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Thanks, Ray, no doubt many here agree about the principle of portfolio tools allowing people to keep what is significant across learning across life. But I fear you may be pointing the wrong finger at JISC...

On 25 October 2010 20:30, Ray Tolley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
[...]

JISC, with all its magnificence, tended to promote the use of ePortfolios as an in-house system without any real perception of Lifelong, Lifewide learning, 5-95, or ‘from sperm to worm’.  On several occasions I have read comments such as, “Why should I bother with an ePortfolio – I cannot take it with me!”


... as it seems to me they have consistently funded good work on the lifelong aspect of portfolios, right from the MLEs for Lifelong Learning work several years ago, and more recently very useful funding for interoperability, which would make little sense in terms of purely "in-house systems". It's rather hard to fault JISC on this one; indeed hard to blame anyone in particular. We could blame ourselves collectively for not trumpeting the lifelong aspects of portfolio technology hard enough, but I don't think that would be realistic either (even for Guardian readers :-) )

What we really need, it seems to me now, are real-life examples where learner-owned information has been carried across fruitfully from an earlier episode of learning to a later one, whether it be via a portfolio system or a VLE without strong portfolio functionality. The more we can demonstrate in practice the value of, and thus motivation for, transferring such information between systems, the more we can expect people to start understanding.

What we have done in producing the Leap2A interoperability specification is to provide the key part of the enabling technology. It is now technically much easier to transfer the information than it was previously, so we are now waiting expectantly for case studies of people doing, rather than just talking...

(Of course, it is mainly e-portfolio systems that have taken up Leap2A, and it would be great now to get more VLEs to adopt it. I understand Moodle has made a good start.)

Best wishes

Simon
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Simon Grant
+44 7710031657
http://www.simongrant.org/home.html
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