It is OK to make a mistake!

The proposal from the Francis Report to introduce a duty of candour into the NHS is a challenging one. My only experience of working in the NHS was one summer placement. It was generally a happy experience but I remember one morning when cold tea was served to the residents on the ward. One of them let us know what he thought and I pacified him with an apology. I was then asked to come into the charge nurse’s (as they were called then) office and I was told that we should never admit to a resident that we had made a mistake.


This is a flippant example in comparison to the serious issues faced by the Stafford enquiry. However I use it a symptomatic of a culture where a lack of openness and honesty was encouraged and expected. Something that appears to have continued.

When I am talking about e-portfolios one of the benefits that I often highlight is how transparent they are. Not because they are ‘open’ documents, because ours are certainly not that, but because those with permission to do so are able to review the whole process. It is not easy to ‘hide’ what you don’t want those involved in the assessment to see.

For some this can become a significant barrier to an adopting an electronic system. They fear that somehow their ‘mistakes’ will be published over the web and even if this is not the case the fact is that there is now evidence that I have not got it always right. For professionals the can fear revealing their mistakes.

However when I am internal verifying vocational qualifications, evidence of students getting ‘it wrong’ and assessors highlighting this, is exactly what I want to see because each occasion provides an opportunity for deeper learning. In the same way the most powerful CPD records are often those where someone has reflected on their existing practice, perhaps as a result of a learning intervention or sometimes not, recognised a ‘mistake’ or improvement and implemented it.

Even when this happens there is a reluctance to share that learning experience as if in some senses it erodes your reputation as a practitioner, whereas in many cases, it is the person who has made a mistake and has reflected and learnt from it, is the one that you most want to see.

It is time we started seeing transparency/candour as an asset not as a threat.

Dear Serge are you finally losing the plot?

I received the annual e-mail(s) from the European Institute for e-Learning to announce their 11th conference in the UK and the fact they had secured some European funding to bring together e-portfolio expertise however I felt that I needed to write the following back to them.

Dear Serge,

I have a lot of time for the team at Eifel and particularly you, because you have been at the forefront of pioneering e-portfolios for over a decade and it is therefore with some regret that I write the following.

I have just received your invitation to submit contributions to the 11th ePortfolio and Identity Conference, Open Me! with the following topic areas.

• open ePortfolio and open badges

• open identity and open data

• open learning and open educational resources

• open assessment and open accreditation

• open employment and open business

• open architecture and open infrastructure

In fairness to you all this is totally consistent with the direction of travel for your understanding of e-portfolios over the past decade. The giveaway is in the title of the conference ePortfolio and Identity.

Somehow you have allowed these two concepts to become intertwined even though you have previously recognised, that there are other tools that are arguably more ubiquitous and appropriate to capture identity than any e-portfolio. On many occasions I have wanted to congratulate you and say well done you have achieved the goal that you set yourself and that everyone does have the same sort of e-portfolio you have wanted them to have, it is called facebook or i-google or linked in

However you can’t but help yourself and move into other areas like assessment still desperately trying to cling onto those first principles, that the portfolio is owned by the individual and that it is open and available to be shared. Can you therefore just try and explain what open assessment and open accreditation looks like. Is this where I award myself a certificate or perhaps my learning group award me a certificate based on assessment criteria we have developed together.

So what I would really like to say to you is, acknowledge what you have achieved and that the e-portfolio world has moved on. However what we are likely to have instead is a conference attended only by the presenters, in the main presenting projects that have not and will never go anywhere.