It took us a long time to get from Episode 100 to 101 but this one is worth your listen. We bring you a globe-crossing conversation recorded back in June with Amy Cicchino in Orlando, Florida and Kristina Hoeppner in Wellington, New Zealand. In this show you will learn how Amy, director of the University Writing Center at the University of Central Florida and Kristina, project lead at Catalyst IT for the open source portfolio platform Mahara have been part of a large multi-institutional task force that has created a remarkable guide called Digital Ethics Principles in ePortfolios.

This work has been accomplished as part of the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), the international professional development organization for ePortfolio practitioners and researchers. The relevance of our conversation is not only that the Digital Ethics in ePortfolios Principles has been published under an open license and that of of the 10 principles is Respect for Author Rights and Re-Use Permissions, but that all 10 ethical principles are applicable to other domains.

In the OEGlobal Voices podcast studio with left to right, guests Amy Cicchino, Kristina Hoeppner and host Alan Levine.

Amy Cicchino, PhD, is associate professor and director of the University Writing Center at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL, USA. Her work focuses on writing curriculum and pedagogy, especially digitally enhanced and online writing instruction and writing as experiential education, and high-impact practices. In addition to her involvement with the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force, she holds leadership positions in the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) and the Society for Experiential Education (SEE). She is the Editor-in-Chief for the Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education journal. 

Kristina Hoeppner, MA, is the project lead for the open source portfolio platform Mahara, working at Catalyst IT in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. She enjoys supporting and working with the New Zealand and worldwide community of educators, learning designers, and education innovators in both formal and informal learning settings to create positive and supportive learning environments. She has been a member of the AAEEBL Task Force on Digital Ethics in ePortfolios since 2019 and a member of the Executive Committee of FLANZ (Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand) since 2021.

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In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

Digital Ethics Principles for ePortfolios (AAEEBL) with Amy Cicchino and Kristina Hoeppner

In OEGlobal Voices episode 101, host Alan Levine talks with Amy Cicchino (University of Central Florida Writing Center) and Kristina Hoeppner (Catalyst IT, Mahara) about AAEEBL and their ongoing project to publish Digital Ethics Principles for ePortfolios, recorded June 25, 2026. They describe AAEEBL as an international community of ePortfolio practitioners and researchers spanning disciplines and roles, and explain how 2019 conference discussions on issues like end-user license agreements, consent, privacy, and reuse sparked a task force that brainstormed ~30 ideas and refined them into 10 principles. The current version includes Support, Promote Awareness, Practice, Evaluation, DEIBD, Accessibility, Technology and Usability, Responsibility, Respect for Author Rights and Reuse Permissions, and Visibility of Labor, emphasizing practical guidance, scenarios, and recognizing ePortfolios as labor for students, educators, and staff. They discuss ongoing work, including an AI-focused paper and workshops.

  • 00:00 Intro Music and Highlight Quotes
  • 01:19 Podcast Welcome And Guests
  • 02:58 Meet Amy In Orlando
  • 04:12 Meet Kristina In Wellington
  • 05:45 School Memories And Learning
  • 10:51 What Is AAEEBL
  • 16:19 Who Joins The Community
  • 19:34 Why Digital Ethics Principles
  • 26:41 The Ten Principles Explained
  • 29:41 Favorite Principles Spotlight
  • 36:53 Author Rights And Reuse
  • 40:52 What Comes Next Including AI
  • 47:19 Off Duty Hobbies And Wrap Up
  • 51:54 Credits And Next Episode

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 101

I’ll just add the idea behind this structure– we talked a lot about audience when we were developing the first version of the principles, and we wanted these principles to be accessible, to educators, to administrators, but then also to students because students are the ones often doing this work.

They’re intentionally concise, and they’re intentionally accessible, with the ideas that you could use then the resources to jump off into to research supporting these principles.

Amy Cicchino

And for me DEIBD, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Decolonization is a favorite principle because we interviewed a whole bunch of people from these areas. And we also interviewed non-portfolio practitioners because we are not creating the principles necessarily for the people that are in the field but as Amy said, for the students as well. So we wanted to make sure that we also get a perspective from people that are not involved in portfolio practice.

And that’s why this one is one of my favorite really because it’s also so rich in the strategies and covers a lot that we want to achieve with portfolios: That students have ownership; that students create portfolios; that students bring in themselves so that they see they belong; that they see that it’s included; that we see the diversity in the answers and not just, ‘oh, everybody’s going through a multiple choice test and it gives the same answers.;

Kristina Hoeppner

The open licensed music for this episode is a track called Im Labor Pt.1 by 4di licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

Photos of Amy’s location Orlando and Kristina’s location on Wellington are combined and included as background in the featured image for this episode are Orlando Skyline rawpixel public domain photo CC0 and Wellington flickr photo by US Embassy New Zealand shared with no copyright restrictions using Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (PDM)