Dr Angela Smallwood and Peter Rees Jones' well-organised and well-attended "ePortfolio into Employment" invitation seminar at Nottingham University provided an excellent opportunity to see how XCRI project work in general, and curriculum services in particular, might fit with emerging work in the area of ePortfolios. Hand-picked delegates and a good balance of presentations, workshops and lunchtime networking opportunities ensured that participants were able to appreciate existing initiatives and priorities in FE, HE, qualification and course marketing bodies, and industry, within the UK and further afield (see, for instance, Michel Arnaud's paper on the State of the art for ePortfolio in Europe).

A morning workshop led by Peter on Employability and Europass provided an opportunity to discuss the technical support for transitions (eg school to further or higher education, higher education to employment ...etc), including use of the European Diploma Supplement (see, for instance, ongoing work to ensure IMS LIP can be extended in a robust way to cover the EDS as it is implemented in France and Germany). Discussions highlighted:

• the need for individuals to be empowered to marshal, and present with an acute sense of audience, diverse evidence of achievement that might or might not be certificated by external bodies
• issues of data ownership and authenticity of claimed achievement
• legal and cultural norms surrounding the content of a transcript or references that one institution would be willing to release to another about an individual
• the importance of expressing achievements and goals in a way that could be transformed to:
  • work with employers' recruitment systems (eg Monster.com's use of HR-XML as an agreed job application format), acknowledging that employers are often interested in softer skills and congruence between evidence of an individual's general approach to personal development, teamwork and problem-solving, and an organisation's core value set
  • search aggregated directories of learning offerings to highlight those most relevant to an individual's developmental aspirations
• the need to help learners to develop their goal-setting and evidence-marshalling skills - this would appear to tie in with mandatory Personal Development Planning (PDP) initiatives required across UK FE and HE from the 05/06 academic year (see the QAA's policy statement).
• the need for better dialogue between industry and academia with an eye on opportunities for PDP initiatives in the latter to be informed by well-developed industry practice, the former making a full contribution to the development of ePortfolio, and increasingly blurred lines between the two arising from work-based (lifelong and lifewide) learning and mentoring schemes.

Networking opportunities over lunch revealed considerable interest in XCRI's aims, and several insitutional initiatives in the area. None had made a specific connection between curriculum specification and ePortfolio although its relevance for producing transcripts of achievement was broadly acknowledged. In terms of assessing the completeness of draft elements within XCRI's working curriculum specifications (Specification_v0h.xml and Offering_v0d.xml), Nottingham Trent's database-driven central course repository/quality workflow initiative appeared particularly relevant and I hope to visit the project in the near future. Interest in definitive specifications seemed most apparent in those institutions that had been through Institutional Audits, and it is interesting to note that a recent QAA publication on lessons learned from institutional audits highlights how definitive programme specifications with suitable versioning and derived information feeds can provide powerful integrating and coordinating mechanisms for education institutions, and encourages sharing of good practice in this area.

The afternoon workshops focused on ways in which a service-oriented approach might be able to assist with some of the ePortfolio requirements raised in the morning sessions. My group focused on the relationship between curriculum and ePortfolio and included a good mix of perspectives from industry, FE, HE, JISC, and UCAS. We produced the following model showing how Curriculum, Pathways and Achievements services could be assembled to support an Advice service:

For XCRI, the model highlighted:

• the need for curriculum pre-requisites to be expressed in way that facilitates comparison against the ePortfolio representation of achievements
• the need for curriculum metadata to support searching according to varied criteria, including the practicalities of the financial and travel implications of study, where, when and how it is offered, as well as the subject of study.

Our discussions about curriculum and ePortfolio ran out of time before the role of curriculum services in providing transcript information could be discussed, but as interface definitions fall within scope of the ePortfolio Reference Model project, Peter, Angela and I will definitely be exploring this further - hopefully combined with a look at Nottingham Trent's course repository. Keep watching this space.