| NETWORK NEWS |
| Sixth Edition June 2006 |
| EDITORIAL |
by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Johannes Wildt Dear eCompetence and eLearning actors, Welcome to the Sixth Edition of our European eCompetence newsletter. Finally we have published our eCompetence book "The Challenge of eCompetence in Academic Staff Development", which presents 24 contributions from all over Europe and even one contribution from South Africa. Next to conceptual backgrounds, the book focuses on institutional staff training measures and approaches to individual eCompetence development. We hope that the book contains interesting findings to all actors, which are involved in academic staff development and building support and infrastructure for eLearning in their universities. As the book is published under the Creative Commons licence, you are free to download all contributions from our website. The fourth eCompetence symposium has taken place in March at the University of Dortmund, embedded into an International Conference on Academic Staff Development. We have seen excellent presentations from eLearning experts, including Gilly Salmon from Leicester, Jan Elen and Wim Van Petegem from Leuven, Michael Kerres from Duisburg - Essen, Iain Mc Labhrainn from Galway, Hans Boon from Pretoria, and Dieter Euler from St. Gallen, to mention only a few. All presentations and a summary of all eCompetence sessions is also available at our website. Although we have analysed and learned a lot already on eCompetence, much remains to be done. In educational research, there is a continued strong interest in competence development and management, as well in as competence assessment methods. eCompetence combines educational questions on how competence can be developed with questions on technological innovation and its impact on educational institutions and structures. The research outcomes in our project can serve as basis for further and more fundamental follow-up investigations on this important topic in the European higher education landscape. We will present our reflections in a workshop at the EDEN 2006 conference in Vienna. The conference title, is by the way, "E-Competences for Life, Employment and Innovation", which underlines the relevance of our topic. Best regards,
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REVIEW: LORENZO, G.; ITTELSON, J. (2005). AN OVERVIEW OF E-PORTFOLIOS Review by: Taiga Brahm, University of St. Gallen, Swiss 
Lorenzo's and Ittelson's paper, published as part of the Educause Learning Initiative, aims at giving an overview of e-portfolios as a means to advance learning through IT innovation. Thus, an e-portfolio is defined as a “digitized collection of artefacts”. This can include text-based, multimedia or graphic demonstrations, accomplishments and resources which are usually archived on a website. Emphasizing the fact that e-portfolios are more than a pure collection of achievements, the article points out that they also function as a tool for personal reflection since they often encourage feedback by others. Additionally, e-portfolios can be used as administrative tool in order to control work created with different applications and by different users. After briefly defining e-portfolios and analysing their functions, the article describes three major types of e-portfolios: student e-portfolios, teaching e-portfolios and institutional e-portfolios. Historically, print-based student portfolios already existed in the 1980s and gained reputation in the mid 1990s as a possibility to collect one’s own work and to reflect on one’s learning. Student e-portfolios teach critical thinking, communication skills as well as computer literacy. They also give students the chance to present their skills to prospective employers since their university usually provides a temporary or even lifetime access to their portfolios. Teaching e-portfolios are used to showcase skills and accomplishments for the purpose of career advancement. They may include the faculty’s instructional work, his or her teaching philosophy and lesson plans. Institutional e-portfolios combine e-portfolios by faculty and students with those by programs and departments. They are relatively new and are seen to function as a possibility of institution-wide learning, reflection, and improvement. They can therefore be used for accreditation as well as for marketing purposes. The article points out a number of examples, including the Urban Universities Portfolio Project (UUPP) which was the first formal institutional e-portfolio. Some of the challenges connected to e-portfolios are the student access to the document, the required server space as well as the server maintenance, privacy issues, the ways of promotion, support, and evaluation of e-portfolios. After discussing these implementation issues as well as the question of interoperability and standards the article gives an overview of the various possibilities to develop e-portfolios: Home-grown, open-source or commercial systems can be used as well as common HTML editors to start an e-portfolio. The article describes some examples of each of these tool sets. E-Portfolios seem to be a promising means to promote life-long learning in institutions of higher education. But they are yet to be established on a large-scale level. RELATED LINKS FOR MORE INFO CONTACT |
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