Pulling Together the Threads of Learning

One word that might best characterises many systems of education could be fragmentation: fragmentation of the schooling system across age groups, between formal and informal learning, disciplines, learning and assessment, learning and teaching...

To compensate the actual disorder caused by this fragmentation, to help learners pull together the threads of their learning, new practices and technologies have emerged. Integrative learning and eportfolios are among the best known.

Yet, while eportfolios should contribute to reducing the fragmentation of learning, the world of eportfolios is also a victim of fragmentation:

• Fragmentation of information: where to find relevant and up-to-date information on eportfolio actors, initiatives, practices and technologies?
• Fragmentation of actors: where do eportfolio professionals meet, each other and with the actors from other fields who share similar questions?
• Fragmentation of initiatives and technologies: where are the incentives to working together, across disciplines, institutions, sectors, territories and technologies, to create a seamless eportfolio infrastructure?

It is to address this challenge that a group of partners have agreed to work together, with the support of the European Commission, to establish Europortfolio, a not-for profit association, dedicated to exploring how eportfolios and eportfolio-related technologies and practices can help us to achieve the following goal:
to empower individuals as reflective learners and practitioners, organisations as a place for authentic learning and assessment, and society as a place for lifelong learning, employability and self-realisation."

Europortfolio is an opportunity to go beyond the current fragmentations, to create the means to pull together the threads of learning, lifelong and life- wide.
You will find in this newsletter a presentation of Europortfolio and how you can contribute and benefit by becoming a Europortfolio Charter Signatory. You will also find an invitation to join us in London on the 10th of July 2013 for the launch of Europortfolio.

We look forward to working with you.

Serge Ravet & Igor Balaban, Europortfolio