Category Archives: portfolio

Representing defining and using ability competency and similar concepts

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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.

Doing XML semantically

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this is an extension on what I wrote earlier…

ePortfolio 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E-Systems and E-Portfolios

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I went to this joint LLN meeting in Sheffield (2008-07-03) because there were several people, and several topics, that I wanted to keep up or catch up with. The meeting fulfilled that and more.

Roger Clark talked about current GMSA work (Pathways and Advance), and about the need for well defined standards and interfaces. Mark Stubbs talked about XCRI, and how the recently started European initiative, Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) has adopted a basic structure reflecting XCRI. If I understood correctly, he is to join the DCSF Information Standards Board. Selwyn Lloyd reviewed ioNetworks. They are all doing important work which I want to keep up with, and as they are very busy, this kind of meeting is useful to keep track of the general picture. Kirstie Coolin, another valued portfolio interoperability colleague, talked about e-portfolio pilot work in the LEAP AHEAD LLN, covering Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, which was new to me.

I took the opportunity also to catch up with Lisa Gray and Stuart Wood (recently appointed developer at Nottingham) about our current portfolio interoperability prototyping work.

After a very pleasant and unhurried lunch, we split into workshop discussions, and I went to probably the largest, related to e-portfolios. A very interesting idea bubbled up here: that none of the e-portfolio tools are ideal for all the different purposes of e-portfolios ranging from assessment management to PDP, and that perhaps the way forward would be to use more than one tool. Of course, this lifts portfolio interoperability into the limelight – people seemed to concur on this.  Rather than being a nice-to-have optional extra, interoperability will become a vital enabler to reusing the same information across these different systems. Perhaps also now, interoperability with student record systems, other e-admin systems, and VLEs will become recognised as an equal part of this overall move toward allowing the learner-controlled sharing and reuse of all personal-related information. Sharing between e-portfolio systems and e-admin systems is not so different from sharing information between e-portfolio systems with different purposes. No one system will use the complete range of portfolio information, but in a Web 2.0 world where there are surprising new uses for old information, as much as reasonably possible should be made available for use by other systems.

The networking brought two new contacts with significant interests. Colin Wilkinson is the Employer Engagement Co-ordinator for the North East Higher Skills Network, and has a strongly overlapping interest in the represention of skills. He intends to work with GMSA, and also perhaps us in CETIS in this area, which could be very promising in several ways. Ann Hughes, Becta’s Head of Efficiency and Productivity, is interested in lowering the barriers for information between schools, HE and FE. She told me that in the UK the SIF is now thought of as the “Systems Interoperability Framework”. They need guidance towards positive and fruitful avenues of development, and I think we can help them.

GMSA advance

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As I’ve been involved with GMSA in various ways including through the ioNW2 project, I went to their seminar on 14th May introducing GMSA Advance.  This is to do with providing bite-sized modules of Higher Education, mainly for people at work, and giving awards (including degrees) on that basis – picking up some of the “Leitch” agenda. As I suspected, it was of interest from a portfolio perspective among others.

I’ll start with the portfolio- and PDP-related issues.

The first issue is award coherence. If you put together an award from self-chosen small chunks of learning (“eclectic”, one could call it), there is always an issue of whether that award represents anything coherent. Awarding bodies, including HEIs, may not think it right to give an award for what looks like a random collection of learning. Having awarding bodies themselves define what counts as coherent risks being too restrictive. An awarding body might insist on things which were not relevant to the learner’s workplace, or that had been covered outside the award framework. On the other hand, employers might not understand about academic coherence at all. A possible solution that strikes me and others is

  • have the learner explain the coherence of modules chosen
  • assess that explanation as part of the award requirement.

This explanation of coherence needs to make sense to a variety of people as well as the learner, in particular, to academics and to employers. It invites a portfolio-style approach: the learner is supported through a process of constructing the explanation, and it is presented as a portfolio with links to further information and evidence. One could imagine, for example, a video interview with the learner’s employer as useful extra evidence.

A second issue is the currency and validity of “credit”. Now I have a history of skepticism about credit frameworks and credit transfer, though the above idea of assessed explanation of award coherence at last  brings a ray of light into the gloom. My issue has always been that, to be meaningful, awards should be competence-based, not credit based. And I still maintain that the abilities claimed by someone at the end of a course, suitably validated by the awarding body, should be a key part of the official records of assessment (indeed, part of the “Higher Education Achievement Report” of the Burgess Group – report downloadable as PDF)

One of the key questions for these “eclectic” awards is whether credit should have a limited lifetime. Whether credit should expire surely should depend on what credit is trying to represent. It is just the skills, abilities or competences whose validation needs to expire – this is increasingly being seen in the requirement for professional revalidation. And the expiry of validation itself needs to be based on evidence – bicycle riding and swimming tend to be skills that are learned once for ever; language skills fall off only slowly; but the knowledge of the latest techniques in a leading edge discipline may be lost very quickly.

This is a clear issue for portfolios that present skills. The people with those portfolios need to be aware of the perceived value of old evidence, and to be prepared to back up old formal evidence with more recent, if less formal, additional evidence of currency. We could potentially take that approach back into the the GMSA Advance awards, though there would be many details to figure out, and issues would overlap with accreditation of prior learning.

Other issues at the seminar were not to do with portfolios. There is the question of how to badge such awards. CPD? Several of those attending thought not – “CPD”is often associated with unvalidated personal learning, or even just attendance at events. As an alternative, I rather like the constructive ambiguity of the phrase “employed learning” – it would be both the learners and the learning that are employed – so that is my suggestion for inclusion into award titles.

Another big issue is funding. Current policy is for no government funding to be given for people studying for awards of equal or lower level than one they have already achieved. The trouble is that if each module itself carries an award, then work-based learners couldn’t be funded for this series of bite-sized modules, but only one. The issue is recognised, but not solved. A good idea that was suggested at the seminar is to change and clarify the meaning of credit, so that it takes on the role of measuring public fundability of learning. Learners could have a lifetime learning credit allowance, that they could spend as they preferred. Actually, I think even better would be a kind of “sabbatical” system where one’s study credit allowance continued to build, to allow for retraining. Maybe one year’s (part time?) study credit would be fundable for each (say) 7 years of life – or maybe 7 years of tax-paying work?

So, as you can see, it was a thought-provoking and stimulating seminar.

LEAP workshop 2008-03-12

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Lisa Gray arranged an afternoon workshop for e-portfolio projects interested in LEAP 2.0 at the JISC e-Learning Programme event on 2008-03-12 at Aston.

Nine project delegates attended, and we split into four small groups of pairs of projects. I asked each pair to explain their practice to each other, to consider how their systems might possibly work together, and then to come up with

  • next steps they will take
  • challenges they envisage
  • support they might want

in their progress towards interoperability.

Because of the range of projects represented, and their wide range of situations, the answers to these covered a good range and had many valuable points. Here are a few issues which came up.

  • How is this spec any better than or different from previous ones?
  • Ownership of and responsibility for the information held.
  • Security (various aspects of this).
  • Shared development of Open Source systems and tools, for e.g. validation (of syntax); verification (of information presented).
  • Transfer of permissions between systems.
  • Interfacing with systems (such as e-Learning / MIS / student information systems) from various vendors.

Related to these, the support we (variously CETIS and/or JISC) can offer could include:

  • Making the new specifications available
  • Supporting work on common tools and services (as above)
  • Supporting common ontologies
  • Getting vendors on board
  • Dissemination of what is possible

This was a smart collection of delegates, and they even seemed to enjoy the process! One of the lessons I take back with me is that this approach – getting people to work in pairs as if they had been asked to implement some kind of interoperability between their systems – is very productive: I’ll do it again given the chance. I think it puts people in just the right frame of mind. Everyone gets to explain what their system does to another highly informed person who doesn’t know much about it, and talk about interoperability is grounded in practice, rather than in abstract (and too often, futile) discussions of the conceptual structure of the interoperability specification.

Just one thing – try to match people/projects up so they have as much as possible in common. I prepared this, but had to rearrange on the spot when one person was absent.

ePortfolios, identity etc. Newcastle 2008-02-28

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When we saw the initial announcement, it looked like a good thing to go to, as it overlaps areas of keen interest. So Helen, Scott and I had written the paper – Social portfolios supporting professional identity – and Helen and I went along to the one-day conference in Newcastle organised by Medev. It was a good day.

Why, then, have I been hesitating to write a blog entry about it? The usual good lot of people were there, including a pleasing number of those I didn’t know. The proceedings were printed admirably. The food, the arrangements, were all very good. Even our paper went down well (OK, actually it was the presentation, not the paper, which had some, what shall we say, interesting content). There was some very stimulating discussion around that.

And I’m sure it was very interesting and useful to many. But to me, the interest and use was in the networking, which one can’t really blog about so easily, as it is much more personal. The presentations were all worthy, but perhaps one may be forgiven for not remembering much that stood out as being different from the many other portfolio conferences that some of us have been to.

Intellectual heritage tracing

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I’ve only been hearing and thinking about plagiarism in the last few days – since going to the Assessment Think Tank in York in fact, but since then reading in many places. One of the debated ideas is encouraging students to use plagiarism detection services. Another, heard at York, is that the more adventurous students run more risk. Why? It is unlikely in some subjects (say Philosophy) to come up with entirely novel ideas, so if a student has an idea which was not represented on the reading list, they are less likely to know if someone has had it before, and thus more likely to be judged to have plagiarised – have passed off some ideas as theirs which actually came from someone else. They may not have known that, but they can’t prove it.

Those two ideas together spark off a bigger idea.

Sophisticated plagiarism detection services could be rebranded to be thought of as tracing the intellectual heritage of a piece of work. That would be very useful – I could write some thoughts down, submit them, and be returned a list of similar ideas, along with how my ideas relate to theirs (according to the software, which is not of course going to be perfect). Then I could look up the originals, and work them in properly: paraphrase and reference, for example. It would also be a powerful self-critical tool: instead of simply imagining the objections to one’s own supposedly new idea, one could see how others have argued against similar ideas in the past.

Incredibly useful in the field of patenting, as well, I would guess…

Have the anti-plagiarism people got on to patents yet? I’ll ask.

Uniform tags, not uniform templates

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On Friday (16th November) I was at a meeting of the Academy Subject Centre e-portfolio projects, in Wolverhampton. Among more gently interesting topics, the big thing that came out in the end was the desire not to be able to navigate around e-portfolio related information and resources without being swamped or overloaded. Initially discussing case studies, people at the meeting agreed that we don’t really want uniform templates, but rather uniform tags. Exactly how these might work was not discussed, but the question got me thinking.

Ideally, to get a coherent and consistent set of domain tags, they need to be based on an agreed domain model. This could be a domain ontology, but what one calls it is less important than the reality of it being: (a) widely and commonly agreed; and (b) able to be put in a machine-processable form for use on the web – the Semantic Web in fact.

JISC could perhaps fund one or more projects, absolutely not, under any circumstances, to invent their own domain models or ontologies in isolation, but to explore what common ground there is in a particular domain, and to explore also the processes which can result in broadening the area of agreement in the domain model. A by-product of this would be an evaluation of the usefulness of the tools needed to facilitate broadening of consensus in the domain model. Here, graphical representations will be vitally central.