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reflection on AeP2

I have just attended the Australian ePortfolio Symposium 2009 and would like to acknowledge all the hard work and effort put in by the team at QUT who made this such a worthwhile event. On the Sunday I was privileged to be able to participate in a panel session on 'Technical issues and opportunities in eportfolio practice'. Given my interest in this area, the big take away for me was the recognition of the importance of the work by various organisations trying to map out the eportfolio space and create standards for us. Specifications development is hard work when addressing topics like eportfolios that have many layers of complexity. As important as this work is though, more needs to be done in enabling end-user communities exploit their eportfolios as they see fit in a Web 2.0 oriented world. On to the main conference and there was no shortage of really interesting presentations. The scene was really set by a great presentation from Marij Veugelers and Wijnand Aalderlink on the work they have been doing for coming up ten years on the development of sustainable communities of practice. One of the great lines from their very informative and entertaining presentation 'things change at the speed of education'. Without going into detail on each of the presentations given, there was some great coverage on updating us with a number of initiatives in both the Higher Ed and VET sectors and also some really interesting work from international speakers from the UK, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The UK and Netherlands seem to be at the front when it comes to eportfolios and we can learn a lot from their systemic, regional and local approaches. As the organisers of this conference said, learning from these efforts will enable us to fast-track our own progress in this area and hopefully we will have something to contribute back to the international community as well as each other. Developing communities of practice is going to be pivotal in this work. The highlight of the conference for me was listening to the inspirational work that Ruth Wallace is doing with disengaged learners on identity. I look forward to seeing presentations from the conference online. It was great to see that there were some Twitterers at the event and you can probably get some interesting snippets using the #AeP2 hashtag. Cheers, Jerry