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ePortfolios - supporting lifelong learning

I had an opportunity to present at our ePortfolio Symposium the other day and gave a brief presentation on what form ePortfolios could take if we were to support them from a lifelong learning perspective. I think one of the challenges for many ePortfolio implementations is that they are bound to individual organisations rather than learners. While some (many?) may offer access of some form after learners have left the organisation - does that access really benefit the learner in the best way possible? To be successful from a lifelong perspective, ePortfolios must be 'learner owned and learner controlled'. Implementing this has its own set of challenges. The presentation seeks to identify what some of those challenges may be such as policy, trust, who can or should provide such services, access, ownership, the short lifespan of many of the technologies we are using (much shorter than the length of our careers), standards and interoperability etc.

To illustrate some of these points I look at a few services on the Web that are being used by learners to enable some form of eportfolio related services then have a look at a services model for ePortfolios based around a model originally put forward by the JISC in the UK.

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Posted June 13, 2008