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.

In explaining the diagram, I explain what the different colours represent. I’m still waiting for critique (or reasoned support, for that matter) of the types of thing I find so helpful in conceptual modelling (again, see previous post on this).

As I find so often, detailed thinking for any particular purpose has clarified one part of the diagram. I have introduced (and will bring back into the mainstream of my modelling) an “assessment result pattern”. I recognise that logically you cannot specify actual results as pre-requisites for opportunities, but rather patterns, such as “pass” or “at least 80%” for particular assessments. It takes a selection process (which I haven’t represented explicitly anywhere yet) to compare actual results with the required result pattern.

Overall, this section 2 of the deliverable explains quite a lot about a part of the overall conceptual model intended to be at least approximately from the point of view of ICOPER. The title of this deliverable, “Model for describing learning needs and learning opportunities taking context ontology modelling into account” was perhaps not what would have been chosen at the time of writing, but we needed to write to satisfy that title. Here, “learning needs” is understood as intended learning outcomes, which is not difficult to cover as it is central to ICOPER.

The deliverable as a whole continues with a review of MLO, the prospective European Standard on Metadata for Learning Opportunities (Advertising), to get in the “learning opportunities” aspect. Then it goes on to suggests an information model for “Learning Outcome Definitions”. This is a tricky one, as one cannot really avoid IMS RDCEO and IEEE RCD. As I’ve argued in the past, I don’t think these are really substantially more helpful than just using Dublin Core, and in a way the ICOPER work here implicitly recognises this, in that even though they still doff a cap to those two specs, most of RDCEO is “profiled” away, and instead a “knowledge / skill / competence” category is added, to square with the concepts as described in the EQF.

Perhaps the other really interesting part of the deliverable was one we put in quite a lot of joint thinking to. Jad came up with the title “Personal Achieved Learning Outcomes” (PALO), which is fine for what is intended to be covered here. What we have come up with (provisionally, it must be emphasised) is a very interesting mixture of bits that correspond to the overall conceptual model, with the addition of the kind of detail needed to turn a conceptual model into an information or data model. Again, not surprisingly, this raises some interesting questions for the overall conceptual model. How does the concept of achievement (in this deliverable) relate to the overall model’s “personal claim expression”? This “PALO” model is a good effort towards something that I haven’t personally written much about - how do you represent context in a helpful way for intended learning outcomes or competences? If you’re interested, see what you think. For most skills and competences, one can imagine several aspects of context that are really meaningful, and without which describing things would definitely lose something. Can you do it better?

I hope I’ve written enough to stimulate a few people at least to skim through that deliverable D2.2.

The kick-off meeting was in Essen, December 14th to 16th, and this post is an attempt to summarise our agreed starting point.

Partners

The University of Duisberg-Essen (UDE) is leading the project, and the 8 partners besides UDE and ourselves are

• BIBB, the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training
• MAICh, the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, Crete
• ELOT, the Greek national body for standardization
• Agro-Know Technologies, a Greek “research-oriented enterprise”
• UZEI, the Czech Institute of Agricultural Economics and Information
• KGZS, the Chamber of Agriculture and Forestry of Slovenia
• ISFOL, the Italian Institute for the Development of Vocational Training
• KION SpA, a company developing information systems for Italian universities

ISFOL and BIBB include their respective National Europass Centres.

We know several of the people involved through previous work. Christian M. Stracke, the overall project director, has been involved in many European standards bodies and projects. Cleo Sgouropoulou (ELOT) and Simone Ravaioli (KION) are part of the core team working with me on the European Learner Mobility work, assisted by Christian, our Scott (also working on this project), Alessandra Biancolini (ISFOL) and others. To understand this project, it is useful to set it in the context of this and other related work.

What the project is doing

At the meeting, Christian Stracke described as the “story in brief” how eCOTOOL provides the missing ingredient to add to a mix of

• Europass Certificate Supplement
• PAS 1093
• EQF
• ECVET

to create a “Europass CS with Competence as Application Profile and XML.” What this means in practice is (I hope) explained in what follows.

What is the ECS, and how could it be used?

Well then, what is this Europass Certificate Supplement? Its cousin the Europass Diploma Supplement (EDS) is better known, as the EDS has much in common with transcripts offered to graduates, and the HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Report) that is expected to supersede the transcript in the UK. The ECS, in contrast, does not have details of the results of individual learners. Exactly the same certificate is given to all those who successfully complete the same course. It is not designed for the kind of academic study where learners get marks and grades depending on their exam results, but rather for the kind of training course where people pass or fail. Either you can do something, or you can’t, the view would be, and being awarded the Certificate says that you can, because you did the course. The key information held in the ECS is the detailing of what it is that someone can do after successful completion of the course, which is just what the EDS does not record. This is done in the ECS Section 3, called “Profile of skills and competences”. However, the paper ECS does not define any specified structure to this section, leaving it simply as a text box. This is adequate for human reading, but inadequate for precise automatic use of the information contained.

Despite the lack of official definition, a common practice has built up in ECS use to list perhaps 5 to 15 items in Section 3, each comprising one sentence starting with an action verb. The expectation seems to be that a list of skill and competence items is defined specifically for each ECS offered, which may be common to several courses across different providers. This at least offers a little more informal standardization, and perhaps increases the ease of translation, but still does not address automatic processing well.

But, surely, there is much that could be done with an ECS with more electronic detail and structure, particularly in that Section 3. Here are a few ideas, based on ones that came up at the meeting.

• National Europass Centres would be able to manage the national collection of ECS documents, being able, for instance, to search for all ECSs that had a particular skill or competence line.
• Learners and training providers would be able to search for courses that had ECSs containing particular skills or competences. Learners (or their employers) could use this to plan their training; training providers could look for competitors, or gaps in the training market.
• ECS information could be downloaded into e-portfolio tools for use by learners, without the need to cut and paste; or possibly even presented through e-portfolio tools, without any need for an actual downloading or copying. This, in turn, would facilitate the creation of CVs or other presentations that were searchable by recruiters for particular skills or competences.

The other “ingredients” of eCOTOOL are interesting for their illustration of the kind of approach to be taken.

PAS 1093 – what’s that?

Translated into English, this “Publicly Available Standard” deals with “Human Resource Development with special consideration of Learning, Education and Training – Competence Modelling in Human Resource Development”. In the Foreword, it is described as “This Publicly Available Specification (PAS) is a Reference Framework for the development as well as for the structural comparison and evaluation of competence Modeling in Human Resource Development.”

What PAS 1093 does do is give a structure for HR staff to go through the process of documenting the competences that are relevant to them. “Reference Framework” is a very slippery label, and PAS 1093 may not do other things that might be associated with the label. Probably, the essential “framework” could be summarised in a just few pages, but what is also useful about the document is that it sets out some of the thinking behind managing competence information.

An English language version was distributed to project members. It is held at http://www.qed-info.de/downloads.

EQF: the European Qualifications Framework

Much of the documentation for the EQF can be found though its European Commission page.

One obvious aim of the project is to include EQF terminology where appropriate into the information available through ECS documents. Clearly, one place for this is in Section 5, “Official basis of the certificate”, but ideally there might be a way of tracking though individual skills and competences in Section 3 to a corresponding EQF level, if that is not the same as the overall level of the certificate. There are two essential aspects to EQF terminology:

• the levels, 1 to 8;
• the distinction between knowledge, skill and competence;

and we may also want to find a good way of representing which of these categories a particular line or definition falls into.

ECVET

The European Credit system for Vocational Education and Training (ECVET) is nicely introduced by that linked page on the European Commission site. ECVET intends to do for vocational education and training something like what the ECTS (the credit transfer system) does for university education, helping learners move between courses and between countries, both during and after their VET. However, implementation is not envisaged until 2012 and after.

ECVET depends partly on representing the intended learning outcomes of VET opportunities. Some countries have defined standards like the UK’s National Occupational Standards, which serve to underpin the UK’s National Vocational Qualifications. In principle, if similar national standards were established across Europe, and cross-related to each other, this might provide the right basis for ECVET to work.

The eCOTOOL project takes the agricultural sector as a test case for establishing what can be done. We will have to deal with considerable diversity, including such variations as the fact that in the UK, there are different NVQs, NOSs and Sector Skills Councils for agriculture (LANTRA) and food and drink (Improve), while in other countries they are taken together. To me, that makes quite a lot of sense, as some countries retain much farm-based production, whereas in the UK food raw materials have for a long time come from UK farms and abroad.

Relationship to my other work

I’ve had an interest in National Occupational Standards and representing competencies for several years now, partly though work done for XCRI and the ioNW2 project funded by JISC and run by GMSA, and partly what I have written for TENCompetence project workshops. Most recently, there are very strong connections with the European Learner Mobility work I mentioned above, the ICOPER project we are also now involved in, and all the skill and competence related discussions I have been involved in through our CETIS work on competences, and the related CEN WS-LT competency group. All of this feeds in to my role in eCOTOOL.

My role in eCOTOOL

Our main responsibility in eCOTOOL is for WP1, which is called “Application Profile Development of Europass CS”. In the kick-off meeting we had to explain that the term “application profile” really just meant an information model, but one that could well be created on the basis of other established specifications. Much as we did in the European Learner Mobility work, this will mean starting with the ECS structure as it is, and working out how best to represent that as elements in an information model. Obviously, we need to be able to represent existing plain document ECS examples, but we also want to look carefully at possible integration with other Europass documents (including the DS, which we have worked extensively on), and we want to bear in mind all the likely uses of this kind of competence information.

One particular issue that I will focus on first will be the relationship between the one-line versions of a skill or competence that currently appear in Section 3 of ECS documents, and the fuller definition of skills and competences that would not actually appear in an ECS document, but which are often implicit in course offerings. One of the issues that also impinges greatly on the portfolio interoperability work involving LEAP2A is how to represent structures of related skill and competence definitions. All this has to be done, of course, in a way that allows useful tools for applications that are really wanted by end users – in our case, particularly learners and training bodies in the area of agricultural VET.

I would (of course!) welcome any comments or correspondence, as it would be good to integrate as many good ideas as we can grasp.

Why and how the Semantic Web

We want interoperability specifications and standards with a Semantic Web underlay,

• because that is
  • the fundamental common denominator,
  • well-adapted to evolving systems,
  • good for reuse,
  • post-modern;
• using and enabling a “linked data” strategy, with emphasis on:
  • URI-identified resources,
    • with types of resource that are widely agreed for a domain;
  • links between them,
    • using common DC-like relationships/properties/predicates;
• but with no immediate need for RDF all at once…
  • for RDF, think more Turtle than RDF/XML;
  • any XML should be RDF friendly:
    • able to be clearly mapped and transformed to triples;
    • there may be blank nodes
      • which may be filled in one day;
  • can approach RDF via RDFa and/or GRDDL approaches;
  • may not need XML, as long what there is can be transformed to RDF;
• using the DCMI Abstract Model as a reference point.

Where a community of practice exists

Where there is good existing practice with electronic tools, experience suggests that it is effective to start with an informal, community-driven specification initiative, and the community in question would be in the best position to decide if and when to offer the specification to a formal body for standardisation. Such an initiative could:

• start from existing data;
• inclusively unify current good practice.

This unification would involve:

• establishing common conceptual models as groundwork (see below);
• identifing elements that are close enough, and merging them;
• retaining elements that are likely to be used in more than one system.

Good qualities for a target specification include:

• the appropriate reuse of existing RDF-friendly specs;
• ease of implementation;
• graceful degradation for lesser-used features;
• being able to be repurposed and reused in the same way that it reuses other specs.

Common conceptual models

Where there is as yet insufficient practice to fuel a specification effort by a community of practice, it is useful to get together as many people as are interested, from formal and informal groupings, and:

• seek first to agree on a clear common conceptual model  where everyone’s point of view is represented, filling out hidden, elided concepts,
  • recognising that this involves all in development, as
  • it is a challenge to loosen up a conceptual scheme, so
  • people need support and the right context.

Such a conceptual modelling process can work well by being primed with personal discussions between those able to develop their conceptual models. It is essential to the viability of a common conceptual model that everyone with a significant variant opinion is drawn in to the process of working towards a common model. Each of these discussions needs to focus on mutual understanding and a mutual development of positions so that each position comes to include a partial model that is shared between the parties. This takes time – typically several hours, not a few minutes – but is very promising.

This deep communication and shared modelling process is certainly not well-adapted to formal committee procedure. Nor is it suitable for a collective process of a community of interest or of practice. But both formal and informal bodies can perfectly well encourage dialogues of this kind to happen, and seek to check whether they have in fact taken place sufficiently to provide the basis of a usable common model.

Clearly, some people find loosening their conceptual structures more difficult than others. Bodies, formal and informal, should ideally stress that this is necessary, provide encouragement (and perhaps even education or training) in how to do it, and finally discourage those who are unable or unwilling to do this from participating in these processes at all.

Information models, specifications and standards

After the agreement of a common conceptual model, information models can be based on it, as the basis for specifications and eventually standards. This does not mean that the whole conceptual model needs to be represented in any information model, nor even that complete parts of the conceptual model need to be. If no relevant information attaches to a particular concept in the conceptual model, it is quite reasonable to leave it out from a practical information model (resulting in what I have termed “elision”) as long as the conceptual model is kept in mind to refer back to.

Derivative information models should, rather:

• feel comfortable to practitioners;
• not be hard to implement;
• but still be interoperable.

Notes and references

• Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/
• Post-modern: for a good understanding of this, I recommend the book “In Over Our Heads” by Robert Kegan.
• Linked Data: e.g. http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data or http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
• DC = Dublin Core (Metadata Initiative): http://dublincore.org/
• RDF: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
• Turtle: http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/
• RDFa: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/
• GRDDL: http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/
• DCMI Abstract Model: http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/
• Elision: term borrowed from linguistics, denoting the custom of leaving something out that is not needed for communication.
• See also my previous post on consensus process, and the several recent ones on the development of a conceptual model.

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.

Tuesday, December 1st, Berlin — a rainy day in the Ambassador Hotel, talking with an esteemed bunch of people about modelling skill/competence/competency. I won’t go on about participants and agenda — these can be seen at http://sites.google.com/site/competencydriven/ It was all interesting stuff, conducted in a positive atmosphere of enquiry. I’ll write here about just the issues that struck me, which were quite enough…

How many kinds of model are there?

At the meeting, there seemed to be quite some uncertainty about what kind of model we might be trying to agree on. I don’t know about other people, but I discern two kinds of model:

• a conceptual model attempting to represent how people understand entities and relationships in the world;
• an information model that could be used for expressing and exchanging information of common interest.

A binding isn’t really a separate model, but an expression of an information model.

My position, which I know is shared by several others, is that to be effective, information models should be based on common conceptual models. The point here is that without an agreed conceptual model, it is all too easy to imagine that you are building an information model where the terms mean the same thing, and play the same role. This could lead to conflict when agreeing the information model, as different people’s ideas would be based on different conceptual models, which would be hard to reconcile, or even worse in the long term, troublesome ambiguity could become embedded in an information model. Not all ambiguity is troublesome, if the things you are being ambiguous about really share the same information model, but no doubt you can imagine what I mean.

Claims and requirements for competence

A long-term aim of many people is to match what is learned in education with what is required for employment — Luk Vervenne was as usual championing the employer point of view. After reflection on what we have at the moment, and incorporating some of Luk’s ideas in the common information model I’ve been putting together, I’d say we have enough there to make a start, at least, in detailing what a competency claim might be, and how that might relate to a competency requirement.

In outline, a full claim for a single separate competence component could have

• the definition of that component (or just a title or brief description if no proper definition available)
• any assessment relevant to that component, with result
• any qualification or other status relevant to that component (which may imply assessment result)
• a narrative filling the gap between qualifications or assessment and what is claimed
• any relevant testimonials
• a record of relevant experience requiring, or likely to lead to, that competence component
• links to / location of any other relevant “raw” (i.e. unassessed) evidence

I’ll detail later a possible model of competency requirements, and detail how the two could fit together. And I have now put up the latest version of the big conceptual model as well. There is clearly also a consequent need to be clearer about the structure of assessments, and we’ll be working on that, probably both within CETIS and within the CEN WS-LT.

What about competencies in themselves?

Reflected in the meeting, there still seems to be plenty of disagreement about the detail that is possible in an information model of a competency. Lester Gilbert, for example put forward a model in which he distinguished, for a fully specified educational objective:

• situation;
• constraints;
• learned capability;
• subject matter content;
• standard of performance;
• tools.

The question here, surely, is, to what extent are these facets of a definition (a) common and shared (b) amenable to representation in a usefully machine-processable way?

Personally, I wouldn’t like to rule anything in or out before investigating more fully. At least this could be a systematic investigation, looking at current practice across a range of application areas, carefully comparing what is used in the different areas. I have little difficulty believing that for most if not all learning outcomes or competency definitions, you could write a piece of text to fit into each of Lester’s headings. What I am much more doubtful about is whether there is any scheme that would get us beyond human-readable text into the situation where we could do any automatic matching on these values. Even if there are potential solutions for some, like medical subject headings for the subject matter content, we would need these labels to be pretty repeatable and consistent in order for them to be used automatically. And, what would we do with things like “situation”? The very best I could imagine for situation would be a classification of the different situations that are encountered in the course of a particular occupation. In UK NOSs, these might be written in to the documentation, either explicitly or implicitly. Similar considerations would apply to Lester’s “tools” facet. This might be tractable in the longer term, but would require at least the creation of many domain-specific ontologies, and the linking of any particular definition to one of these domain ontologies.

I can also envisage, as I have been advocating for some time, that some competency definitions would have ontology-like links to other related definitions. These could be ones of equivalence, or the SKOS terms “broadMatch” and “narrowMatch”, in cases where the authorities maintaining the definitions believed that in all contexts, the relationship was applicable.

What about frameworks of skill, competence, etc.?

It surprised me a little that we didn’t actually get round to talking about this in Berlin. But on reflection, with so many other fundamental questions still on the table, perhaps it was only to be expected. Interestingly, so far, I have found more progress here in my participation with MedBiquitous than with the CEN WS-LT.

I’ll write more about this later, but just to trail the key ideas in my version of the MedBiquitous approach:

• a framework has some metadata (DC is a good basis), a set of competency objects, and a map;
• the map is a set of propositions about the individual competency objects, relating them to each other and to objects that are not part of the framework;
• frameworks themselves can be linked to as constituent parts of a framework, just as individual competency objects;
• it is specified whether to accept the relationships defined within the competency objects, and in particular any breakdown into parts.

The point here is that just about any competency definition could, in principle, be analysed into a set of lower-level skills or competencies. This would be a framework. Equally, most frameworks could be used as objectives in themselves, so playing the same role as an individual competency object, being part of a competency framework. If a framework is included, and marked for including its constituent parts, then all those constituent parts would become part of the framework, by inclusion rather than by direct naming. In this way, it would be easy to extend someone else’s framework rather than duplicating it all.

Need for innovations in process and convention

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion from my point of view was about how we could conduct the processes better. There is a temptation to see the process as a competition between models — this would assume that each model is fixed in advance, and that people can be objective about their own, as well as other people’s models. Probably neither of these assumptions is justified. Most people seem to accept the question as “how can a common conceptual model be made from these models?”, even though there may be little wisdom around on how to do this. There is also the half-way approach of “what common information elements can be discerned between these models?” that might come into play if the greater aim of unifying the conceptual models was relinquished.

From my point of view, this brings me back to two points that I have come to recognise only in recent months.

This meeting, for me, displayed some of the same pattern as many previous ones. I was interested in the models being put forward Luk, and Lester, and others, but it was all too easy not to fully understand them, not quite to reach the stage of recognising the insights from them that could be applied to the model I’m continuing to put together. I put this down to the fact that the meeting environment is not conducive to a deep mutual understanding. One can ask a question here and there, but the questions of others may be related more to their own models, not to the relationship of the model under discussion with one’s own. So, one gets the feeling at the end of the meeting that one hasn’t fully grasped the direction one should take one’s own model. Little growth and development results.

So I proposed in the meeting what I have not actually proposed in a meeting before, that we schedule as many one-to-one conceptual encounters as are needed to facilitate that mutual growth of models at least towards the mutual understanding that could allow a meaningful composite to be assembled, if not a fully constituted isomorphism. I don’t know if people will be bold enough to do this, but I’ll keep on suggesting it in different forums until someone does, because I want to know if it is really an effective strategy.

The other point that struck me again was about the highest-level ontology used. One of the criteria, to my mind, of a conceptual model being truly shared, is that people answer questions about the concepts in recognisably similar ways, or largely the same on a multiple choice basis. Some of those questions could easily relate to the essential nature of the concept in question. In the terms of my own top ontology, is the concept about the material world? Or is it a repeatable pattern, belonging to the world of perception and thought? Is it, rather a concept related to communication — an expression of some kind? Whether this is exactly the most helpful set of distinctions is not the main point — it is that some set of distinctions like this will surely help people to clarify what kind of concepts they are discussing and representing in a conceptual model, and thus help people towards that mutual understanding.

A similar, but less clear point seems to apply to relationships between concepts. Allowed free rein in writing a conceptual model, people seem to write all kinds of things in for the relationships between concepts. Some of them seems to tie things in knots — “is a model of” for instance. So maybe, as well as having clear types for concepts, maybe we could agree a limited vocabulary for permitted relationships. That would certainly help the process of mapping two concept maps to each other. There are also two related conventions I have used in my most recent conceptual model.

1. Whole-part relationships are represented by having contained concepts, of varying types, represented as inside a containing concept. This is easy to do in CmapTools. Typically the containing concept represents a sub-system of some kind. These correspond to the UML links terminated by diamond shapes (open and filled).
2. Relationships typically called “kind of” or “is a” correspond to the UML sub-class relationship, given with an open triangle terminator. As these should always be between concepts of the same essential type, these can be picked out easily by being a uniform colour for the minimized and detailed representations of the whole.

So, all in all, a very stimulating meeting. Watch this space for further installments as trailed above.

There was a lot of very interesting discussion going on. As I had suspected, this generalised well from my own experience, recounted in a previous post, that one-to-one discussion is much better for helping one’s own model to develop than is discussion in a larger group. So, in the meeting, I discouraged conversations that were either across the floor, or threatened to involve the whole group, even though, as it happened, we probably could have got a long way with these as well, because of the small numbers involved. But it was more important to trial the method properly, so we can be more confident that it will work when scaled up to, say 20 or so people working simultaneously.

Personally, I will take a close look at the output, put together with my recollections of all the great conversations I had over one or other traffic cone, and apply them to the extension of my developing conceptual model. If anyone else wants to take the CmapTools file, and elaborate it with their own ideas, I’d be very interested to see the result. During the conference session, I had very consciously held back from putting in ideas from my own conceptual models, at least in the first half, so that what developed was independent of that. I did participate in the second half, working on what had been built up, and trying to play a normal role of a collaborative participant. Now, I’d like to repeat the exercise again, with this, or in related domains.

I’d keep the traffic cones as they are. Mark Stubbs commented that they were a good size. They aren’t the biggest ones you can get, but they are proper normal full-sized traffic cones. The string, paper and fibre-tip colouring pens were workable — not very neat, but adequate, and perhaps a little untidiness helps to keep the informal atmosphere that in turn helps people relax and discuss deeply and openly.

But I’m driven to incorporate the ideas from the top-level ontology I’m developing, as mentioned in the most recent post here. Perhaps we could decide which top-level categories are most helpful for collaborative conceptual modelling, and pop different coloured sports cones on top of each traffic cone, depending on the type of thing it is representing. In the models in earlier posts, I have used a four-way distinction:

• material things, including agents and non-agents together
• real instantiated processes that are proceeding, or have completed
• repeatable patterns of all kinds
• expressions, including assertions of fact and predictions

It might be helpful to distinguish agents from non-agents, and assertions from predictions. It’s not clear what will be most helpful in the practical situation of this “floor-based conceptual modelling”. There need to be enough categories to help people recognise what they and others are meaning, but not so many that they are themselves difficult to understand, or confusing. I’ll be thinking about it, talking with people, and waiting for relevant comments from readers here…

I started to think about this kind of thing when writing my book on e-portfolios, because I wanted a decent basis for discussion of what kind of information there is, or could be, in e-portfolios — and also, what kinds of things can e-portfolios refer to. I couldn’t find anything that was simple enough and easy enough to understand, or that I thought would really be helpful to my readers. So I wrote a short section on that in my book.

But then, doing all this recent conceptual modelling work, for European Learner Mobility and other things, the same issues came back. For example when we talk about a “qualification”, what on earth are we talking about? Is is a (physical) piece of paper? A definition of some sort? A status in society? A string of letters? Perhaps the concept of qualification is multi-faceted, and means all these things and more. But that isn’t much use for a conceptual model, where concepts need to be related to other concepts. These different meanings of “qualification” participate in radically different relationships with other concepts.

So, I’ve taken the ideas started off in my book, and put them in a separate web page, which can be developed as people share their feedback with me. It is intended to help people reflect on and understand what kind of concept or thing they mean, when doing conceptual modelling, so aiding communication in and about concept maps.

Here, then, is a link to the page with my “top ontology” — open to discussion and development. Please comment (through whatever medium), and help me make it into a useful resource.

There are now two diagrams: a contracted and an expanded version. When you use CmapTools, you can click on the << or >> symbols, and the attached box will expand to reveal the detail, or contract to hide it. This grouping was suggested by several people in discussion, particularly Christian Stracke. Let’s look at the two diagrams first, then go on to draw out the other points.

You can’t fail to notice that this is remarkably simpler than the previous version. What is important is to note the terms chosen for the groupings. It is vital to the communicative effectiveness of the pair of diagrams that the term for the grouping represents the things contained by the grouping, and in the top case — “learning opportunity provision” — it was Cleo Sgouropoulou who helped find that term. Most of the links seem to work OK with these groupings, though some are inevitably less than fully clear. So, on to the full, expanded diagram…

I was favourably impressed with the way in which CmapTools allows grouping to be done, and how the tools work.

Mainly the same things are there as in the previous version. The only change is that, instead of having one blob for qualification, and one for credit value, both have been split into two. This followed on from being uncomfortable with the previous position of “qualification”, where it appeared that the same thing was wanted or led to, and awarded. It is, I suggest, much clearer to distinguish the repeatable pattern — that is, the form of the qualification, represented by its title and generic properties — and the particular qualification awarded to a particular learner on a particular date. I originally came to this clear distinction, between patterns and expressions, in my book, when trying to build a firmer basis for the typology of information represented in e-portfolio systems. But in any case, I am now working on a separate web page to try to explain it more clearly. When done, I’ll post that here on my blog.

A pattern, like a concept, can apply to many different things, at least in principle. Most of the documentation surrounding courses, assessment, and the definitions about qualifications and credit, are essentially repeatable patterns. But in contrast, an assessment result, like a qualification or credit awarded, is in effect an expression, relating one of those patterns to a particular individual learner at a particular time. They are quite different kinds of thing, and much confusion may be caused by failing to distinguish which one is talking about, particularly when discussing things like qualifications.

These distinctions between types of thing at the most generic level is what I am trying to represent with the colour and shape scheme in these diagrams. You could call it my “top ontology” if you like, and I hope it is useful.

CmapTools is available free. It has been a great tool for me, as I don’t often get round to diagrams, but CmapTools makes it easy to draw the kinds of models I want to draw. If you have it, you might like to try finding and downloading the actual maps, which you can then play with. Of course, there is only one, not two; but I have put it in both forms on the ICOPER Cmap server, and also directly in CXL form on my own site. If you do, you will see all the explanatory comments I have made on the nodes. Please feel free to send me back any elaborations you create.

So, let’s start at the top left. The French contingent wanted to add some kind of definition of structure to the MLO (Metadata for Learning Opportunities) draft CWA (CEN Workshop Agreement) and it seemed like a good idea to put this in somewhere. I’ve added it as “combination rule set”. As yet we haven’t agreed its inclusion, let alone its structure, but if it is represented as a literal text field just detailing what combinations of learning opportunities are allowed by a particular provider, that seems harmless enough. A formal structure can await future discussion.

Still referring to MLO, the previous “assessment strategy” really only related to MLO and nothing else. As it was unclear from the diagram what it was, I’ve taken it out. There is usually some designed relationship between a course and a related assessment, but though perhaps ideally the relationship should be through intended learning outcomes (as shown), it may not be so — in fact it might involve those combination rules — so I’ve put in a dotted relationship “linked to”. The dotted relationships are meant to indicate some caution: in this case its nature is unclear; while the “results in” relationship is really through a chain of other ones. I’ve also made dotted the relationship between a learning opportunity specification and a qualification. Yes, perhaps the learning opportunity is intended to lead to the award of a qualification, but that is principally the intention of the learning opportunity provider, and may vary with other points of view.

Talking about the learning opportunity provider, discussion at the meetings, particularly with Mark Stubbs, suggested that the important relationships between a provider and an learning opportunity specification are those of validation and advertising. And the simple terms “runs” and “run by” seem to express reasonably well how a provider relates to an instance. I am suggesting that these terms might replace the confusingly ambiguous “offer” terminology in MLO.

Over on the right of the diagram, I’ve tidied up the arrows a bit. The Educational Credit Information Model CWA (now approved) has value, level and scheme on a par, so I though it would be best to reflect that in the diagram with just one blob. Credit transfer and accumulation schemes may or may not be tied to wider qualifications frameworks with levels. I’ve left that open, but represented levels in frameworks separately from credit.

I’ve also added a few more common-sense relationships with the learner, who is and should be central to this whole diagram. Learners aspire to vague things like intended learning outcomes as well as specific results and qualifications. They get qualifications. And how do learners relate to learning opportunity specifications? One would hope that they would be useful for searching, for investigation, as part of the process of a learner deciding to enrol on a course.

I’ve added a key in the top right. It’s not quite adequate, I think, but I’m increasingly convinced that this kind of distinction is very helpful and important for discussing and agreeing conceptual models. I’m hoping to revisit the distinctions I made in my book, and to refine the key so that it is even clearer what kind of concept each one is.