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In a recent paper for Becta as part of the IMPACT STUDY OF E-PORTFOLIOS ON LEARNING

Elisabeth Hartnell-Young and the project team at Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham wrote the following:

Definitions of e-portfolios

The research team worked from an understanding of e-portfolios that incorporates both process and product, and includes a range of tools within a system that links with other systems. Broadly, the product (e-portfolio) is a purposeful selection of items (evidence) chosen at a point in time from a repository or archive, with a particular audience in mind. The processes that are required to create e-portfolios for any purpose include capturing and ongoing storage of material, selection, reflection and presentation.

As a working statement, and being aware of the need to provide a definition that is inclusive of systems and service based approaches, we agreed on 20th September 2007 to use the following statement moving forward;

An e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items - ideas evidence reflections feedback etc. - which presents a selected audience with evidence of a person's learning and/or ability

Definitions of e-portfolios: linking with other systems

How does an e-Portfolio system make use of the resources MIAP will provide, for example MINERVA? German and Benelux colleagues have been reviewing the work JISC-CETIS has done and is planning on e-Portfolio, we hope in close collaboration with Becta. Our focus is to make MINERVA information available across the partners in a Lifelong Learning Network. Instead of agreggating data into one or more Portfolios and MIS systems we could look it up when it is needed. Ingo Dahn has defined this "thin model of e-Portfolio" as a "dynamically generated view of distributed data". Should MIAP provide us with an infrastrucutre which will support the slender(schlanken)portfolios the Germans also envisage or are VLEs sufficient to transform learners' experience?

Peter

Since June growing international technical collaboration for ePortfolio between UK, Germany and Australia has developed the following key technical definition: "An ePortfolio is a dynamically created view of authentic and diverse evidence, drawn from one or more repositories, that represent facets which a person or organisation has acquired over time and on which a person or organisation has reflected, designed for presentation to one or more audiences for a particular purpose." A specification neutral approach based on federated repositories will be developed through the FP7 Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services (TAS3) project in which Becta is an associate partner and a smaller parallel project funded by DFG (the German HE research funding council).

Peter

Comments from our Becta colleague Paul Wareing on links to the recent Leitch review of skills

The following assumes that the Leitch final report (Prosperity for all in the global economy - world class skills) will be adopted almost wholesale. This is a reasonable assumption in my opinion, given the cross party support for it and the likely pattern that changes within the Government will probably take.

Within the Leitch Final report (attached) recommendations, were the following key recommendations:

The Review recommends that all adults should be entitled to a free ‘Skills Health Check’, building on the success of a similar approach in Sweden, which would identify an individual’s skill needs and strengths. The Train to Gain brokers, similarly will use skills health check to work with employers of specific micro businesses, SMEs and larger organisations to base line the skills in their workforce and as part of training needs analysis that will inform the brokered training that is then recommended and put into effect. A new Adult Careers service will also utilise this for the benefit of the individual.

An ideal situation may be if vendors of e-portfolio products could be persuaded to produce a subset of their full product as a free to use version, to enable the skills health checks to be undertaken. They may want to do this to encourage the ongoing paid for use of their products beyond this.

The skills health check will need an efficient means of collating information and making it available for the individual to use, businesses to use and providers of all sorts to access. It is also a starting point and base lining of an individual's achievement, aspirations and particular needs.

Sounds like the genesis of an e-portfolio to me! But if Becta was to take this as a means of embedding e-portfolio into the system it would require a piece of work to define an agreed set of protocols, description of the fields needed and the identification of a steering group/stakeholder group to do this. Then a proposal could be developed to make this happen and also a plan to implement this.

Terri (for Paul)

Comment from Lisa:

I've taken on board these discussions around definitions on the revision of our overview of JISC e-portfolio activity in October this year. The paper is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/eportfoliooverviewv2.aspx. I've also produced some JISC web pages on the area, with definitions, outline of our work and projects, and links to external key resources, available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/elearning/eportfolios.aspx

Lisa

My attempt to DefineePortfolio took quite an effort to try to boil down to something comprehensible.

Shane

Part of a comment on the JISC discussion at http://www.elframework.org/learning_domain_services/eportfolio/forums/public/563531763371

-A (sic) e-portfolio should show proof of an individual user's learning and performance, versus proof of an organization's goals.

Terri