ePIC 2012, the 10th ePortfolio and Identity Conference

Should everybody have an ePortfolio? How do ePortfolios contribute to the identity construction process? How do ePortfolios support the acquisition of 21st century skills? How do ePortfolios support lifelong learning, orientation and employability? How can we make ePortfolios fully interoperable? To find the answers to these questions, and more, join us at ePIC 2012, the 10th ePortfolio and Identity Conference, 9-10-11 July 2012, at the IET, Savoy Place, London. 

ePIC 2012, London 9-10-11 July 2012, will mark the 10th anniversary of the International ePortfolio and Identity Conference. We would be delighted to celebrate this special event with you and all those who have contributed to the success of previous conferences. It would be a great honour and pleasure for us if you accepted to submit a contribution or simply join us next July in London. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet colleagues of a truly international community to, one more time, move forward the "state of the art" in the field of ePortfolio and identity construction. EPIC 2012 will also host the second ePortfolio World Summit (after Boston in 2011).

 

If you cannot attend ePIC 2012, please keep us posted on the latest developments in your area and forward the information about ePIC 2012 to people who might be interested to join our ePortfolio and Identity Community.

You will find below the information relative to the ePIC 2012 call for contributions

 (http://www.epforum.eu/2012/).

We look forward to hearing from you and your projects!

Serge and Esther, Europortfolio
    

e-Assessment - some timely notes

I took this photograph of the end-of-term pile of assessments to be done by a teacher some years ago. But since then not much has changed. The work is still printed out, marked and put into a folder, marks written up in a marks book and then the whole file for each student is assessed. And many teachers will now be doing this well into the Summer term!

The document produced for Becta by John Winkley offers some hope of a solution for overworked teachers, but probably not universally available in my lifetime! As I have argued eleswhere, the place for such powerful tools should be within the VLE, but some schools are still lagging behind in installing such tools or even really getting pupils and parents to access their VLEs from home!

As the blurb states:

An authoritative survey of a technology which, perhaps like virtual reality, has not come of age as quickly as expected. A wide-ranging overview describes current and future applications of on-screen examinations, audio, text editing, adaptive assessment, games and simulations, short text answer marking, essay marking, spoken language marking, mathematics marking and voting devices. John Winkley argues that e-assessment has potential to be transformational in developing the benefits of immediate results and improved feedback, interactivity and richness of ICT for more authentic assessment, e-assessment as an enabler of better assessment and as a democratising influence on the assessment process which also encompasses diversity.

BUT, he mentions e-Portfolios only once in passing! It is surely time to start encouraging students to take the initiative in claiming what should be assessed along with their own reflections and possibly those of peers and mentors. Winkley is arguing for some future nirvana, I am arguing that e-Portfolios (and in particular eFolio) should be adopted NOW!