AAC&U Forum on Digital Learning and ePortfolios (January 2020)
Save the Turtles! (I was too busy at the conference to take many pictures!)
ePortfolios played a large role at the Honors International Faculty Institute in Fort Worth, and I saw a lot of value in the concept. So, when we returned to campus in the Fall, and one of the Associate Deans put out a call for volunteers for a committee to explore ePortfolios at HPU, I sent him a message immediately. As a committee member, I was invited to attend this forum, which was the final day of a larger conference of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. The forum was in Washington D.C on January 25th, the same weekend as the March for Life, so the hotels were packed. I had expected something like a workshop, and was startled to find, when I arrived, that the symposium was a full conference in itself. I found that, as with the NCHC conference the previous Fall, that I was immediately at home with the ePortfolio community, and found several useful ideas in the sessions, especially “Meaningful, Authentic, and Actionable: ePortfolios and Digital Storytelling for Leadership Development,” presented by Dr. Tracy Penny Light of St. George’s University; and “A HIP Taxonomy for High-Impact ePortfolio Implementation,” presented by a team from IUPUI.
The first presentation grabbed my attention right away, as it addressed me as a leader first; not as someone who aspired to lead, or who was being groomed for leadership, but as a leader in my own right. Dr. Light led us through a series of reflective exercises in which we identified what we valued in leadership, where our models of leadership came from, and our own leadership qualities. Like a good story, Dr. Light argued that ePortfolios represented our leadership in was that were authentic, reflective, integrative, outcomes-oriented, and dispositional.
She then unpacked these ideas through several though-provoking questions:
What are your aspirations and why do you have them?
How do the layers of your identity come together? (How do you translate who you are into your role?)
How do you evidence good leadership qualities? (What is compelling evidence of leadership?)
How do our stories connect to all the areas in which we work?
Where can we take our stories of leadership to move things forward?
What can we learn from stories of poor leadership?
By far, most of my conference notes came from this session, and I still have a lot of work to do in this area. At the time, I had little idea of the COVID-19 crisis that would follow, and the demands for leadership that it would create, especially in a department that was already a hornet’s nest of conflicting leadership visions and styles.
The presentation from IUPUI was similarly exciting. In an effort to quantify how “high-impact” their "High Impact Practices” actually were, the team had developed a series of rubrics that identified characteristics of “high-impact,” higher-impact,” and “highest-impact” implementation. At the session, they focused mainly on the ePortfolio rubric, of course, but I later visited the IUPUI website and downloaded several of the others, including the ones for first-year experiences, senior capstones, and undergraduate research. I was so eager to use these are both templates and justifications for our curricular revision that I virtually ran to the Associate Dean’s office to share them.
Incidentally, some other ideas that i took from the forum were 1) the importance of faculty advocating ePortfolios to lead by example (i.e. building their own ePortfolios), and 2) the idea of a conference blog that identified important ideas and demonstrated how they were being put into action. These were the seeds of the current project.