Award winners will be honored during a luncheon Feb. 20 that will coincide with the annual American Association of School Administrators' National Conference on Education in San Francisco. Stephanoff said he plans to attend.

Web 2.0 is turning the traditional electronic portfolio into a diverse personal learning space, putting students at the helm of their academic experience.

When Julie Bohnenkamp, director of technology for the Center Grove Community School Corporation in Greenwood, IN, introduced the Epsilen Environment to her district last August, she expected a few of the more tech-savvy teachers to take the new electronic portfolio system for a spin, and then gradually spread the word. She didn't expect what she calls an "Epsilen epidemic." What began last year as a small pilot project aimed at half a dozen teachers now comprises 495 teachers, 1,908 students, 88 online courses, and 33 online collaborative groups.

"We thought we'd have between five and seven teachers who might like to utilize the system for online learning enhancements to their traditional courses," Bohnenkamp says. "But people really responded to the connectedness designed into it, the way Epsilen combines Web 2.0 technologies with the e-portfolio piece."

The Epsilen Environment is an example of what can fairly be called a new species of electronic portfolios. No longer merely a handy digital means for collecting and displaying student work or the professional achievements of teachers, this new breed adds internet-based applications and services that are fundamental to the Web 2.0 phenomenon-- things like social networks, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, and mashup tools.

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Except it isn’t a course management system, exactly, though it does allow faculty members to post assignments and readings online for students to download. Calling it a social network wouldn’t be fair either, though it does offer personalized profiles for students and professors. An “integrated online course content, portfolio and communications tool” is a bit closer, but its actual name is Epsilen. Last September, the Times announced a partnership with the service in its push into the distance learning market.

Last month, it finalized a deal to purchase a 53 percent majority stake in the holding company that markets Epsilen, an environment that was originally developed at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Purdue School of Engineering and Technology. (For the record, Felice Nudelman, director of education for the Times, called it “the most robust Web 2.0 learning platform in the world.")

“By using the Times content, I was able to build enough case studies and avoid having the students get a second textbook. So they saved 65 bucks,” said Cookson, whose day job is the University System of New Hampshire’s associate vice chancellor for external relations.

For examples of how corporations dealt with severe fallout from public relations disasters — think the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill or the Tylenol tampering scare in the early 1980s — Cookson found that using contemporaneous news and opinion articles helped students understand how events unfolded at the time. And, using Epsilen for the second time this semester, he was able to integrate archived news content into his course materials.

The New York Times Knowledge Network provides the service with tailored and subject-specific content modules, offering instructors template tools to match articles, graphs and other materials with their lectures or online notes. News content goes all the way back to 1851, Nudelman said. “We’re really excited because we know that we’re in the process now of really ramping up,” she said, with over 12,000 members of the network and active Epsilen users from more than 830 different institutions.

Cookson’s is a traditional class taught on campus, but, like other typical courses with an online course management component, he has made use of work group features so that students who sometimes can’t meet in person can stay up to speed. Epsilen allows students and faculty members to create their own profiles — a free service for those with.edu e-mail addresses — which can contain resumes, an e-portfolio, a blog and more. The service was initially a central component, along with the availability of archived news and multimedia content, of the Times’s foray into providing technology and marketing services to colleges that offer distance learning.

The social networking features aren’t an afterthought, either. “One particular part of it that’s great is a lot of [the students] upload photos, and when you go onto Epsilen you can see who visited your corner,” Cookson said. “It’s a great tool to help learn their names.”

Others have found that the environment helps them connect students around the world.

“What Epsilen has enabled me to do is to connect universities in Germany, Taiwan and China, as well as in Indiana and Alaska ... in order to be able to facilitate a truly global interaction between students in the same classroom but on various continents and throughout the world,” said Darrell L. Bailey, a self-described “early adopter,” professor and former dean at the IUPUI School of Informatics. This semester, he’s using the tools in a course called Informatics and Global Engagement, where students “explore and participate in a conversation about information management techniques connecting global communities,” he said.

“More specifically, it provides students an opportunity to experience both real-time and asynchronous interactions with professors, content experts and other students on four continents. Epsilen is the synergy that powers this interaction. What is unique in my experience about Epsilen is that it is not an internal course management system inside a university. Therefore it enables students at any university to participate in coursework with students from multiple colleges and universities.”

It’s even been adapted to uses outside the classroom. Merrill A. Ritter, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine, has used it to share X-ray images with patients in Latin America as part of his organization, Operation Walk, which sends medical specialists to developing countries around the world.

(By Andy Guess, insidehighered.com)