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CONTRIBUTIONS
18.05.2016
Igor Balaban
Europortfolio
EUROPORTFOLIO final report
Dear Europortfolio community members, dear Portal contributors,As you are probably aware, Europortfolio started as a Lifelong Learning project and has been funded with support from the European Commission. We started at the beginning of 2013 and finalized the project by the end of 2015. The project ended, but the portal and the community of ePortfolio experts and practitioners communicating here remain alive and vivid.Just to remind you that our aim has been to contribute to the realisation of a European area for lifelong learning, using ePortfolios as a means to support reflective learning and practice as well as transparency and trust across all the actors involved in education and employment. This was achieved by bringing together the community of European ePortfolio experts and practitioners and developing a Learning Community Portal as a space to publish, share and review data and resources on ePortfolio practices and technologies. So far the Europortfolio community has grown to over 600 registered members from 112 countries. The state-of-the-art Europortfolio Learning Portal available at www...
03.04.2016
Elisabeth Agerbæk
Learning
Your house of learning
EPNET member Lise Agerbaek participated as a speaker in TEDxEAL, where the subject was learning in general. The official theme was Each One Teach One. The subject of Lise’s talk is how you get to know your own learning. In it she compares the building of a portfolio as a reflective practice to entering one’s own house of learning. The opportunity for getting to know your way of learning is to pay attention to whenever you fail at learning. This can literally feel like hitting a wall. The great thing about hitting “the wall” is this is an opportunity to sneak along side it, find the door and enter this house of learning.When you hit the wall Lise’s suggestion is this. Start stalking yourself. Sit down to read/train and notice what actually happens. When you stop – why do you stop? What are your feelings? What makes you hate yourself? Take notes. Make a drawing of yourself trying to learn. Notice situations when you are comfortable with your learning. And notice when you are not. Say the things that frustrates you out aloud. And listen to yourself. ...
16.02.2016
Igor Balaban
Announcement
Join the conversation about the future of ePortfolios
Europortfolio community invites you to join our collaboration on the ePortfolio green and or white paper.If ePortfolios are such a wonderful thing, we should all have one, shouldn’t we? Why isn’t this the case? What does it say about the state of the art of learning and technologies? Is it because technology is not mature enough? Is it because the learning environment, especially the formal one, is not conducive to ePortfolio practice?Put differently, what is the causal relationship? Is the underdevelopment of ePortfolios an indicator of the current underdevelopment of authentic learning and assessment, or do we seriously believe that any valuable ePortfolio practice can take place in an unauthentic, artificial learning environment?All this and much more is tackled in the ePortfolio Green paper.On the other hand, we are also trying to reinvent ePortfolio technology and practice based on the questions raised in the Green paper and emerging technologies. If you want to explore the potential of a promising technology to build the next generation of ePortfolio technologies and imagine...
12.02.2016
Announcement
Understanding the essence(s) of portfolio based learning. A collaborative international seminar, the University of Edinburgh, 6-8 June 2016
This intentionally global Seminar, the first jointly organised by the Centre for Recording Achievement (UK) and the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (USA), will take place in the wonderful setting of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. One of the world’s leading Universities,  Edinburgh was an intellectual cradle for the Age of Enlightenment and can boast amongst its many famous alumni signatories of the US declaration of independence, Charles Darwin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania.The seminar will provide a blended format, a purposeful mix of whole event working within a colloquium setting and conventional workshops and seminars grouped by themes.  It will provide opportunities for:The sharing of innovative and evidence-informed practice.The further development of a broadly-based international network to support and advance eportfolio implementation.The development of a shared agenda for practitioner-centred action research.Taken together, over the three days, participants will be supported and enabled to...
10.02.2016
Serge Ravet
Announcement
ePIC 2016: Making learners and citizens the leaders of educational and social innovation
Call for Contributions www.openepic.euMaking learners and citizens the leaders of educational and social innovationThis is the goal of the 14th edition of the ePIC conference that will take place in Bologna 26-28 October 2016. We want to open up technology and put it at the service of educational and social innovation. We want to think deeply about technology - not just its surface and trends but its newest ideas and applications - and technology to be the key to open up social innovation itself: open it up to new viewpoints and new paths. ePIC is a community of innovators, and here is everything we are asking you to help out with, and everyone we feel would be a great asset for this #openEpic community.We are looking for contributions on the following themes:Opening up Education: educating social innovatorsTeacher education, continuing education, competency based education, open educational practices (e.g. open assessment…), accreditation of prior learningOpening up Lifelong Learning: empowering social innovatorsInformal and...
10.02.2016
Serge Ravet
Technology
From ePortfolios to OpenLedgers — via OpenBadges and BlockChains
When I started exploring Open Badges a few years ago, I rapidly realised that not only were they a solution to several of the problems we had with ePortfolios, but they also had the potential to help us reinvent them — the Open Badge Passport initiative is our contribution to this. And now that I have started exploring the possible application of blockchains to Open Badges, I realise that not only were blockchains the perfect solution to a number of Open Badge problems, but they could also be a means to review our ideas on Open Badges altogether.What is a blockchain?A blockchain is the historical record of all the transactions between the participants (nodes) of a network. This record is referred to as a ledger, the artefact accountants use for book keeping. Adding new entries to the ledger, or modifying existing ones, is done by adding a new block to the chain — previous blocks are the faithful representation of the ledger’s previous states.Moreover, the blockchain technology makes ledgers unfalsifiable. How is this possible? By providing a copy of the...

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