7th March - 11th March Rob Ward from the Centre for Recording Achievment

Rob Ward
11:07am 4 March 2011

Good morning everyone

Lurking on the periphery, I’ve been thinking about how to facilitate this week quite a bit.  What are the key issues, that will engage yourselves – be you activists or fellow lurkers!  Having given it a bit of thought, it seems to me that we need to be clear – for starters - about:

The focus for this community, and how it pulls together the intersect between two communities, namely the e-portfolio-ites and the Work-Based Learning folk.  How this is effectively done might need some pondering (and is related to community building).  In this context, this takes the comment from John Peters in week 1 about an existing community who had themselves identified a community need and extends it with the notion of bringing colleagues from communities with a common need together.  Or is it but one element of the ongoing life of an already existing community?  Or something which might link the communities together but which may not feature prominently in either?  We already have an Employee Learning Network, facilitated by the Academy, for’ all those with an interest in employer engagement and employee learning’, a new list on lifewide learning, and several e-portfolio groupings

The possible actions for this community, once defined, harking back to Kevin’s proposal to develop a conference proposal…This has been developed a little in terms of assessment, see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/4949

There may also be decisions about facilitation of any developing community post March, but let’s leave that for a bit…unil we are clearer on what’s to facilitate

Over to you!

Sarah Chesney
1:36pm 11 March 2011

On Wednesday 9th March we had a  valuable Elluminate session led by Rob Ward and attended by people from a range of perspectives including practitioners, project funders and developers.  The link to the recording of the discussion is here:http://elluminate.jisc-ssbr.net/play_recording.html?recordingId=1250872506764_1299669864466

There seemed to be resonances between the HE5P project (which formed the basis of the discussion) and the outcomes of the Lifelong Learning and Workforce Development Programme.  The areas of similarity included the tension between multiple stakeholders in a workbased learning scenario - these stakeholder include employers, learners and  higher education institutions and sometimes include a professional body and/or a trade union.  E-portfolios seem to be the space where these tensions come to the fore - maybe because the course is funded by an employer and they feel they have some access rights into the e-portfolio, or because the HEI may feel this is non negotiable.  This is a complex situation with the learners' objectives not necessarily being in tune with their employers - the learner may see study as a way of moving on, where an employer sees the study as a solution to a problem.

Given that there are similarities emerging, and areas where there are still many questions and tensions to be addressed, it was felt that this emergent community of practice should be looking to either:

• Become a Special Interest Group and a subgroup of a larger community (one that is concerned with workbased learning or e-portfolios)
• Become linked with a 'project' and have a precise timescale attached to activities
• Let the community organically develop and mature (and what support would be needed to allow this to happen) and attach itself to a range of agenda (much like ELLESIG)
• Somehow envigorate an exisiting community.

We welcome feedback on these ideas and would like more suggestions.  This will inform an agenda item when we meet on 11th May (details to be confirmed soon) in Wolverhampton.