Today is the final day of the InLOC project — a European ICT Standardization Work Programme project I have been leading since November 2011. So a good day for an initial review and reflection. I blogged some previous thoughts on InLOC in November 2012 and February this year.
21. Putting together a good interoperability specification is hard, and especially so for competence. I've tried to work into InLOC as many of the considerations in this Logic of Competence series as I could, but these are all limited by the scope of a pragmatically plausible goal. My hypothesis is that it's not possible to have a spec that is at the same time both technically simple and flexible, and intuitively understandable to domain practitioners.
Is there a good term for my specialist area of work for CETIS? I've been trying out "technology for learner support", but that doesn't fully seem to fit the bill. If I try to explain, reflecting on 10 years (as of this month) involvement with CETIS, might readers be able to help me?
The idea that I am calling "follower guidance" is about how to relate with chosen others to promote good work, well being, personal growth and development, in an essentially peer-to-peer manner — it's an alternative to "mentoring".
InLOC is a European project organised to come up with a good way of communicating structures or frameworks of competence, learning outcomes etc. We've now produced our interim reports for consultation: the Information Model and the Guidelines. We welcome feedback from everyone, to ensure this becomes genuinely useful and not just another academic exercise.
20. Modelling competence is too far removed from common experience to be intuitive. So I've been thinking of what analogy might help. How about the analogy of tourism? This may help particularly with understanding the duality between competence frameworks (like tourist itineraries) and competence concept definitions (like tourist destinations).
19. Descriptions of personal ability can serve either as claims, like "This is what I am good at ...", or as answers to questions like "What are you good at?" or "can you ... ?" In conversations – whether informally, or formally as in a job interview – the claims, questions, and answers may be more or less specific. That is a necessary and natural feature of communication. It is the implications of this that I want to explore here, as they bear on my current work, in particular including the InLOC project.
Today I had a most helpful phone call with a kind lady from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), and it has illuminated the area of the competence world, related to regulation, that I was very unclear about, so I thought I would try to share my increased understanding.
We had a badges session last week at the CETIS conference (here are some summary slides and my slides on some requirements). I'd like to reflect on that, not directly (as Phil has done) but instead by looking forward on how a badge system for leisure activity might be put together.
Several of us in CETIS have been to the CEN Workshop Learning Technologies (WS-LT), but as far as I know none yet to a closely related Workshop on ICT Skills. Their main claim to fame is the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF), a simpler alternative to SFIA (developed by the BCS and partners). It was interesting on several counts, and raises some questions we could all give an opinion on.
