I’ve been telling people, for quite a while, that I will write up suggestions for how to deal with abilities (competence, competencies, knowledge, etc. etc.) for many reasons, including particularly e-portfolio related uses. Well, here are my current ideas for the New Year.
They are expressed in a set of linked pages, each dealing with a facet of the issues. The pages are very much draft ideas, but serve the purpose of getting out the basic ideas and inviting other ideas for improvement. If you have an interest, please do at least leave a comment here, or e-mail me with ideas and suggestions.
Hi Simon. This looks promising. We’ve spoken before about the inability of people in one sector to agree on competences and how this gets even worse across international borders where it can take days even to realise there is a fundamental difference of understanding never mind have the argument. I ‘think’ I follow the technological response and the “SKOS closematch” could become a really important tool for employers, job-seekers, assessors, etc. That, for me, promises the user-centric tool, a slant that can so easily become lost in development. (Did you see Michael Feldstein’s recent post on usability approaches in Sakai and Bodington? http://mfeldstein.com/permissions-and-usabilit/)
In my ideal world, employers, job-seekers, assessors, students and others should not need to know URIs exist and most of them can also probably survive perfectly well without detailed knowledge of single, centralised competence frameworks. Computer-mediated natural language descriptions should be sufficient for real-world use given that anything so vital it would today be tested at the time of need, can still be tested in the future.
Good luck – and let me know if you need a tester.
I enjoyed a read through these pages – thanks. I was surprised that assessment was an ‘impersonal actionpattern’ – the viva is rarely so and I saw no obvious place for the personal reference or the testimonial? I also think that assessment is usually linked to curriculum/syllabus and you may wish to talk more about intended learning outcomes and assessment criteria (and frameworks of same). Good luck!