The LEAP2A specification - for e-portfolio portability and interoperability - means a lot to the developers who have worked on it, but can be a challenge to describe concisely to others who are less familiar with this technology. Recently it was suggested that I write a short article to do just that, and it appeared in Issue 16 of the ALT Newsletter, May 2009.
Yesterday I went to an interesting event in Reading (at the University) called “Future-proofing PDP and ePortfolios“. My role was only to answer questions in a Q&A session on interoperability, but as there were few technical people around it was called “Can I take away what I’ve put into our PDP system?”
Two really interesting points emerged.
The wiki tool in question is from Learning Objects. The general idea is that learners find wiki technology an easy way to write a presentation, and if that is what they want to do with a “portfolio”, it should work fine - as indeed any wiki technology. I don’t know how important the integration with the rest of the e-learning system would be.
But this in turn brings up the question, if wikis are used as a platform for constructing e-portfolio presentations, can we make them interoperable with other e-portfolio systems? It would be great if we could. I intend to ask around, and think around, this issue, and write more. The basic idea would be to get a new version of LEAP2 out - LEAP2R - that would be LEAP2 in RDFa - and then see if a wiki system can be tweaked to export and import XHTML+RDFa in LEAP2R format. We would of course also build transforms to convert between LEAP2A and LEAP2R.
Through the RDFa blog I see a new specification, Common Tag, that various service providers have agreed, for a way of associating local text tags to URIs. This could be very helpful for many reasons, but in general, for making your own tags understandable to the outside world, including software working through the Semantic Web.
My book, “Electronic Portfolios: Personal information, personal development and personal values” has recently been published, and is eventually available on Amazon etc.
The publishers have it in their catalogue.
I was very surprised by the high list price, which I have had no influence over. I would publish it for no more than half that price. Perhaps the publishers aren’t expecting all that many sales? But I hope that doesn’t stop people ordering it for their libraries. It is relevant to many different people, and the principles should be valid for a few years, so I’d say it’s worth having in any library where there are educators using e-portfolios, or developers developing them.
