At this useful meeting, on the premises of European Schoolnet, the question of e-portfolio information was introduced, and other business carried forward. Many of the familiar people were there: though among those missed were Scott, Mark Stubbs, Cleo Sgouropoulou. Dan Rehak was absent, but Angelo Panar was there in his place. I turned out to be the only UK person. A bright new face was Eleni Kargioti, from Q&R, a Greek company contracted to CEDEFOP to do interesting things with their Europass web site.

Jan Pawlowski, in the chair, changed the agenda a bit to include a presentation from Eleni, and to include discussion on the EC’s Standardisation Work Programme in ICT. “Our” bit is Domain 7: eSkills and eLearning. We have an obvious interest in having EC policy matched with what we think is important. The idea this time was just to gently edit, not to change anything substantive. As the term “e-portfolio” has now been included under out interest in European Learner Mobility, I persuaded people for the corresponding inclusion of “Professional Development” under the “elearning” interest heading.

We did discuss the InLOC proposal (integrating learning outcomes and competences), which has been very delayed this year mainly due to confusion over the resignation of DIN from providing the workshop secretariat. It has just last week been finally resubmitted to CEN who are doing their bit and passing it on. This is a vital proposal that I have been jointly authoring, as it follows on from the earlier European Learner Mobility work that led to the EuroLMAI specifications. Now, the secretarial question has nearly been resolved, with AENOR (Spanish national body) offering to take on the workshop on condition that InLOC is funded.

I made a presentation about the need for standardisation in area of e-portfolio information. It’s on Slideshare. After a brief history, I point out the key motivations, which include the fact of the Korean-led ISO SC36 e-portfolio reference model work. I outline the Leap2A model, and give thoughts about how Leap2A and the NL profile of IMS eP might be brought together. Renewed CEDEFOP involvement makes this work even more timely.

I also drew attention to the forthcoming ISO SC36 meeting in Strasbourg in March. We need to get together with our usual suspect colleagues (including Erlend, Tore and Christian who all plan to be there) and focus relevant ideas.

Eleni Kargioti gave a very heartening presentation, reflecting the fact that CEDEFOP is back in touch. There is now great potential for collaboration over Europass in several ways. Perhaps CETIS should follow this up, develop a relationship with CEDEFOP perhaps through Q&R, and make the connections with the HEAR work, for example.

Joris Klerkx talked about the Interoperability of Registries work. As I know little about learning resources or repositories, it mainly went over my head, though it did look vaguely plausible. The slight issue here is that there may be competition between this work and e-portfolio information work for funding in the coming year’s work programme. So, from our side, we need to find who is really interested in e-portfolio work and make a convincing case by the end of February, to maximise the chance of benefiting from the opportunity for Leap2A being a key part of a future European Standard, just as XCRI provided perhaps the majority of ideas for MLO.

The next meeting of the Workshop is in Madrid, April 11, followed the next day by TC353. After that, we are investigating a summer meeting for the Workshop in conjunction with the EUNIS conference, which is in Dublin in June; the following WS-LT and TC353 meeting is still scheduled for October 13 in Sweden.