogy side.  One of the things that we are doing is allowing for users to be able to give feedback and comment on portfolios, in a much more interactive way then it is today.  Today it works like a Web log.  At the bottom of the page you can make comments.  But I really wanted to be more like tracking-where I highlight a piece of text, and very quickly and leave a message.  But not only to the author, but having the author being able to control and give permission to other people to come in and have a discussion about network.  

I believe that is much closer to the critique, the insight that we get from a critique structured in a steady-based architecture, and it can be really powerful.  Of course, to really understand where that goes in terms of technology, I believe that is where a mobile application comes in any very interesting way.  I have seen people that are-I have seen people using the mobile applications where there is a tremendous amount of people that use in mobile telephones to consume information content.  There are a lot of people that are also producing content.  Not a lot of content-they are just riding down a little text messages, and perhaps little audio clips.  That is the kind of thing that we are really thinking very hard about, in terms of how the code to enable that.  So that people can truly have the entire community in their pockets.  And it can be done in real time if they want to; and it does not have to be.  Does that answer the question? 

>>  I think so.  I notice another question coming from someone near and dear to me here at Portland State, wondering how technical support for the product is going with your customers? And of course, we are wondering what that means to the last answer as well.  

>>  Sure.  I am going to say this, but I am going to say this with a grain of salt.  A lot of schools have chosen to provide support through their own help desk to their students.  Many of them have created really sophisticated, I would say, very smart and creative ways to do things rapidly and in expansively.  I think one of the most successful models is the use of student mentors.  Not only is it less expensive to do so; they are also able to, sort of, really harness the student to student relationship, that grass roots relationship, in a very positive way.  I know that at schools like the stony Brook and the aborted the Community College and Boston University, many of these schools have a very large portfolio presence,  and most of the time we find that the schools are able to figure out-(inaudible).  It is usually the pedagogy side that they need help with.  And I would say it is not just them-it is the faculty members who need the help as well.  Because they are using a new tool, and how they're going to structure the course.  We like the idea of working with professors, in helping them with the structuring curriculum, structuring what they want to do in terms of integrating things into something that already exists.  

And so that is something that I have personally done a lot of work with in different schools.  And generally I think that we have seen it either way, whether it be instructional Technology, instructional designers, or certain faculty members who just want to become a trainer to train their people.  Does that answer the question? 

>>  I think it does.  As a are looking at the poll results-we have an approaching half of the people looking at this and saying, yes, reflective practice makes sense.  But you are saying, we may not be ready for that.  And a large number of people did not respond, which I would take a support for what you just said.  

Would you think, moderators? Any other questions.  

>>  We had a question from LaGuardia Community College, from Mercedes, about the size of the files that can be loaded,-but that kind of has to do with your future direction, Jeff.  

>>  Yes.  Talking about a one gigabyte file-(inaudible).  We are definitely working on that right now, but that is our goal, to provide up load limits of one gigabyte per file.  It may take several steps to get there.  It may start off being 300 or five hundred megabytes, before we get ourselves to the one gigabyte range.  But that is something that we are aiming to do.  From a timing standpoint, I really hesitate to give any kind of announcement, just because as a technologist, we tried to announce this when we do not really know for sure.  I believe that is lying.  And I do not like to do that.  Technology happens.  And if I really cannot guarantee something, I do not want to give you a date.  What I would like to say, however, I really want to have that increase by September 1st.  And now it is September 14th.  So we are not there yet, but is something that is obviously at the top of our list.  One of the things on top of the list.  And so hopefully we will have an announcement relatively soon.  

>>  Thank you.  And I think we have time for one more question.  

>>  This is a question from Mercedes, she is asking, in terms of social networking, does the company have plans for expanding (reading from the chat window).  

>>  I agree with Mercedes.  In fact, the accordion Community College has been a major partner in one of the areas-with the social networks in a more streamlined fashion? Yes, it is definitely on our road map.  In fact, we have started to build that already.  As part of our comments, when folks can just highlight something and comment-not only can they do that, but it is for all those comments can then be aggregated, and unified and transmitted to and from various social networks.  So, whether someone is checking Facebook all day long, or they are using Twitter instead.  That is fine as well.  When the Google product becomes available, we will do that too.  That is something that we are very aggressive in developing-(inaudible).  I am using it myself, all of these tools as a communication channel.  I think all of us realize and understand how important it is.  

>>  Jeffrey, thank you very much.  We have only touched upon this, and as mentioned earlier, as Judy has posted below, we have a forum where we can continue to respond to many of the other questions.  Jeff will be available for the next two weeks.  We also have a survey that we hope that you will allowed to help us do better at our job, and to help us understand what you all are interested in.  

With that, I want to say thank you to Jeff again and thank you all for spending an hour with us.  Look forward to the next one on September 28th at the same time.  Please join us.  

>>  This is Patty.  We are going to try to transfer a document to everybody.  This will be a resource document that will take you to the forum.  There are also some links in the  chat window that will take you to the discussion forum and the survey.  

>>  Thank you everyone who has worked so hard on this.  I really am honored to be the first of the presenters in this series.  I look forward to seeing you all in the forum.  And if you need assistance you can always reach me personally at my e-mail address.  The thank you very much.  (pause).  

>>  If you are on the line, Jeff will be available at the forum for additional questions.  Also, if you did not get the file, I am going to try onmore time.  (pause).  OK.  Thank you, Nancy.  I appreciate that.  (pause).  Thank you all so much.  (pause). 
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