Simon Grant of CETIS

(20th in my logic of competence series.)

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).

The analogy is helped by the fact that last week I was in Lisbon for the first time, at work (the CEN WS-LT and TC 353), but also more relevantly as a tourist. (If you don't know Lisbon, think of examples to suit your own chosen place to visit, that you know better.) I'll start with the aspects of the analogy that seem to be most straightforward, and go on to more subtle features.

First things first, then: a tourist itinerary includes a list of destinations. This can be formalised as a guided tour, or left informal as a "things you should see" list given by a friend who has been there. A destination can be in any number of itineraries, or none. An itinerary has to include some destinations, but in principle it doesn't have any upper limits: it could be a very detailed itinerary that takes a year to properly acquaint a newcomer with the ins and outs of the city. Different itineraries for the same place may have more, or fewer, destinations within that place. They may or may not agree on the destinations included. If there were destinations included by the large majority of guides, another guide could select these as the "essential" Lisbon or wherever. In this case, perhaps that would include visiting the Belem tower; the Castle of St George; Sintra; experiencing Fado; sampling the local food, particularly fish dishes; and a ride on one of the funicular trams that climb the steep hills. Or maybe not, in each case. There again, you could debate whether Sintra should be included in a guide to Lisbon, or just mentioned as a day trip.

A small itinerary could be made for a single destination, if desired. Some guides may just point you to a museum or destination as a whole; others may give detailed suggestions for what you should see within that destination. A cursory guide might say that you should visit Sintra; a detailed one might say that you really must visit the Castle of the Moors in Sintra, as well as other particular places in Sintra. A very detailed guide might direct you to particular things to see in the Castle of the Moors itself.

It should be clear from the above discussion that a place to visit should not be confused with an itinerary for that place. Any real place has an unlimited number of possible itineraries for it. An itinerary for a city may include a museum; an itinerary for a museum may include a painting; there may sometimes even be guides to a painting that direct the viewer to particular features of that painting. The guide to the painting is not the painting; the guide to the museum is not the museum; the guide to the city is not the city.

There might also be guides that do not propose particular itineraries, but list many places you might go, and you select yourself. In these cases, some kind of categorisation might be used to help you select the places of interest to you. What period of history do they come from? Are they busy or quiet? What do they cost? How long do they take to visit? Or a guide with itineraries may also categorise attractions, and make them explicitly optional. Optionality might be particularly helpful in guided tours, so that people can leave out things of less interest.

If a set of guides covered several whole places, not just one, it may make comparisons across the different places. If you liked the Cathar castles in the South of France, you may like the Castle of the Moors in Sintra. Those who like stately homes, on the other hand, may be given other suggestions.

A guide to a destination may also contain more than an itinerary of included destinations within it. A guidebook may give historical or cultural background information, which goes beyond the description of the destinations. Guides may also propose a visit sequence, which is not inherent in the destinations.

The features I have described above are reasonably replicated in discussion of competence. A guide or itinerary corresponds to a competence framework; a destination corresponds to a competence concept. This is largely intended to throw further light on what I discussed in number 12 in this series, Representing the interplay between competence definitions and structures.

Differences

One difference is that tourist destinations have independent existence in the physical world, whereas competence concepts do not. It may therefore be easier to understand what is being referred to in a guide book, from a short description, than in a competence framework. Both guide book and competence framework may rely on context. When a guide book says "the entrance", you know it means the entrance to the location you are reading about, or may be visiting.

Physical embodiment brings clarity and constraints. Smaller places may be located within larger places, and this is relatively clear. But it is less clear whether lesser competence concepts are part of greater competence concepts. What one can say (and this carries through from the tourism analogy) is that concepts are included in frameworks (or not), and that any concept may be detailed by (any number of) frameworks.

Competence frameworks and concepts are more dependent on the words used in description, and because a description necessarily chooses particular words, it is easy to confuse the concept with the framework if they use the same words. It is easy to use the words of a descriptive framework to describe a concept. It is not so common, though perfectly possible, to use the description of an itinerary as a description of a place. It is because of this greater dependence on words (compared with tourist guides) that it may be more necessary to clarify the context of a competence concept definition, in order to understand what it actually means.

Where the analogy with competence breaks down more seriously is that high stakes decisions rarely depend on exactly where someone has visited. But at a stretch of the imagination, they could: recruitment for a relief tour guide could depend on having visited all of a given set of destinations, and being able to answer questions about them. What high stakes promotes is the sense that a particular structure (as defined or adopted by the body controlling the high-stakes decisions) defines a particular competence concept. Despite that, I assert that the competence structure and the separate competence concept remain strictly separate kinds of thing.

Understanding the logic of competence through this analogy

The features of competence models that are illustrated here are these.

• Competence frameworks or structures may include relevant competence concepts, as well as other material. (See № 12.)
• Competence concept definitions may be detailed by a framework structure for that competence concept. Nevertheless the structure does not fully define the concept. (See № 12 and № 13.)
• Competence frameworks may include optional competences (as well as necessary or mandatory ones). (See № 15 and № 7.)
• Both frameworks and concepts may be categorised. (See also № 5.)
• Frameworks may contain sub-frameworks (just as itineraries may contain sub-itineraries).
• But frameworks don't contain concepts in the same way: they just include them (or not).
• A framework may be simply an unstructured list of defined concepts.

I hope that helps anyone to understand more of the logic of competence, and I hope that also helps InLOC colleagues come to consensus on the related matters.

(19th in my logic of competence series.)

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.

This is a new theme in my logic of competence series. Since the previous post in that series, I had to focus on completing the eCOTOOL competence model and managing the initial phases of InLOC, which left little time for following up earlier thinking. But there were ideas clearly evident in my last post in this series (representing level relationships) and now is the time for followup and development. The terms introduced previously there can be linked to this new idea of specificity. Simply: binarily assessable concepts are ones that are defined specifically enough for a yes/no judgement about a person's ability; rankably assessable concepts have an intermediate degree of specificity, and are complemented by level definitions; while unorderly assessable concepts are ones that are less specifically defined, requiring more specificity to be properly assessable. (See that previous post for explanation of those terms.) The least specific competence-related concepts are not properly assessable at all, but serve as tags or headings.

As well as giving weight and depth to this idea of specificity in competence definitions, in this post I want to explore the connection between competence definitions and answering questions, because I think this will help to explain the ideas, because it is relatively straightforward to understand that questions and answers can be more or less specific.

Since the previous post in the series, my terminology has shifted slightly. The goals of InLOC — Integrating Learning Outcomes and Competences — have made it plain that we need to deal equally with learning outcomes and with competence or ability concepts. So I include "learning outcomes" more liberally, always meaning intended learning outcomes.

Job interviews

Imagine you are interviewing someone for a job. To make it more interesting, let's make it an informal one: perhaps a mutual business contact has introduced you to a promising person at a business event. Add a little pressure by imagining that you have just a few minutes to make up your mind whether you want to ask this person to go through a longer, formal process. How would you structure the interview, and what questions would you ask?

As I envisage the process, one would probably start off with quite general, less specific questions, and then go into more detail where appropriate, where it mattered. So, for instance, one might ask "are you a programmer?", and if the answer was yes, go into more detail about languages, development environments, length of experience, type of experience, etc. etc. The useful detail in this case would depend entirely on the circumstances of the job. For a graduate to be recruited into a large company, what matters might be aptitude, as it would be likely that full training would be supplied (which you could perhaps see as a kind of technical "enculturation"). On the other hand, for a specialist to join a short-term high-stakes project, even small details might matter a lot, as learning time would probably be minimal.

In reality, most job interviews start, not from a blank sheet, but from the basis of a job advert, and an application form, or CV and covering letter. A job advert may specify requirements; an application form may contain specific questions for which answers are expected, but in the absence of an appliation form, a CV and covering letter needs to try to answer, concisely, some of the key questions that would be asked first in an informal, unprepared job interview. This naturally explains the universal advice that CVs should be designed specifically for each job application. What you say about yourself unprompted not only reveals that information itself, but also says much about what you expect the other person to reckon as significant or interesting.

So, in the job interview, we notice the natural importance of varying specificity in descriptions and questions about abilities and experience.

Recruitment

This then carries over to the wider recruitment process. Potential employers often formulate a list of what is required of prospective employees, in terms of which abilities and experience are essential or desirable, but the detail and specificity of each item will naturally vary. The evidence for a less specific requirement may be assessed at interview with some quick general questions, but a more exacting requirement may want harder evidence such as a qualification, certificate or testimonial from an expert witness.

For example, in a regulated world such as pesticides that I wrote about recently, an employer might well want a prospective employee to have obtained a relevant certificate or qualification, so that they can legally do their job. Even when a certificate is not a legal requirement, some are widely asked for. A prospective sales employee with a driving licence or an office employee with an ECDL might be preferred over one without, and it would be perfectly reasonable for an employer to insist that non-native speakers had obtained a given certified level of proficiency in the principle workplace language. In each case, because the certificate is awarded only to people who have passed a carefully controlled test, the test result serves to answer many quite specific questions about the holder's abilities, as well as the potential legal fact of their being allowed to perform certain actions in regulated occupations.

Vocational qualifications often detail quite specifically what holders are able to do. This is clearly the intention of the Europass Certificate Supplement (ECS), and has been in the UK, through the system of National Vocational Qualifications, relying on National Occupational Standards. So we could expect that employers with specific learning outcome or competence requirements may specify that candidates should have particular vocational qualifications; but what about less specific requirements? My guess is that those employers who have little regard for vocational qualifications are just those whose requirements are less specific. Time was when many employers looked only for a "good degree", which in the UK often meant a "2:1", an upper second class. This was supposed to answer generic questions, as typically the specific subject of the degree was not specified. Now there is a growing emphasis on the detail of the degree transcript or Europass Diploma Supplement (EDS), from which a prospective employer can read at least assessment results, if not yet explicit details of learning outcomes or competences. There is also a increasing trend towards making explicit the intended learning outcomes of courses at all levels, so the course information might be more informative than the transcript of EDS.

Interestingly, the CVs of many technical workers contain highly unspecific lists of programming languages that the individual implicitly claims, stating nothing about the detailed abilities and experience. These lists answer only the most general questions, and serve effectively only to open a conversation about what the person's actual experience and achievements have been in those programming languages. At least for human languages there is the increasingly used CEFR; there does not appear to be any such widely recognised framework for programming languages. Perhaps, in the case of programming languages, it would be clumsy and ineffective to give answers to more detailed questions, because the individual does not know what those detailed questions would be.

Specificity in frameworks

Frameworks seem to gravitate towards specificity. Given that some people want to know the answers to specific questions, this is quite reasonable; but where does that leave the expression of the less specific requirements? For examples of curriculum frameworks, there is probably nowhere better than the American Achievement Standards Network (ASN). Here, as in many other places, learning outcomes are defined only in one or two levels. The ASN transcribes documents faithfully, then among many other things marks the "indexing status" of the various components. For an arbitrary example, see Earth and Space Science, which is a topic heading and not "indexable". The heading below just states what the topic is about, and is not "indexable". It is below this that the content becomes "indexable", with first some less specific statements about what should be achieved by the end of fourth grade, broken down into the smallest components such as Identify characteristics of soils, minerals, rocks, water, and the atmosphere. It looks like it is just the "indexable" resources that are intended to represent intended learning outcome definitions.

At fourth grade, this is clearly nothing to do with employment, but even so, identifying characteristics of soils etc. is something that students may or may not be able to do, and this is part of the less specifically defined (but still "indexable") "understanding of the characteristics of earth materials". It strikes me that the item about identifying characteristics would fit reasonably (in my scheme of the previous post) as a "rankably assessible" concept, and its parent item about understanding might be classified (in my scheme) as unorderly assessable.

How to represent varying specificity

Having pointed out some of the practical examples of varying specificity in definitions of learning outcome or competence, the important issue for work such as InLOC is to provide some way of representing, not only different levels of specificity, but also how they relate to one another.

An approach through considering questions and answers

Any concept that is related to learning outcomes or competence can provide the basis for questions of an individual. Some of these questions have yes/no answers; some invite answers on a scale; some invite a longer, less straightforward reply, or a short reply that invites further questions. A stated concept can be both the answer to a question, and the ground for further questions. So, to go back to some of the above examples, a CV might somewhere state "French" or "Java". These might be answers to the questions "what languages have you studied?" or "what languages do you use?" They also invite further questions, such as "how well do you know ...?", or "how much have you used ..., and in what contexts?", or "how good are you at ...?" – which, if there is an appropriate scale, could be reformulated as "what level is your ability in ...?"

Questions could be found corresponding to the ASN examples as well. "Identify characteristics of soils, minerals, rocks, water, and the atmosphere" has the same format that allows "can you ...?" or "I can ...". The less specific statement — "By the end of fourth grade, students will develop an understanding of the characteristics of earth materials," — looks like it corresponds with questions more like "what do you understand about earth materials?".

As well as "summative" questions, there are related questions that are used in other ways than assessment. "How confident are you of your ability in ...?" and "is your ability in ... adequate in your current situation?" both come to mind (stimulated by considerations in LUSID).

What I am suggesting here is that we can adapt some of the natural properties of questions and answers to fit definitions of competence and ability. So what properties do I have in mind? Here is a provisional and tentative list.

• Questions can be classified as inviting one of four kinds of answer:
1. yes or no;
2. a value on a (predefined) scale;
3. examples;
4. an explanation that is more complex than a simple value.
• These types of answer probably need little explanation – many examples can readily be imagined.
• The same form of answer can relate to more than one question, but usually the answer will mean different things. To be fully and clearly understood, an answer should relate to just one question. Using the above example, "French" as the answer to "what languages have you studied?" means something substantially different from "French" as the answer to "what languages are you fluent in?"
• A more specific question may imply answers to less specific questions. For example, "what programming languages have you used in software development?" implies answers such as "software development" to the question "what competences do you have in ICT?" Many such implied questions and answers can be formulated. What matters in a particular framework is the other answers in that particular framework that can be inferred.
• An answer to a less specific question may invite further more specific questions.
1. Conversely to the example just above, if the question "what competences do you have in ICT?" includes the answer "software development", a good follow-up question might be "what programming languages have you used in software development?" Similar patterns could be seen for any technical specialty. Often, answers like this may be taken from a known list of options. There are only so many languages, both human and computer.
2. Where an answer is a rankable concept, questions about the level of that ability are invited. For instance, the question "what foreign languages can you speak?", answered with "French" and "Italian", invites questions such as "what is your European Language Passport level of ability in spoken interaction in French?"
3. Where an answer has been analysed into its component parts, questions about each component part make sense. For example, if the answer to "are you able to clear sites for tree planting?", following the LANTRA Treework NOS (2009) was "yes", that invites the narrower implied questions set out in that NOS, like "can you select appropriate clearance methods ...?" or "do you understand the potential impacts of your work on the environment ...?"
4. Unless the question is fully specific, admitting only the answers yes and no, and even in that case many times, it is nearly always possible to ask further questions, and give further answers. But everyone's interest in detail stops sooner or later. The place to stop asking more specific questions is when the answer does not significantly affect the outcome you are looking for. And that varies between different interested parties.
• Questions may be equivalent to other questions in other frameworks. This will come out from the answers given. If the answers given by the same person in the same context are always the same for two questions, they are effectively equivalent. It is genuinely helpful to know this, as it means that one can save time not repeating questions.
• Answers to some questions may imply answers to other questions in different frameworks, without being equivalent. The answers may contain, or be contained by, their counterparts. This is another way of linking together questions from different frameworks, and saving asking unnecessary extra questions.

That covers a view of how to represent varying specificity in questions and answers, but not yet frameworks as they are at present.

Back to frameworks as they are at present

At present, it is not common practice to set out frameworks of competence or ability in terms of questions and answers, but only in terms of the concepts themselves. But, to me, it helps understanding enormously to imagine the frameworks as frameworks of questions, and the learning outcome or competence concepts as potential answers. In practice, all you see in the frameworks is the answers to the implied questions.

Perhaps this has come about through a natural process of doing away with unnecessary detail. The overall question in occupational competence frameworks is, "are you competent to do this job?", so it can go unstated, with the title of the job standing in for the question. The rest of the questions in the framework are just the detailed questions about the component parts of that competence (see Carroll and Boutall's ideas of Functional Analysis in their Guide to Developing National Occupational Standards). The formulation with action verbs helps greatly in this approach. To take NOS examples from way back in the 3rd post in this series, the units themselves and the individual performance criteria share a similar structure. Less specifically, "set out and establish crops" relates both to the question "are you able to set out and establish crops" and the competence claim "I am able to set out and establish crops". More specifically, "place equipment and materials in the correct location ready for use" can be prefixed with "are you able to ..." for a question, or "I am able to ..." as a claim. Where all the questions take a form that invites answers yes or no, one really does not need to represent the questions at all.

With a less uniform structure, one would need mentally to remove all the questions to get a recognisable framework; or conversely, to understand a framework in terms of questions, one needs to add in those implied questions. This is not as easy, and perhaps that is why I have been drawn to elaborating all those structuring relationships between concepts.

We are left in a place that is very close to where we were before in the previous post. At simplest, we have the individual learning outcome or competence definitions (which are the answers) and the frameworks, which show how the answers connect up, without explicitly mentioning the questions themselves. The relations between the concepts can be factored out, and presented either together in the framework, or separately together with the concepts that are related by those relations.

If the relationships are simply "broader" and "narrower", things are pretty straightforward. But if we admit less specific concepts and questions, because the questions are not explicitly represented, the structure needs a more elaborate set of relationships. In particular, we have to make particular provision for rankable concepts and levels. I'll leave detailing the structures we are left with for later.

Before that, I'd like to help towards better grasp of the ideas through the analogy with tourism.

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.

The EU often comes up with directives intended for the good of European citizens in general. In this case, as an example we are looking at Directive 2009/128/EC of 2009-10-21 "establishing a framework for Community action to achieve the sustainable use of pesticides". Good that this one looks uncontroversial in principle – we don't want people to use pesticides in an unregulated way, potentially polluting common air, water or ground (potentially without our even being aware of it), so I guess most people would support the principle of regulation here.

If you work your way down to Article 5 of this directive, you see:

Article 5
Training
1. Member States shall ensure that all professional users, distributors and advisors have access to appropriate training by bodies designated by the competent authorities. This shall consist of both initial and additional training to acquire and update knowledge as appropriate.

The training shall be designed to ensure that such users, distributors and advisors acquire sufficient knowledge regarding the subjects listed in Annex I, taking account of their different roles and responsibilities.

2. By 14 December 2013, Member States shall establish certification systems and designate the competent authorities responsible for their implementation. These certificates shall, as a minimum, provide evidence of sufficient knowledge of the subjects listed in Annex I acquired by professional users, distributors and advisors either by undergoing training or by other means.

(I will say nothing at all about what "competent" means as in "competent authority". Maybe it is quite different.)

It goes on. So what is this Annex I? That is really significant for the purposes of knowledge, skill and competence. It's worth perhaps repeating this in full, just to get the full flavour of one example of the language and way these things are set out.

Training subjects referred to in Article 5

1. All relevant legislation regarding pesticides and their use.
2. The existence and risks of illegal (counterfeit) plant protection products, and the methods to identify such products.
3. The hazards and risks associated with pesticides, and how to identify and control them, in particular:
   1. risks to humans (operators, residents, bystanders, people entering treated areas and those handling or eating treated items) and how factors such as smoking exacerbate these risks;
   2. symptoms of pesticide poisoning and first aid measures;
   3. risks to non-target plants, beneficial insects, wildlife, biodiversity and the environment in general.
4. Notions on integrated pest management strategies and techniques, integrated crop management strategies and tech­niques, organic farming principles, biological pest control methods, information on the general principles and crop or sector-specific guidelines for integrated pest management.
5. Initiation to comparative assessment at user level to help professional users make the most appropriate choices on pesticides with the least side effects on human health, non-target organisms and the environment among all auth­orised products for a given pest problem, in a given situation.
6. Measures to minimise risks to humans, non-target organisms and the environment: safe working practices for storing, handling and mixing pesticides, and disposing of empty packaging, other contaminated materials and surplus pesticides (including tank mixes), whether in concentrate or dilute form; recommended way to control operator exposure (personal protection equipment).
7. Risk-based approaches which take into account the local water extraction variables such as climate, soil and crop types, and relieves.
8. Procedures for preparing pesticide application equipment for work, including its calibration, and for its operation with minimum risks to the user, other humans, non-target animal and plant species, biodiversity and the environment, including water resources.
9. Use of pesticide application equipment and its maintenance, and specific spraying techniques (e.g. low-volume spraying and low-drift nozzles), as well as the objectives of the technical check of sprayers in use and ways to improve spray quality. Specific risks linked to use of handheld pesticide application equipment or knapsack sprayers and the relevant risk management measures.
10. Emergency action to protect human health, the environment including water resources in case of accidental spillage and contamination and extreme weather events that would result in pesticide leaching risks.
11. Special care in protection areas established under Articles 6 and 7 of Directive 2000/60/EC.
12. Health monitoring and access facilities to report on any incidents or suspected incidents.
13. Record keeping of any use of pesticides, in accordance with the relevant legislation.

What we have here is a kind of syllabus, but in some ways quite a vague syllabus. It does not make it expressly clear what people have to be able to do as a result of training with this syllabus, as is now good practice for many learning outcomes, particularly vocational ones. So it falls to the Member States to interpret that, with the result that different Member States may do things differently, the resultant competences may not be the same, and there may well be considerable differences across Europe in how safe people actually are from the dangers the regulation was brought in to counter.

So the European directive works its way down through the system to national governments, and out comes something like The Plant Protection Products (Basic Conditions) Regulations 1997. In this case, though the area is similar, this UK legislation was obviously created long before the above European directive. Here we read:

1. It shall be the duty of all employers to ensure that persons in their employment who may be required during the course of their employment to use prescribed plant protection products are provided with such instruction, training and guidance as is necessary to enable those persons to comply with any requirements provided in and under these Regulations and the Plant Protection Products Regulations.

and later

3. No person in the course of a business or employment shall use a prescribed plant protection product, or give an instruction to others on the use of a prescribed plant protection product, unless that person—
(a) has received adequate instruction, training and guidance in the safe, efficient and humane use of prescribed plant protection products, and
(b) is competent for the duties which that person is called upon to perform.

and yet later

7.—(1) No person in the course of a commercial service shall use a prescribed plant protection product approved for agricultural use unless that person—
(a) has obtained a certificate of competence recognised by the Ministers; or
(b) uses that plant protection product under the direct and personal supervision of a person who holds such a certificate; or [...]

The UK Regulations do not themselves define in detail what counts as "adequate instruction, training and guidance", nor indeed "competent" and "competence". This is where the HSE comes in, by approving as "adequate" the proposals of awarding bodies aimed at the certification of this training etc.

Do we get the general idea here? I hope so. But wait a minute ...

One cannot help remarking on the differences between the language of the EU regulation and the language recommended, say, in the Europass Certificate Supplement, where it is clear that each skill or competence item should start with an action verb. Is it therefore a case of lack of effective communication between DGs? It looks likely, but I have no evidence.

Nor do I have an opinion about the merits of leaving definitions open (perhaps deliberately so) to give room for courts to establish case law and precedent.

But it would seem to me a good idea, when formulating this kind of regulation, at the same time to put together a well-structured framework of knowledge, skill and competence to define the required abilities of the people concerned. Not defining them clearly just means that the cost of defining them is multiplied through being borne by every Member State, resulting not only in divergence but in considerable administrative work that one could say was unnecessary. Multiply this across all the relevant European regulations. OK, admitted, I have little knowledge of the workings of such bureaucracy. Maybe there is a reason, but at present I am an unsatisfied citizen.

And this is one area where InLOC outputs could potentially play a role. It would be principally at a European level, though national governments could do something similar for any national regulations. Some central European body could define the required knowledge and ability, for each European regulation across all areas of public life, according to clear and sensible standard approaches that relate directly to learning outcomes, competence, training and assessment. The requirements could be published in InLOC format in all relevant languages. (That's what InLOC is set up to facilitate). How to train and assess would still be up to training, assessment and awarding bodies, and there would still have to be structures and practices (probably with considerable national variation) within which this is controlled, and operating licences managed. But at least several stages would be removed from the process, which could be much quicker. The Commission could be seen to be more in touch with the grass roots. Procedures would look more transparent and fairer. Maybe, even, European regulations would be held in higher repute. That would be a nice outcome.

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.

In the discussion part of our conference session, we looked at two areas of potential application of badges. First, for formative assesssment in high-stakes fields (such as medicine); second, for communities of practice such as the ones CETIS facilitates, still in the general area of work. What we didn't look at was badges for leisure or recreation. The Mozilla Open Badges working paper makes no distinction between badges for skills that are explicitly about work and for skills that are not obviously about work, so looking at leisure applications complements the conference discussion nicely, while providing an example to think through many of the main issues with badges.

The worked example that follows builds on my personal knowledge of one hobby area, but is meant to be illustrative of many. Please think of your own favourite leisure activities.

Motivation

On returning from the conference, on the very same day as the badges session, it happened to be a rehearsal evening for the small choir I currently sing with. So what more natural for me to think about than a badge system for singing. The sense of need for such a system has continued to grow on me. Many people can sing well enough to participate in a choir. While learners of classical instruments have "grade" examinations and certificates indicating the stages of mastery of an instrument, there is no commonly used equivalent for choral singing. Singing is quite a diverse activity, with many genres as well as many levels of ability. The process of established groups and singers getting together tends to be slow and subject to chance, but worse, forming a new group is quite difficult, unless there is some existing larger body (school, college, etc) all the singers belong to.

Badges for singers might possibly help in two different ways. First, badges can mark attainment. A system of attainment badges could help singers find groups and other singers of the right standard for them to enjoy singing with. It may be worthy, but not terribly exciting singing with a group at a lower level, and one can feel out of one's depth or embarrassed singing with people a lot more accomplished. So, when a group looks for a new member, it could specify levels of any particular skills that were expected, as well as the type of music sung. This wouldn't necessarily remove the need for an audition, but it would help the right kind of singer to consider the choir. Compared with current approaches, including singers hearing a choir performing and then asking about vacancies, or learning of openings through friends, a badge system could well speed things up. But perhaps the greatest benefit would be to singers trying to start new groups or choirs, where there is no existing group to hear about or to go to listen. Here, a badge system could make all the difference between it being practical to get a new group together, or failing.

Second, the badges could provide a structured set of goals that would help motivate singers to broaden and improve their abilities. This idea of motivating steps in a pathway is a strong theme in the Open Badges documentation. There must be singers at several levels who would enjoy and gain satisfaction from moving on, up a level maybe. In conjunction with groups setting out their badge requirements, badges in the various aspects of choral singing would at very least provide a framework within which people could more clearly see what they needed to gain experience of and practice, in order to join the kind of group they really want.

By the way, I recognise that not all singing groups are called "choirs". Barbershop groups tend to be "choruses", while very small groups are more often called "ensembles"; but for simplicity here I use the term "choir" to refer to any singing group.

Teachers / coaches

Structured goals lead on to the next area. If there were a clear set of badged achievements to aim for, then the agenda for coaches, tutors, et al. would be more transparent. This might not produce a great increase in demand for paid tuition (and therefore "economic" activity) but might well be helpful for amateur coaching. Whichever way, a clear set of smaller, more limited goals on tried and tested pathways would provide a time-honoured approach to achieving greater goals, with whatever amount of help from others that is needed.

Badge content

I've never been in charge of a choir for more than a few songs, but I do have enough experience to have a reasonable guess at what choirmasters and other singers want from people who want to join them. First, there are the core singing skills, and these might be broken down for example like this:

• vocal range and volume (most easily classified as soprano / alto / tenor / bass)
• clarity and diction
• voice quality and expressiveness (easy to hear in others, but hard to measure)
• ability to sing printed music at first sight ("sight-singing")
• attentiveness to and blend with other singers
• ability to sing a part by oneself
• speed at learning one's part if necessary
• responsiveness to direction during rehearsal and performance
• specialist skills

It wouldn't be too difficult to design a set of badges that expressed something like these abilities, but this is not the time to do that job, as such a structure needs to reflect a reasonable consensus involving key stakeholders.

Then there are other personal attributes, not directly related to singing, that are desirable in choir members, e.g.:

• reliability of attendance at rehearsals and particularly performances
• helpfulness to other choir members
• diligence in preparation

Badges for these could look a little childish, but as a badge system for singing would be entirely voluntary, perhaps there would be no harm in defining them, for the benefit of junior choirs at least.

Does this cover everything? It may or may not cover most of what can be improved — those things that can be better or not so good — but there is one other area that is vital for the mutual satisfaction of choir and singer. Singers have tastes in music; choirs have repertoires or styles they focus on. To get an effective matching system, style and taste would have to be represented.

Assessing and awarding badges

So who would assess and award these badges? The examinations for musical instrument playing are managed by bodies such as the ABRSM (indeed including solo singing). These exams have a very long history, and are often recognised, e.g. for entry to musical education institutions. But choral singers are usually wanting to enjoy themselves, not gain qualifications so they can be professional musicians. They are unlikely to want to pay for exams for what is just a hobby. That leaves three obvious options: choirmasters, fellow singers, and oneself.

In any case, the ABRSM and similar bodies already have their own certificates and records. A badge system for them would probably be just a new presentation of what currently exists. The really interesting challenge is to consider how badges can work effectively without an official regulating body.

On deeper consideration, there really isn't much to choose between choirmasters and fellow singers as the people who award choral singing badges. There is nothing to stop any singer being a choirmaster, anyway. There is not much incentive for people to misrepresent their choral singing skills: as noted before, it's not much fun being in a choir of the wrong standard, nor in singing music one doesn't like much. So, effectively, a badge system would have the job of making personal and choir standards clear.

There is an analogy here with language skills, which are closely related in any case. The Europass Language Passport is designed to be self-assessed, with people judging their own ability against a set of criteria that were originally defined by the Council of Europe. The levels — A1 to C2 — all have reasonably clear descriptors, and one sees people describing their language skills using these level labels increasingly often.

This is all very well if people can do this self-assessment accurately. The difficulty is that some of the vital aspects of choral singing are quite hard to assess by oneself. Listening critically to one's own voice is not particularly easy when singing in a group. It might be easier if recording were more common, but again, most people are unfamiliar with the sound of their own voice, and may be uncomfortable listening to it.

On the other hand, we don't want people, in an attempt to be "kind", to award each other badges over-generously. We could hope that dividing up the skills into enough separate badges would mean that there would be some badges for everyone, and no one need be embarrassed by being "below average" in some ways. Everyone in a choir can have a choir membership badge, which says something about their acceptance and performance within the choir as a whole. Then perhaps all other choir members can vote anonymously about the levels which others have reached. Some algorithm could be agreed for when to award badges based on peer votes.

The next obvious thing would be to give badges to the choir as a whole. Choirs have reputations, and saying that one has sung in a particularly choir may mean something. This could be done in several ways, all involving some external input. Individual singers (and listeners) could compare the qualities of different choirs in similar genres. Choral competitions are another obvious source of expert judgement.

Setting up a badge system

The more detailed questions come to a head in the setting up of an actual badge system. The problem would not only be the ICT architecture (such as Mozilla Open Badges is a working prototype for) but also the organisational arrangements for creating the systems around badges for singers. Now, perhaps, we can see more clearly that the ICT side is relatively easy. This is something that we are very familiar with in CETIS. The technology is hardly ever the limiting factor — it is the human systems.

So here are some questions or issues (among possibly many more) that would need to be solved, not necessarily in this order.

• Who would take on responsibility for this project as a whole? Setting up a badge system is naturally a project that needs to be managed.
• Who hosts the information?
• How is the decision made about what each badge will be, and how it is designed?
• How would singers and choirs be motivated to sign up in the first place?
• If a rule is set for how badges are to be awarded, how is this enforced, or at least checked?
• Is Mozilla Open Badges sufficient technical infrastructure, and if not, who decides what is?
• Could this system be set up on top of other existing systems? (Which, or what kind?)
• ...
• ...

Please comment with more issues that need to be solved. I'll add them if they fit!

Business case

And how does such a system run, financially? The beneficiaries would primarily be choirs and singers, and perhaps indirectly people who enjoy listening to live choral music. Finding people or organisations in whose financial interests this would be seems difficult. So it would probably be useful for the system to run with minimal resources.

One option might be to offer this as a service to one or more membership organisations that collects fees from members, or alternatively, as an added service that has synergy with an existing paid-for service. However, the obvious approach of limiting the service to paid members would work against its viability in terms of numbers. In this case, the service would in effect be advertising promoting the organisation. Following the advertising theme, it might be seen as reasonable, for users who do not already pay membership, to receive adverts from sellers of music or organisers of musical events, which could provide an adequate income stream. The nice thing is that the kind of information that makes sense for individuals to enter, to improve the effectiveness of the system, could well be used to target adverts more effectively.

Would this be enough to make a business case? I hope so, as I would like to use this system!

Reflection

I hope that this example illustrates some of the many practical and possibly thorny issues that lie before a real working badge system can be implemented, and these issues are not primarily technical. What would be really useful would be to have a working technical infrastructure available so that at least some of the technical issues are dealt with in advance. As I wrote in comments on a previous post, I'm not convinced that Mozilla Open Badges does the job properly, but at least it is a signpost in the right direction.

Another conversation with Mark Johnson yesterday got me thinking seriously about what the role of humility and of confidence is in the academic community. If there is a literature on this, I don't know it, so my remarks here are appropriately tentative. But the issue is of surprising importance to personal development, so perhaps worth the risk of some speculation.

Back when I was doing my PhD (gulp) years ago, I suppose I must have recognised, probably only just in time, the importance of this for a PhD candidate to turn into a fully-fledged member of the academic community. To cut a long story short, I would now say that it should be a requirement of any PhD viva for any candidate who is in line to pass to be thrown a few questions outside of their area of research. I fear I don't recall which such questions were asked of me, but perhaps they could have been about more mainstream psychology, for example.

There seems to me to be a range of acceptable answers to questions outside one's area of expertise. The simplest is something like "I'm sorry, I don't know." PhD candidates are not meant to be masters of general knowledge. While this answer would be problematic if the question is to do with the candidate's central thesis, when off topic it is not only allowed, but just about necessary. Or it could be, "I haven't read enough of the literature to know the answer there, so I'd rather not speculate." Or, at a pinch, "Well, I don't know this literature well, but I'd guess that ...". Certainly not just an unqualified unfounded opinion in a PhD viva.

This isn't really the flavour of the month, though, is it? The world seems to be fuller than ever of people willing to tout their own conjectures, or worse, prejudices, as facts. People in all walks of life seem to be called upon to be confident in their own views, so it is hard to find good role models for appropriate academic or intellectual humility. There was Socrates, of course, but that was rather a long time ago for people with little sense of history.

Why should this matter? One thing pointed out by Mark was the interests of future students of this potential member of the academic community. To help students reach their own full intellectual maturity, it is rarely a good thing to lay down "the truth" and expect students to lap it up. Do this, perhaps, for younger school pupils, if they still need a basic set of working views to start with, and provided that the same line is taken by all other teachers in the establishment. But after that, teachers, lecturers, mentors, coaches, need to provide good and timely questions – another thing Socrates excelled at.

Perhaps undergraduates do need to absorb a corpus of existing established belief on a topic, but they also need a clear awareness of the boundaries of existing knowledge. Focusing on what one does know is less likely to help than focusing on what people dispute.

This takes me back so strongly to the work of William G Perry, Robert Kegan, and Darren Cambridge. There is a hard challenge here when one comes to the stage of PhD study – the academic apprenticeship. On the one hand, as Kegan points out, a graduate needs to come to their own conclusions, not just accept one single authority in a discipline. As Darren Cambridge points out, many subjects have "essentially contestable" concepts there to be studied, and portfolio practice allows the learners to argue for their position; to marshal evidence for it; to be a co-creator of meaning in their part of the academic world. This is the place, perhaps, for confidence, because if one is not confident of one's own intellectual position, who else will take it seriously? Who will count it as a material contribution to the academic world? As I recall it, this corresponds at least roughly to Kegan's "4th Order" thinking.

Kegan's 5th (and final) Order is rather more elusive. I can't summarise such a subtle concept here quickly – go read "In Over Our Heads" etc. But what Kegan calls the 5th Order to me is to do with being aware of all the orders; being able to adjust one's response to fit the person with whom one is conversing. This is what teachers should be aiming at, it seems to me. They should be well-developed, intellectually and ethically, in themselves, but also aware of the needs of those who are not so well-developed, and able to speak to their condition. And this feels like a deeper and even more wholesome kind of humility than the humility of knowing the boundaries of one's specialist area of study. It includes the position that all one's specialist knowledge is useless and inappropriate in some contexts. It includes the idea that to question every tradition in a post-modernist way is not the right thing to do for people who have not yet even established their own way.

This can be confusing, which I suppose is why it requires unusual maturity. To those at earlier stages, one may need mainly to be a knowledgeable and reliable authority. To those at later stages, one needs first to leave room for advanced learners to develop their own ideas and positions, and then to model comfort with being uncertain, to prepare the way for the learner to be achieve the same true mastery.

I turn back to T.S. Eliot, East Coker:

"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has gathered much press over recent days. The arguments raised are worrying, but also rather confused. From the point of view of intellectual property and openness (which concerns us in many ways in CETIS, JISC, and UK HE) it is worth aiming some very sharp questions at the weak intellectual foundations of ACTA.

It is worth reading the text of the agreement (just search for a chunk of what I reproduce here). We need go no further than the very first two paragraphs:

The Parties to this Agreement,

Noting that effective enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to sustaining economic growth across all industries and globally;

Noting further that the proliferation of counterfeit and pirated goods, as well as the proliferation of services that distribute infringing material, undermines legitimate trade and the sustainable development of the world economy, causes significant financial losses for right holders and for legitimate businesses, and, in some cases, provides a source of revenue for organized crime and otherwise poses risks to the public; [...]

It's perhaps not surprising that, if one really believes this, measures can be implemented that lead to bad consequences. We see it so often: people get scared by something, and overreact. I believe, as thinking people, we should be robustly questioning what come across as misleading half-truths contained in this preamble. Before signing up to such a treaty, it should be incumbent on signatories to ensure that the people they represent actually believe in the justifications stated in such a preamble, otherwise there is bound to be trouble.

First, where is the actual evidence that "effective enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to sustaining economic growth across all industries and globally"? At very least, such a treaty should refer to the literature. I don't know it, but who does?

So, knowing essentially nothing about the literature, I plunge in via a Google search for "intellectual property" and "economic growth". One really can't expect the WIPO literature to be unbiased. And many other academic articles are, of course, hidden behind paywalls, benefiting, ... er ... the copyright holders ... who are only rarely the authors, and much more often the vast wealthy empires of publishing. But then I found one paper on an open website. It is: "International trade, economic growth and intellectual property rights: A panel data study of developed and developing countries" by Patricia Higino Schneider, published in the Journal of Development Economics 78 (2005) 529 – 547. Part of the conclusion is very interesting.

The results regarding intellectual property protection are interesting. They suggest that IPRs have a stronger impact on domestic innovation for developed countries and might even negatively impact innovation in developing countries. These results may be indicative of the fact that most innovation in developing countries may actually be imitation or adaptive in nature. Therefore, providing stronger IPRs protects foreign firms at the expense of local firms.

Even though this is followed by the relatively tame

The policy implication here is not to discourage intellectual property protection in developing countries, but to generate incentives for its strengthening. Innovative activities and IPRs are complementary in nature; therefore, developed countries would benefit by supporting R&D activities in developing countries.

At least, the end of the conclusion

highlights the importance of conducting studies that are inclusive of both developed and developing countries and suggests that pooling together developed and developing countries might lead to misleading conclusions, and consequently to inadequate policy recommendations

And this is from just one article I managed to find. Is that not enough to start casting doubt on the bland assurance of what ACTA "notes"?

That's only the first paragraph of ACTA.

The second paragraph expresses concern about "significant financial losses for right holders" without questioning the ethics or desirability of this. So what if a right holder is making itself rich exploiting its IP ownership while withholding free useful information and cheap and effective solutions to people who need them? No talk of that, but rather of the cases of "organized crime". That might remind people of the "war on drugs", but hasn't even that fallen into disrepute recently?

And these two paragraphs form the sum total of the explicit justification for ACTA. It strikes me as scandalous that such far-reaching and worrying political conclusions can be based on such a contentious basis.

Yes, of course we don't want criminals making dangerous counterfeit goods. Let's encourage our governments to fight that kind of thing that we all agree on, without creating highly problematic treaties and laws based on highly dubious premises.

All of us in the learning technology standards community share the challenge of knowing who our real customers are. Discussion at the January CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies (WS-LT) was a great stimulus for my further reflection — should we be thinking more of national governments?

Let's review the usual stakeholder suspects: education and training providers; content providers; software developers; learners; the European Commission. I'll gesture (superficially) towards arguing that each one of these may indeed be stakeholders, but the direction of the argument is that there is a large space in our clientele and attendance for those who are directly interested and can pay.

Let's start with the the providers of education and training. They do certainly have an interest in standards, otherwise why would JISC be supporting CETIS? But rarely do they implement standards directly. They are interested, so our common reasoning goes, in having standards-compliant software, so that they can choose between software and migrate when desired, avoiding lock-in. But do they really care about what those standards are? Do they, specifically, care enough to contribute to their development and to the bodies and meetings that take forward that development?

In the UK, as we know, JISC acts as an agent on behalf of UK HEIs and others. This means that, in the absence of direct interest from HEIs, it is JISC that ends up calling the shots. (Nothing inherently wrong with that – there are many intelligent, sensible people working for JISC.) Many of us play a part in the collective processes by which JISC arrives at decisions about what it will fund. We are left hoping that JISC's customers appreciate this, but it is less than entirely clear how much they appreciate the standardisation aspect.

I'll be even more cursory about content providers, as I know little about that field. My guess is that many larger providers would welcome the chance of excluding their competitors, and that they participate in standardisation only because they can't get away with doing differently. Large businesses are too often amoral beasts.

How about the software vendors, then? We don't have to look far for evidence that large purveyors of proprietary software may be hostile in spirit to standardisation of what their products do, and that they are kept in line, if at all, only by pressure from those who purchase the software. In contrast, open source developers, and smaller businesses, typically welcome standards, allowing work to be reused as much as possible.

In my own field of skills and competence, there are several players interested in managing the relevant information about skills and competence, including (in the UK) Sector Skills Councils, and bodies that set curricula for qualifications. But they will naturally need some help to structure their skill and competence information, and for that they will need tools, either that they develop themselves or buy. It is those tools that are in line to be standards compliant.

And what of the learners themselves? Seems to me "they" (including "we" users) really appreciate standards, particularly if it means that our information can be moved easily between different systems. But, as users, few of us have influence. Outside the open source community, which is truly wonderful, I can't easily recall any standards initiative funded by ordinary users. Rather, the influence we and other users have is often doubly indirect: filtered through those who pay for the tools we use, and through those who develop and sell those tools.

The European Commission, then? Maybe. We do have the ICT Standardisation Work Programme (ICTSWP), sponsored by DG Enterprise and Industry. I'm grateful that they are sponsoring the work I am doing for InLOC, though isn't the general situation a bit like JISC? It is all down to which priorities happen to be on the agenda (of the EC this time), and the EC is rather less open to influence than JISC. Whether an official turns up to a CEN Workshop seems to depend on the priorities of that official. André Richier (the official named in "our" bit of the ICTSWP) often turns up to the Workshop on ICT Skills, but rarely to our Workshop. In any case they are not the ultimate customers.

What are the actual interests of the EC? Mobility, evidently. There has been so much European funding over the years with the term "mobiity" attached. Indeed, the InLOC work is seen as part of the WS-LT's work on European Learner Mobility. Apart from mobility, the EC must have some general interest in the wellbeing of the European economy as a whole, but this is surely difficult, where the interests of different nations surely diverge. More of this later.

In the end, many people don't turn up, for all these reasons. They don't turn up at the WS-LT; they don't turn out in any real strength for the related BSI committee, IST/43; few of the kinds of customer I'm thinking about even turn up at ISO SC36.

Who does turn up then? They are great people. They are genuinely enthusiastic about standardisation, and have many bright ideas. They are mostly in academia, small (often one-person) consultancy, projects, networks or consortia. They like European, national, or any funding for developing their often genuinely good ideas. Aren't so many of us like that? But there were not even many of us lot at this WS-LT meeting in Berlin. And maybe that is how it goes – when starved of the direct stimulus of the people we are doing this for, we risk losing our way, and the focus, enthusiasm and energy dwindles, even within our idealistic camp.

Before I leave our esteemed attendees, however, I would like to point out the most promising bodies that were represented at the WS-LT meeting: KION from Italy and the University of Oslo's USIT, both members of RS3G, the Rome Student Systems and Standards Group, an association of software providers. They are very welcome and appropriate partners with the WS-LT.

Which brings me back to the question, where are the other (real) customers? We could ask the same thing of IST/43, and of ISO SC36. Which directly interested parties might pay? Perhaps a good place to start the analysis is to divide the candidates roughly between private and public sectors.

My guess here is that private sector led standardisation works best in the classic kinds of situation. What would be the point of a manufacturer developing their own range of electrical plugs and sockets? Even with telephones, there are huge advantages in having a system where everyone can dial everyone else, and indeed where all handsets work everywhere (well, nearly...). But the systems we are working with are not in that situation. There are reasons for these vendors to want to try their own new non-standard things. And much of what we do leads, more than follows, implementation. That ground sometimes seems a bit shaky.

Private sector interest in skills and competence is focused in the general areas of personnel, recruitment, HR, and training. Perhaps, for many businesses, the issues are not seen as complex enough to merit the involvement of standards.

So what are the real benefits that we see from learning technology standardisation, and put across to our customers? Surely these include better, more effective as well as efficient education; in the area of skills and competence, easier transition between education and work; and tools to help with professional and vocational development. These relate to classic areas of direct interest from government, because all governments want a highly skilled, competent, professional work force, able to "compete" in the global(ised) economy, and to upskill themselves as needed. The foundations of these goals are laid in traditional education, but they go a long way beyond the responsibilities of schools, HEIs, and traditional government departments of education. Confirmation of the blurring of boundaries comes from recalling that the the EC's ICTSWP is sponsored not by DG Education and Culture, but DG Enterprise and Industry.

My conclusion? Government departments need our help in seeing the relevance of learning technology standardisation, across traditional departmental boundaries. This is not a new message. What I am adding to it is that I think national government departments and their agencies are our stakeholders, indeed our customers, and that we need to be encouraging them to come along to the WS-LT. We need to pursuade them that different countries do share an interest in learning technology standardisation. This would best happen alongside their better involvement in national standards bodies, which is another story, another hill to climb...

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.

The meeting was on 2011-12-12 at the CEN meeting rooms in Brussels. I was there on two counts: first as a CETIS and BSI member of CEN WS-LT and TC 353, and second as the team leader of InLOC, which has the e-CF mentioned in its terms of reference. There was a good attendance of 35 people, just a few of whom I had met before. Some members are ICT employers, but more are either self-employed or from various organisations with an interest in ICT skills, and in particular, CEPIS (not to be confused with CETIS!) of which the BCS is a member. A surprising number of Workshop members are Irish, including the chair, Dudley Dolan.

The WS-LT and TC353 think a closer relationship with the WS ICT Skills would be of mutual benefit, and I personally agree. ICT skills are a vital component of just about any HE skills programme, essential as they are for the great majority of graduate jobs. As well as the e-CF, which is to do with competences used in ICT professions, the WS ICT Skills have recently started a project to agree a framework of key skills for ICT users. So for the WS-LT there is an easy starting point for which we can offer to apply various generic approaches to modelling and interoperability. The strengths of the two workshops are complementary: the WS-LT is strong in the breadth of generalities about metadata, theory, interoperability; the WS ICT Skills is strong in depth, about practice in the field of ICT.

The meeting revealed that the two workshops share several concerns. Both need to manage their CWAs, withdrawing outdated ones; both are concerned about the length and occasional opaqueness of the procedure to fund standardisation expert team work. Both are concerned with the availability and findability of their CWAs. André Richier is interested in both Workshops, though more involved in the WS ICT Skills. Both are concerned, in their own different ways, with the move through education and into employment. Both are concerned with creating CWAs and ENs (European "Norm" Standards), though the WS-LT is further ahead on this front, having prompted the formation of CEN TC353 a few years ago, to deal with the EN business. The WS ICT Skills doesn't have a TC, and it is discussing whether to attempt ENs without a TC, or to start their own TC, or to make use of the existing TC353.

On the other hand, the WS ICT Skills seems to be ahead in terms of membership involvement. They charge money for voting membership, and draw in big business interest, as well as small. Would the WS-LT (counterintuitively perhaps) draw in a larger membership if it charged fees?

I was lucky to have a chance (in a very full agenda) to introduce the WS-LT and the InLOC project. I mentioned some of the points above, and pointed out how relevant InLOC is to ICT skills, with many links including shared experts. While understanding is built up between the two workshops, it was worth stressing that nothing in InLOC is sector-specific; we will not be developing any learning outcome or competence content; and that far from being in any way competitive, we are perfectly set up for collaboration with the WS ICT Skills, and the e-CF.

Work on e-CF version 3 is expected to be approved very soon, and there is a great opportunity there to try to ensure that the InLOC structures are suited to representing the e-CF, and that any useful insights from InLOC are worked into the e-CF. The e-CF work is ably led by Jutta Breyer who runs her own consultancy. Another project of great interest to InLOC is their work on "end user" ICT skills (the e-CF deals with professional competences), led by Neil Farren of the ECDL Foundation. The term "end user" caused some comment and will probably not feature in the final outputs of this project! Their project is a mere month or so ahead of InLOC in time. In particular, they envisage developing some kind of "framework shell", and to me it is vital that this coordinates well with the InLOC outputs, as a generalisation-specialisation.

Another interesting piece of work is looking at ICT job profiles. The question of how a job profile relates to competence definitions is something that needs clarifying and documenting within the InLOC guidelines, and again, the closer we can coordinate this, the better for both of us.

Finally, should there be an EN for the e-CF? It is a tricky question. Sector Skills Councils in the UK find it hard enough to write National Occupation Standards for the UK – would it be possible to reach agreement across Europe? What would it mean for SFIA? If SFIA saw it as a threat, it would be likely to weigh in strongly against such a move. Instead, would it be possible to persuade SFIA to accept a suitably adapted e-CF as a kind of SFIA "Lite"? Some of us believe that would help, rather than conflict with, SFIA itself. Or could there be an EN, not rigidly standardising the descriptions of "e-Competences", but rather giving an indication for how such frameworks should be expressed, with guidelines on ICT skills and competences in particular?

Here, above all, there is room for detailed discussion between the Workshops, and between InLOC and the ongoing ICT Skills Workshop teams, to achieve something that is really credible, coherent and useful to interested stakeholders.

Badges can be seen as recognisable tokens of status or achievement. But tokens don't work in a vacuum, they depend on other things to make them work. Perhaps looking at these may help us understand how they might be used, both for portfolios and elsewhere.

Rowin wrote a useful post a few weeks ago, and the topic has retained a buzz. Taking this forward, I'd like to discuss specifically the aspects of badges — and indeed any other certificate — relevant both to portfolio tools and to competence definitions. Because the focus here is on badges, I'll use the term "badge" occasionally to include what is normally thought of as a certificate.

A badge, by being worn, expresses a claim to something. Some real badges may express the proposition that the wearer is a member of some organisation or club. Anyone can wear an "old school tie", but how does one judge the truth of the claim to belong to a particular alumni group? Much upset can be caused by the misleading wearing of medals, in the same way as badges.

Badges could often do with a clarification of what is being claimed. (That would be a "better than reality" feature.) Is my wearing a medal a statement that I have been awarded it, or it is just in honour of the dead relative that earned it? Did I earn this badge on my own, was I helped towards it, or am I just wearing it because it looks "cool"? An electronic badge, e.g. on a profile or e-portfolio, can easily link to an explicit claim page including a statement of who was awarded this badge, and when, beyond information about what the badge is awarded for. These days, a physical badge could have a QR code so that people can scan it and be taken to the same claim page.

If the claim is, for example, simply to "be" a particular way, or to adhere to some opinion, or perhaps to support some team (in each case where the natural evidence is just what the wearer says), then probably no more is needed. But most badges, at least those worn with pride, represent something more than that the wearer self-certifies something. Usually, they represent something like a status awarded by some other authority than the wearer, and to be worth wearing, they show something that the wearer has, but might not have had, which is of some significance to the intended observers.

If a badge represents a valued status, then clearly badges may be worn misleadingly. To counter that, there will need to be some system of verification, through which an observer can check on the validity of the implied claim to that status. Fortunately, this is much easier to arrange with an electronic badge than a physical one. Physical badges really need some kind of regulatory social system around them, often largely informal, that deters people from wearing misleading badges. If there is no such social system, we are less in the territory of badges, and more of certificates, where the issues are relatively well known.

When do you wear physical badges? When I do it is usually a conference, visitor or staff badge. Smart badges can be "swiped" in some way, and that could, for instance, lead to a web page on the authority's web site with a photo of the person. That would be a pretty good quick check that would be difficult to fake effectively. "Swiping" can these days be magnetic, RFID, or QR code.

My suggestion for electronic badges is that the token badge links directly to a claim page. The claim page ideally holds the relevant information in a form that is both machine processable and human readable. But, as a portfolio is typically under the control of the individual, more portfolio pages cannot easily provide any official confirmation. The way to do this within a user-controlled portfolio would be with some kind of electronic signature. But probably much more effective in the long term is for the portfolio claim page to refer to other information held by the awarding authority. This page can either be public or restricted, and could hold varying amounts of information about the person as well as the badge claim.

Here are some first ideas of information that could relate to a badge (or indeed any certificate):

• what is claimed (competence, membership, permission, values, etc.);
• identity of the person claiming;
• what authority is responsible for validating the claim and awarding;
• when and on what grounds the award was made;
• how and when any assessment process was done;
• assurance that the qualifying performance was not by someone else.

But that's only a quick attempt. A much slower attempt would be helpful.

It's important to be able to separate out these components. The "what is claimed" part is very closely related to learning outcome and competence definitions, the subject of the InLOC work. All the assessment and validation information is separable, and the information models (along with any interoperability specifications) should be created separately.

Competence and values can be defined independently of any organisation — they attach just to an individual. This is different from membership, permission, and the like, that are essentially tied to systems and organisations, and not as such transferable.

We've done a great job with Leap2A in terms of providing a workable starting point for interoperability of e-portfolio systems and portability of learner-ownable information, but what are the next steps we (and JISC) should be taking? That's what we need to think about.

The role of CETIS was only to co-ordinate this work. The ones to take the real credit are the vendors and developers of e-portfolio and related systems, who worked well together to make the decisions on how Leap2A should be, representing all the information that is seen as sharable between actual e-portfolio tools, allowing it to be communicated between different systems.

The current limitations come from the lack of coherent practice in personal and professional development, indeed in all the areas that e-portfolio and related tools are used for. Where some institutions support activities that are simply different from those supported by a different institution, there is no magic wand that can be waved over the information related to one activity that can turn it into a form that supports a fundamentally different one. We need coherent practice. Not identical practice, by any means, but practice where it is as clear as possible what the building blocks of stored lifelong learning information are.

What we really need is for real users — learners — to be taking information between systems that they use or have used. We need to have motivating stories of how this opens up new possibilities; how it enables lifelong personal and professional development in ways that haven't been open before. When learners start needing the interoperability, it will naturally be time to start looking again, and developing Leap2A to respond to the actual needs. We've broken the deadlock by providing a good initial basis, but now the baton passes to real practice, to take advantage of what we have created.

What will help this? Does it need convergence, not on individual development practice necessarily, but on the concepts behind it? Does it need tools to be better - and if so, what tools? Does it need changes in the ways institutions support PDP? In November, we held a meeting co-located with the annual residential seminar of the CRA, as a body that has a long history of collaboration with CETIS in this area.

And how do we provide for the future of Leap2A more generally? Is it time to form a governing group of software developers who have implemented Leap2A? Is there any funding, or are there any initiatives, that can keep Leap2A fresh and increasingly relevant?

Please consider sharing your views, and contributing to the future of Leap2A.