Press Release

North Kingstown, RI, May 24, 2010 – The worldwide Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (www.aaeebl.org) is holding the first major international conference focused on electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) to be held in the United States. The conference is in Boston on July 19 – 22, 2010, at the Seaport Hotel and Seaport World Trade Center, a world-class conference venue. This conference is unique and notable for a number of reasons.

The Conference – ePortfolios and the Emergent Learning Ecology – brings together an astounding number of the world’s ePortfolio leaders in this rapidly-expanding electronic portfolio sector in education and in business. Speakers from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Finland, and Australia are on the program. All major ePortfolio projects and initiatives around the world will be represented at the conference. The President of the University of Massachusetts System, Jack Wilson, will welcome the conferees. About 600 are expected.

“We’ve been working on this conference for 18 months. I’ve traveled to Australia to create an AAEEBL chapter there and will be traveling to London for the EIfEL conference there in early July. So, now, we’ve got people coming from Australia and Europe and speaking at our conference about what’s going on in other parts of the world,” said Dr. Trent Batson, Executive Director of AAEEBL.

This event is a watershed: electronic portfolios are vitally important to learning in today’s learning landscape because they provide a means for students/learners to be mobile and life-long learners. The electronic portfolio is therefore a critical tool for the transition of education from last century to this century’s very different learning environment.

The work that students do is stored in a permanent online repository – an electronic portfolio – that allows them to collect and organize their work, selectively present their work (as in a resume or for a grade 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 conference celebrates the coming-of-age of the electronic portfolio movement as more than half of all American colleges and universities use electronic portfolios in one way or another, and many K-12 school systems are also adopting portfolio practices appropriate for those ages.

“The conference site is terrific,” said David Marble, Director of Business Operations for AAEEBL. “Right on the water, overlooking the Boston Skyline, a short walk from downtown. A beautiful, newly-renovated conference space, great food, great accommodations – people will love this venue!”

The reason why this conference is so important: electronic portfolios 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 sessions (plus a large exhibit hall shared with Campus Technology, which is managing the AAEEBL conference and which is co-located with AAEEBL) showing the many ways that electronic portfolios are used from early childhood to graduate school, from vocational training to digital story-telling, and from course portfolios to institutional assessment management systems.

The conference shows its all-inclusive nature by having a number of co-hosts: the Association of American Colleges and Universities (http://www.AACU.org), LaGuardia Community College’s Making Connections Project (http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/connections/), and The Northeast Regional Computing Project (http://www.NERCOMP.org). Together with Campus Technology’s annual conference, which is expecting 800 attendees, we should have 1400 attendees, total, in the same building (http://events.campustechnology.com/events/ct-2010/home.aspx).

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-organize 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 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. "Our 32 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: The internationally-known “Grandmother of ePortfolios,” Helen Barrett; The Director of Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and Assistant Provost, Randy Bass; and 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.

“This conference is a miracle: to get 16 internationally known ePortfolio leaders to speak at one conference, as keynote or featured speaker – especially when any one of them could be a marquee draw by themselves – still amazes me. These are a bunch of generous people,” said Trent Batson.

AAEEBL is a year-old association that emerged from the existing world ePortfolio community. It is funded by institutional memberships (90) and by corporate affiliates (18). AAEEBL is a non-profit organization 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.

Deadline for early-bird discount is June 18; register at https://center.uoregon.edu/conferences/1105events/AAEEBL/2010/registration/ Home site for the conference: http://www.aaeebl.org/page/AAEEBL+Annual+Conference (link to hotel reservations is at this site as well).

For more information: Trent Batson, trentbatson@mac.com or 401-465-0439.