So I just got back from Boston and the AAEEBL conference.

I love Boston and would like to live there someday.  It’s a walker’s city.

The Sheraton Boston is a beautiful hotel, with horrible scratchy towels and peculiar WiFi service, not to mention horrible mobile phone reception. << The view was spectacular from our room.  The shopping at Copley Place was pretty much grade-A upscale mall in a gorgeous structure and you never really have to go outside unless you want to.  Food is plentiful and good:  we had seafood one night, Chicago-style pizza the next, and the ubiquity of Cheesecake Factory.  There wasn’t enough time to try P.F. Chang’s, but those giant stone horses in front were like some kind of acid flashback vision (in a most entertaining way).

My presentation was a five-minute “ignite” session.  I saw some of these in Utica last month and enjoyed them, but being on the other end of the presentation was not so much fun.  The presenters at Utica CIT had six minutes and 20 seconds.  That would have made a difference for the 20-slide presentation.  I would have been able to speak without feeling like someone was standing behind me with a pitchfork.  The emcee actually said…he actually said this, “This is a sudden-death, no return kind of presentation.”  I told him to stop and he said oh sorry, it’s supposed to be fun.  -_-  <<that’s my evaluation of this kind of thing….it was not fun at all.  I will not ever travel out of state to present for five minutes feeling like I need to race through my points. All it takes is one stutter or longish breath and you’ve missed a slide.  There it goes….whoosh, you’re screwed.  On the other hand,  many of us are altogether too verbose when we present.  In the future, I will know exactly how to give a tight twelve to fifteen minute presentation with no problem.  The problem is that I feel like there is an inherent caste system at work when some presenters get five minutes while others get twenty and yet others get an hour.  I’m not at all convinced that the presentations I saw that were twenty minutes long were more substantive than the Ignite sessions were.  I don’t see the logic behind the choices.  I also saw presenters during the 20 minute sessions scrambling for time and I found myself wondering why (although I’ve often been in that situation as well).  I think we all should have had ten to twelve minutes to do whatever we wanted with. I don’t feel it was a good format for my presentation, but I hope that some will look over the Powerpoint presentation at leisure. It should be more entertaining there.

I saw two keynote presentations.  I enjoyed Randy Bass and Bret Enyon speaking together, as a unit (no, not at identical moments, but back and forth)…I began to think of them as the Twin Consorts.  They had interesting things to say about the future of the ePortfolio movement in the era of high-tech efficiency and massive deployment we are entering.  There is momentum for more formalized assessment, it seems, of ePortfolio learning.  The second keynote (Helen Chen and Gary Brown) seemed more geared toward “converting the non-believers,” although I may have misjudged that.

One of the most unique regular sessions I saw was Howard Sanborn and Jenny Ramirez presenting “Successes and Challenges of Using ePortfolios to Teach About Asia: Reports from Humanities and Social Sciences,” followed by John McLaughlin and Donna Gruber of Queen’s College presenting on using ePortfolios to teach a hybrid course with Vietnamese students. Both sessions were underattended. The second session, in particular, I felt was instructive in terms of how ePortfolios may eventually play a strong role in shaping the high-tech massive deployment educational culture of the future.