EIfEL was invited by Veronika Hornung-Prähauser from Salzburg Research Institute (Austria) to co-organise an ePortfolio workshop, as a follow-up to ePortfolio Austria, 27 April 2005, the first Germanophone ePortfolio event, held in Salzburg. The ICL workshop was an opportunity to present current developments in the field of ePortfolios (S Ravet), discuss the issues linked to interoperability and conformance (M Van Coillie) and the need for further research (V Hornung-Prähauser), in particular in the field of the semantic web.

In parallel to the workshop, the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) had organised an open meeting to discuss the future Austrian eLearning strateg, where the ePortfolio was also the main focus.

In order to give you a flavour of the day, we asked Paul Meinl from factline Webservices GmbH to explain how his company came to developing an ePortfolio system and to report on the OCG meeting.

Paul, when I arrived at the conference, I was extremely surprise to see an ePortfolio exhibitor, you: how did you come to the world of ePortfolios?

Factline’s main focus has always been on communities, learning in a constructivist mode, the social dimension of learning. When we were exposed for the first time to the idea of ePortfolio – it was during the Salzburg ePortfolio forum, last April – we understood immediately that it could be an excellent instrument to make our idea of social learning true.

We have always thought of lifelong learning as something that happens in different environments not just in one institution. Lifelong learning is taking place in all parts of our life, not just within limited borders.

With an ePortfolio, you can, as an individual, use this instrument for all the purposes you need in life. You have complete control as an individual. It is not planned by someone else. You keep control over what is happening.

Moreover, the concept of ePortfolio has been very useful to put a unique name on many different things we were already doing, technology we were already developing. Moving from community-based technologies to ePortfolio was an easy step for us. And it greatly helped us to communicate better with our prospects and clients.

Yesterday there was a meeting of the Austrian Computer Society (OCG). Could you tell us what happened during this meeting?

This OCG meeting was well attended, not only by professionals and researchers, but also by representatives of ministries and public authorities – some of them were also at the ePortfolio workshop. The last topic of the meeting was eLearning, and the main discussion was on eLpA (eLearning pro Austria) building a common eLearning strategy for Austria. As contribution to the discussion, Peter Baumgartner, from FernUniversität, advanced the idea that an Austrian eLearning strategy should start with a leading project involving all the different institutions, school, university and business to combine different ideas and projects into one global learning project that could be the starting point for the strategy. The suggestion was made that ePortfolio could be the topic for such an ambitious project. There are already initiatives at school level, as well as university level, and the ePortfolio could be a focus point for a common, transversal project; bringing coherence to and strength to various initiatives.

There was an apparent consensus to make the ePortfolio the central element of eLPA

.

Thank you Paul for sharing this information with us. I’m looking forward to seeing you in Cambridge.