ePortfolio | News

Upcoming AAEEBL ePortfolio World Summit 2011 Draws Record Registration

• By Trent Batson
• 06/01/11

The largest electronic portfolio conference in the world to date, the AAEEBL ePortfolio World Summit 2011, will be held in Boston July 25-28. The conference will be hosted by AAEEBL, The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning, a professional association for the world electronic portfolio community (www.aaeebl.org).

AAEEBL’s conference will be co-located with Campus Technology during the same days as CT2011, at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center on the Boston Harbor. The two conferences will share a technology exhibit floor with hundreds of vendors represented. Co-sponsors of the AAEEBL conference include the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Making Connections National Resource Center at LaGuardia Community College, and the Northeast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP), an EDUCAUSE affiliate.

Electronic portfolios are growing in their use not only to improve a student’s resume, but because they uniquely offer strong leverage for faculty wanting to improve the life-long learning abilities of their students. The global growth of electronic portfolio use over the past year is astounding. This year, in addition to 15 pre-conference workshops and 100 concurrent sessions during the conference, AAEEBL will feature an international panel of scholars and practitioners in ePortfolio from Australia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, with Darren Cambridge moderating this exceptional group. The panel will address a wide array of topics including Australia’s nationwide use of ePortfolios for the vocational education sector (VET).

Additionally, the two keynote speakers will bring international representation to the conference: Beverley Oliver of Curtin University in Perth, Australia; and Phil Long of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who still maintains his position as Research Scientist at MIT in Cambridge, MA. The conference will gather most ePortfolio associations and experts from the U.S. and around the world for the Boston program. Even more than an ePortfolio conference this is a key conference for those interested in the transformation of education since the ePortfolio community is evolving into an institutional transformation community. It seems that ePortfolios are serving at many schools as a transformation-enabling technology.

Conference attendees may plan to learn about innovative ePortfolio practices around the world from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Featured at the conference this year will be The International Journal for ePortfolio, a new peer-reviewed publication dedicated to ePortfolio scholarship. Also new this year, AAEEBL will hold an invitation-only Executive Summit, sponsored by NobleHour on Monday. Another special feature of this year’s conference will be a series of sessions called “Conversations with…” where ePortfolio leaders will discuss a variety of topics pertinent to ePortfolio theory and implementation with participants. To register for or to find out more about the AAEEBL ePortfolio World Summit 2011, see http://www.aaeebl.org/ePortfolio_world_summit2011.