In 2005, Dr. Helen Barrett retired from the faculty of the College of Education at the University of Alaska Anchorage and is now living in the Seattle area. She has been researching strategies and technologies for electronic portfolios since 1991, publishing a website (http://electronicportfolios.org), chapters in several books on Electronic Portfolios, and numerous articles. She was on loan to the International Society for Technology in Education between 2001 and early 2005, providing training and technical assistance on electronic portfolios for teacher education programs throughout the U.S. under a federal PT3 grant. In 2005, Dr. Barrett became the Research Project Director for The REFLECT Initiative, a two-year research project, underwritten by TaskStream, to assess the impact of electronic portfolios on student learning, motivation and engagement in secondary schools.

In the fall of 2007, she received a courtesy appointment as a Research Associate with the Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE), part of the College of Education at the University of Oregon, where she will be researching emerging strategies for electronic portfolios and digital storytelling to support lifelong and life wide learning. She is currently working on several book projects on electronic portfolios. She is also an Apple Distinguished Educator and a George Lucas Educational Foundation Faculty Associate.

At the European ePortfolio Conference in Maastricht, October 2007, Dr. Barrett received the first EIFEL Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to ePortfolio research and development.