I have been so impressed by the incredible amount of work and diligence I have seen demonstrated by the administrators, teachers and support staff here at the RINET Sakai conference over the last two days. It is really amazing to me to see the hard work that we did on Goal Management at Syracuse in use by real people. The Goal Management tool and the Goal Aware Assignment tool are one of the key components of the RIEPS (Rhode Island Electronic Portfolio System) implementation of Sakai and OSP. Their implementation is supporting:

• 15 districts
• 25 High Schools
• 40,000 students
• 3,200 teachers
• 13,000 courses

The thing that is "right" about RIEPS is the enterprise decision that they made to support a large school reform movement. It is something that an enterprise decision can do to shape the discussion on a very large scale. By providing support and services around the authoring and assessment of student portfolios as a means for students to demonstrate competency in the state and district standards and expectations necessary for a student to graduate, they are making a radical departure from the world of high stakes standardized tests that most of the rest of the country is involved with. It is a big deal.

Attending this conference are quite a few folks who have been talking about portfolios in the context of "cloud computing", using Web 2.0 tools (Google docs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and mobile devices to enable and empower individual teachers to engage students using tools that they already love to use. This very forward thinking group sees the possibilities that these tools afford for "socializing" information amongst the other learners (the teacher being one of those learners) in the class and promoting constructive dialogs around issues relevant to the curriculum. The keynote speaker in the morning was Philip Long from MIT who showed a lot of interesting examples.

As cool as all that was (and it was cool stuff that many folks around the room were really interested in), I feel pretty certain that most teachers will find it difficult to make an investment of their time to research tools that they would like to use and to integrate them into their class on a regular basis. In fact, it might be a bad idea to start developing plans to use a service that isn't supported by your district for a number of reasons:

• They are subject to change faster than you may want them to since you have no relationship with that provider to provide a consistent service
• They may not be regulated in a manner consistent with your school's privacy policies and could be vulnerable to attacks, exposing student information to "ne'er-do-wells"
• The company may be taken over and your data sold

Furthermore, an ad-hoc "cloud computing" strategy draws on the enthusiasm, passion and energy of the early adopters of technology while providing little support for the rest (majority) of other teachers to bring them on board with the change. While the idea of a "Yahoo Pipes-style" mashup of information as a part of a Web 2.0 portfolio sounds pretty cool, its complex nature compounds the above problems and creates a rather brittle model that I wouldn't entertain for long without engaging in serious discussions with each of the component service providers.

While talking briefly with Trent Batson about this idea, he mentioned that he is starting to think less in terms of "life long" portfolios and more in terms of them being ephemeral bits that serve a purpose for a very short time. This was a big shift for me as I had been thinking (and hearing others thinking) of portfolios as the large pile of "my stuff" and presentations of that stuff for various purposes. The notion of a P-80 (Preschool to 80 years old) portfolio was mentioned several times during this conference.

Of course, the flip side of the coin that everyone is sensitive to is an institutionalized/enterpise system that places too much emphasis on institutional needs for accountability and not enough on providing services that provide an environment for authentic learning. Based on what I am seeing here and the excitement that the teachers are describing in having access to a system that allows them to constantly communicate with their students (this is one of the first times I have seen a truly teaching and learning centered Sakai conference), I think that this effort will result in some big changes in the culture of the classroom if it continues to receive the support it needs. Among the exciting things I saw:

• Large numbers of Rhode Island teachers (many of whom professed not to be early adopters) are using the RIEPS system and are really excited about it.
• They have a relationship with a commercial affiliate and seem receptive to engaging in the community discussions relavent to their work so that they can support and change their system at their own pace.
• The effect of the system appears to be a lever by which the RI schools can affect school reform away from standardized tests and towards assessment for learning.
• Teachers are being draw into and are asking for professional development space within RIEPS and having "light bulb" moments in which they see the connection between the technology they are using and how it can be integrated into their classes