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.