Simon Grant of CETIS

The concept of the personal learning environment could helpfully be more related to the e-portfolio (e-p), as both can help informal learning of skills, competence, etc., whether these abilities are formally defined or not.

Several people at CETIS/IEC here in Bolton had a wide-ranging discussion this Thursday morning (2010-02-18), focused around the concept of the “personal learning environment” or PLE. It’s a concept that CETIS people helped develop, from the Colloquia system, around 1996, and Bill Olivier and Oleg Liber formulated in a paper in 2001 — see http://is.gd/8DWpQ . The idea is definitely related to an e-portfolio, in that an e-p can store information related to this personal learning, and the idea is generally to have portfolio information continue “life-long” across different episodes of learning.

As Scott Wilson pointed out, it may be that the PLE concept overreached itself. Even to conceive of “a” system that supports personal learning in general is hazardous, as it invites people to design a “big” system in their own mind. Inevitably, such a “big” system is impractical, and the work on PLEs that was done between, say, 2000 and 2005 has now been taken forward in different ways — Scott’s work on widgets is a good example of enabling tools with a more limited scope, but which can be joined together as needed.

We’ve seen parallel developments in the e-portfolio world. I think back to LUSID, from 1997, where the emphasis was on individuals auditing and developing their transferable / employability skills. Then increasingly we saw the emergence of portfolio tools that included more functionality: presentation to others (through the web); “social” communication and collaboration tools. Just as widgets can be seen as the dethroning of the concept of monolithic learning technology in general, so the “thin portfolio” concept (borrowing from the prior “personal information aggregation and distribution service” concept) represents the idea that you don’t need that portfolio information in one server; but that it is very helpful to have one place where one can access all “your” information, and set permissions for others to view it. This concept is only beginning to be implemented. The current PIOP 3 work plans to lay down more of the web services groundwork for this, but perhaps we should be looking over at the widgets work.

Skills and competences have long been connected with portfolio tools. Back in 1997 LUSID had a framework structure for employability skills. But what is new is the recent greatly enlarged extent of interest in learning outcomes, abilities, skills and competencies. Recent reading for eCOTOOL has revealed that the ECVET approach, as well as being firmly based on “outcomes” (which ICOPER also focuses), also recognises non-formal and informal learning as central. Thus ECVET credit is not attached only to vocational courses, but also to the accreditation of prior learning by institutions that are prepared to validate the outcomes involved. Can we, perhaps, connect with this European policy, and develop tools that are aimed at helping to implement it? It takes far sighted institutions to give up the short term gain of students enrolled on courses and instead to assess their prior learning and validate their existing abilities. But surely it makes sense in the long run, as long as standards are maintained?

If we are to have learning technology — and it really doesn’t matter if you call them PLEs, e-portfolios or whatever — that supports the acquisition or improvement of skills and competence by individuals in their own diverse ways, then surely a central organising principle within those tools needs to be the skills, competencies or whatever that the individual wants to acquire or improve. Can we draw, perhaps on the insights of PLE and related work, put them together with e-portfolio work, and focus on tools to manage the components of competence? In the IEC, we have all our experience on the TENCompetence project that has finished, as well as ICOPER that is underway and eCOTOOL that is starting. Then we expect there will be work associated with PIOP 3 that brings in frameworks of skill and competence. Few people can be in a better position to do this work that we are in CETIS/IEC.

In part, I would formulate this as providing technology and tools to help people recognise their existing (uncertificated) skills, evidence them (the portfolio part) and then help them, and the institutions they attend, to assess this “prior learning” (APL) and bring it in to the world of formal recognition, and qualifications.

But I think there is another very important aspect to the technology connected with the PLE concept, and that is to provide the guidance that learners need to ensure they get on the “right” course. At the meeting, we discussed how employers often do not want the very graduates whose studies have titles that seem to related directly to the job. What has gone wrong? It’s all very well treating students like customers — “the customer is always right” — but what happens when a learner wants to take a course aimed at something one believes they are not going to be successful at? Perhaps the right intervention is to start earlier, helping learners clarify their values before their goals, understand who they are before deciding what they should do. This would be “personal learning” in the sense of learning about oneself. Perhaps the PDP part of the e-portfolio community, and those who come from careers guidance, know more about this, but even they sometimes seem not to know what to do for the best. To me, this self-knowledge requires a social dimension (with the related existing tools), and is something that needs to be able to draw on many aspects of a learner’s life (”lifewide” portfolio perhaps).

So, to reconstruct PLE ideas, not as monolithic systems, but as parts, there are two key parts in my view.

The first would be a tool for bringing together evidence residing in different systems, and organising it to provide material for reflection on, and evidence of, skills and competence across different areas of life, and integrating with institutional systems for recognising what has already been learned, as well as slotting people in to suitable learning opportunities. This would play a natural part in continuous professional development, and in the relatively short term learning education and training needs we have, which we can see we need from an existing working perspective, and thus, in the kind of workplace learning that many are predicting will need to grow.

The second may perhaps be not a tool but several tools to help people understand themselves, their values, their motives, their real goals, and the activities and employment that they would actually find satisfying, rather than what they might falsely imagine. Without this function, any learning education or training risks being wasted. Doing this seems much more challenging, but also much more deeply interesting to me.

This conceptual model now includes basic ideas about what goes on in the individual, plus some of the most important concepts for PDP and e-portfolio use, as well as the generalised formalisable concepts processes surrounding individual action. It has come a long way since the last time I wrote about it.

The minimised version is here, first…

and that is complex enough, with so many relationship links looking like a bizarre and distorted spider’s web. Now for the full version, which is quite scarily complex now…

Perhaps that is the inevitable way things happen. One thinks some more. One talks to some more people. The model grows, develops, expands. The parts connected to “placement processes” were stimulated by Luk Vervenne’s contribution to the workshop in Berlin of my previous blog entry. But — and I find hard to escape from this — much of the development is based on internal logic, and just looking at it from different points of view.

It still makes sense to me, of course, because I’ve been with it through its growth and development. But is there any point in putting such a complex structure up on my blog? I do not know. It’s reached the stage where perhaps it needs turning into a paper-length exposition, particularly including all the explanatory notes that you can see if you use CmapTools, and breaking it down into more digestible, manageable parts. I’ve put the CXL file and a PDF version up on my own concept maps page. I can only hope that some people will find this interesting enough to look carefully at some of the detail, and comment… (please!) If you’re really interested, get in touch to talk things over with me. But the thinking will in any case surface in other places. And I’ll link from here later if I do a version with comments that is easier to get at.

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.

1. Many institutions feel stuck with Blackboard at present, even for their portfolio functionality. Generally, they are unhappy with this.
2. There are a few interesting tools that work in Blackboard, and people are keen on using the wiki facility for building portfolio presentations.

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.

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.

Last Thursday (2009-04-16) I went to a very interesting meeting in Leeds, specially arranged, at the Leeds Institute of Medical Education, between various interested parties, about their needs and ideas for interoperability with e-portfolio tools - but also about skills frameworks.

It was interesting particularly because it showed more evidence of a groundswell of willingness to work towards e-portfolio interoperability, and this has two aspects for the people gathered (6 including me). On the one hand, the ALPS CETL is working with MyKnowledgeMap (MKM) - a small commercial learning technology vendor based in York - on a project involving health and social care students in their 5 HEIs around Leeds. They are using the MKM portfolio tool, Multi-Port, but are aware of a need to have records which are portable between their system and others. It looks like being a fairly straightforward case of a vendor with a portfolio tool being drawn in to the LEAP2A fold on the back of the success we have had so far - without the need for extra funding. The outcome should be a classic interoperability win-win: learners will be able to export their records to PebblePad, Mahara, etc., and the MKM tool users will be able to import their records from the LEAP2A-implementing systems to kick-start their portfolio records there with the ALPS CETL or other MKM sites.

MKM tools, as suggested by the MKM name, do cover the representation of skills frameworks, and this forms a bridge between two threads to this meeting: first, the ALPS CETL work, and second, the more challenging area of medical education, where frameworks - of knowledge, skill or competence - abound and are pretty important for medical students and in the professional development of medical practitioners, and health professionals more generally.

In this more challenging side of the meeting, we discussed some of the issues surrounding skills frameworks in medical education - including the transfer of students at undergraduate level; the transfer between a medical school like Leeds and a teaching hospital, where the doctors may well soon be using the NHS Foundation Year e-portfolio tools in conjunction with their further training and development; and then on to professional life.

The development of LEAP2A has probably been helped greatly by not trying to do too much all at once. We haven’t yet fully dealt with how to integrate skills frameworks into e-portfolio information. At one very simple level we have covered it - if each skill definition has a URI, that can be referred to by an “ability” item in the LEAP2A. But at another level it is greatly challenging. Here in medical education we have not one, but several real-life scenarios calling for interoperable skills frameworks for use with portfolio tools. So how are we actually going to advise the people who want to create skills frameworks, about how to do this in a useful way? Their users, using their portfolio tools, want to carry forward the learning (against learning outcomes) and evidence (of competence) to another setting. They want the information to be ready to use, to save them repetition - potentially wasteful to the institution as well as the learner.

The answer necessarily goes beyond portfolio technology, and needs to tackle the issues which several people are currently working on: European projects like TENCompetence and ICOPER, where I have given presentations or written papers; older JISC project work I have been involved with (ioNW2, SPWS); and now the recently set up a CETIS team on competences.

Happily, it seems like we are all pushing at an open door. I am happy to be able to respond in my role as Learning Technology Advisor for e-portfolio technology, and point MKM towards the documentation on - and those with experience of implementing - LEAP2A. And the new competence team has been looking for a good prompt to hold an initial meeting. I imagine we might hold a meeting, perhaps around the beginning of July, focused on frameworks of skills, competence, knowledge, and their use together with curriculum learning outcomes, with assessment criteria, and with portfolio evidence? The Leeds people would be very willing to contribute. Then, perhaps JISC might offer a little extra funding (on the same lines as previous PIOP and XCRI projects) to get together a group of medical educators to implement LEAP2A and related skills frameworks together - in whatever way we all agree is good to take forward the skills framework developments.

The Portfolio InterOperability Projects (PIOP) partners have been working hard on our LEAP2A spec for portfolio interoperability and portability, and at our meeting last week we ironed out some of the last things necessary to agree a good working specification, able to represent just about any information that is in common use in more than one e-portfolio system. The spec just allows for export/download and import/upload so far, rather than web services, but that will come later.

The spec has been developed with and by developers for developers, so it is relatively easy to implement, being based on Atom. Several people working on e-portfolio-related projects were at the JISC e-Learning Programme meeting yesterday (at Aston) and there was plenty of positive and encouraging comment around.

Anyone interested is very welcome to comment on where we have got to, and send me suggestions for improvement so that any other relevant system dealing with similar information can have the appropriate information also represented in LEAP2A, to enable interoperability with the rest of our established partners.

I’ve been telling people, for quite a while, that I will write up suggestions for how to deal with abilities (competence, competencies, knowledge, etc. etc.) for many reasons, including particularly e-portfolio related uses. Well, here are my current ideas for the New Year.

They are expressed in a set of linked pages, each dealing with a facet of the issues. The pages are very much draft ideas, but serve the purpose of getting out the basic ideas and inviting other ideas for improvement. If you have an interest, please do at least leave a comment here, or e-mail me with ideas and suggestions.

When looking at XML specifications, first look for what are the resources, or objects, or entities. When you have one of these contained in another, ask, what is their relationship? That will help inform a sensible version of the XML spec, if you really must have one.

Didn’t I do well getting the core ideas into less than however many words? OK, now for the full version…

Yesterday we (Scott and I) were visited by Karim Derrick of TAG Learning. Karim and TAG are championing a BSI initiative, scheduled to be BS 8518, for the transfer of assessment data - particularly focused on coursework. They are being generous: they are doing the development work, based on their own and their clients’ needs, and handing it over to BSI for standardisation, so that all can benefit.

One of the things that we are keen on in CETIS is doing standards and specifications in a sensible way. We have long had a strong line in discouraging people from doing ill-advised things (perhaps a bit like the supposed Google message of not being evil) but I’m not very well-adapted for that, so I welcome the complementary approach of positively trying to encourage people to do sensible things, which I think is gaining strength in CETIS. The inherent challenge is coming to some kind of collective view on how to standardise the subject matter in hand - even if this is, wait (until something happens), and only then, do it. Within this line of doing good things, one that we seem to agree on is to do with XML specifications. And so I come back to the main thrust of this post.

Doing XML semantically is what has happened in XCRI (thanks to Scott Wilson and others) and now, with my involvement, in LEAP2A. It is easy in an Atom-based specification to follow this pattern, because Atom’s simple basic structure invites any kind of portfolio item to be an entry, and the relationships between them to be Atom links. For the same reason, Atom tends to be easy to read. But it is not too difficult to do this as well in your own XML language, if you just take a little care. You should look at every element, to see whether it is a thing, a relationship, or data - in RDF terms, a resource, a property or predicate, or a literal. TAG’s draft specification has pupils, as it is designed primarily for schools, rather than students. Pupils are things, in these terms! It has centres, which are often where the teaching and the coursework assessment takes place. What is the relationship between a student and a centre? Just taking leave of the TAG proposal for a minute, and thinking of other possibilities, if there were always only one centre, and all the students belonged to that centre, there would be no need even to represent the students within (in XML terms) the centre. If there are different groups of students within a centre, it might make sense to have within the centre element, elements defining what the relationship is between the centre and this particular group of students.

Then, one part of the draft has pupil elements containing marksheets. Again, what is the relationship? If there is only one possible, you don’t need a container element standing between the pupil and individual marksheet elements. If there is more than one possible relationship, then it would make sense for to have a pupil element containing a wrapper for marksheets, and that wrapper would be associated with the relationship (properly; predicate in RDF terms).

I hope that gives some kind of hint, at least, on how to do XML in a way that makes sense both from the domain point of view, and semantically. The payoff is this. If the mapping to RDF is clear, then someone should be able, without too much difficulty, to create an XSLT to do the transform. Then, if someone else wants to do a different XML spec, or has already done so, and it also transforms to RDF, there is a good basis for knowing whether similar information presented in the two XML specs is actually the same, or not.

One particularly attractive version of this is to have an RDFa representation, which of course of its very nature yeilds RDF on transformation. So you can present exactly the same information in XHTML, readable by anyone in a browser, and formatted to make it easy to read and to understand, and still have all the information just as machine-processable as any XML spec. That’s just what I want to do for LEAP2.

All this is an extension on what I wrote earlier…

Since going to the annual European Eifel “ePortfolio” conferences is a firm habit of mine (in fact, I have been to every single annual one so far) it seems like a good time to take stock of the e-portfolio world. All credit to Serge and Maureen and their team, they have kept the event as being the best “finger on the pulse” in this field. This year was, as last, in Maastricht. It extended to just 3 rather than 4 days, and there were apparently some hundred fewer people overall. Nevertheless, others as well as I felt that there was an even better overall feel this year. At the excellent social dinner boat trip, I was reflecting, where else can one move so quickly from discussing deeply human issues like personal development, with people who care very insightfully about people, to talking technically about the relative merits of the languages and representations used for implementation of tools and systems, with people who are highly technically competent? It makes sense for this account to take both of those tracks.

Taking the easy one first, then…  We didn’t have a “plugfest” this year, which was in some ways odd: the last three years (since Cambridge, 2005) we have had some attempt at interoperability trials, even though no one was really ready for them. (People did remarkably well, considering.) But this year, when in the PIOP work with LEAP2A we really have started something that is going to work, there were no trials, just presentations. Actually I think that it is much better for being less “hyped”. By next year we should have something really solid to present and demonstrate. I presented our work at two sessions, and in both it was well received.

Not everyone likes XML schema specifications - Sampo Kellomäki enlightened me about some of the gross failings around XML - but luckily, those who aren’t so keen on XML or Atom seemed to appreciate the other side of LEAP 2.0 - the side of RDF and the Semantic Web connections, and the RDFa ideas I first understood in my work for ioNW2. It was good to have something for everyone with a technical interest.

What was disappointing was to understand more closely just what has been happening in the Netherlands. Someone must have made the decision a couple of years ago to follow “the international standard” of IMS ePortfolio, not taking account of the fact that it had not been properly tested in use. That’s how the IMS used to work (though no longer):  get a spec out there quickly, get someone to implement it, and then improve towards something workable based on feedback. But though there were “implementations” of IMS eP, there was no real test of interoperability or portability. Various people we know and work with had tried it, even up to last year’s conference, so we knew many of the problems. Anyway, in the Netherlands, they have been struggling to adapt and profile that difficult spec, and despite the large amount of public funding put in to the project (too much?), most of the couple of dozen national partners have only implemented a subset even of their own limited profile. And IMS eP is not being used as an internal representation by anyone.

Fortunately, Synergetics, who have been involved in the Dutch work (despite being Belgian) have also joined our forthcoming round of PIOP work, and talk towards the end of the conference was that LEAP2A will be added to the Dutch interoperability framework. I do hope this goes through - we will support it as much as we are able. Synergetics also play a leading role in the impressive TAS3 project, so we can expect that as time goes on pathways will emerge to add security architecture to our interoperability approach. But now on to the much more humanly interesting discussions.

I had the good luck to bump into Darren Cambridge (as usual, a keynote speaker) on the evening before the conference, and we talked over some of the ideas I’ve been developing, which at the moment I label as “personal integrity reflection across contexts”. Now that needs writing about separately, but in essence it involves a way of thinking about how to promote real growth, development and change in people’s lives. We also talked about this with Samantha Slade of Percolab - Darren analysed Samantha’s e-portfolio for his forthcoming book (which will be more erudite and better written than mine!).

These discussions were the peak, but elsewhere throughout the conference I got the feeling that the time is now perhaps right to move forward more publicly with discussing values in relation to e-portfolios. Parts of my vision were expressed in Anna’s and my paper two years ago in the Oxford conference – “Ethical portfolios: supporting identities and values.” In essence, it goes like this: portfolio practice can help to develop people’s values, and their understanding of their own values; with that understanding, they can choose occupations which lead to satisfaction and fulfillment; representing those values in machine-readable form may lead to much more potent matching within the labour market - another tool towards “flexicurity”(a term introduced to me 10 minutes ago by Theo Mensen). The new expression of insight is that development of personal values, and understanding them, is supported by some kinds of reflection, and not others. The term I am trying out to point towards the most useful and powerful kind of reflection is that “personal integrity reflection across contexts”. I hope the ideas can be taken forward and presented in more depth next year.

At the conference there was also a focus on “Learning Regions” (the subject of Theo’s call), which I wasn’t able to attend much of. My view of regional initiatives has been somewhat jaded by peripheral involvement years ago with regional development agencies that seemed to have just one agenda item: inward investment. But the vision at the conference was much broader and humane. My input is quite limited. Firstly, to get anything distinctive for a region going, there needs to be a common language for the distinctive concerns (and groups of concerns) for a region. If this is done machine-readably (e.g. RDF) then there is the hope for cross linkage, not just in the labour market but beyond. Again, as in my ioNW2 work, this could well be based on clear and unambiguous URIs being set up for each concept, and possibly this could be extended to having some kind of ontology in the background. Then there is the question of two-way matching, already trialled in a small way by the Dutch public employment service (CWI).

This leads to an opportunity for me to round up. There is so much that could be contributed to by e-portfolio practice and tools; and the sense of this conference was that indeed, things are set to move forward. But it still depends on matters which are not fully and generally understood. There is this issue of representing skills/competences/abilities which will not go away until dealt with satisfactorily (beyond TENCompetence), and alongside that, the issue of assessment of those in a way which makes sense to employers (and of which the results can be machine processed). That “hard” assessment needs to be reconciled with the more humane e-portfolio based assessment, which I think everyone agrees is already very good to get a feel for those last few short-listable candidates. Portfolio tools still have a way to go until they are relevant for search and automatic matching.

But my opinion is that progress here, and elsewhere, can definitely be made.