ePORTFOLIO FOR A LEARNING SOCIETY

One of the main characteristics of a knowledge economy is the organic link between individual, community, organizational and territorial learning (e.g. learning regions and cities). Understanding and exploiting this link will be critical to responding to the Lisbon Summit’s call for the rise of a knowledge economy. We would contend that the dazzling advance of the ePortfolio is one of one of the most promising indicators that we are now entering into the age of a learning society. ePortfolios are transforming the strong existing practice of the use of portfolios in education and training, and opening up a wealth of new services. Using state of the art technologies – blogs, social software, semantic web, peer to peer networks, distributed databases – ePortfolios are now major tools in the hands of policy makers at local and national level to develop the infrastructure of the learning cities and regions of the future. The choice of Wales which defines itself as a “Learning Country” -to provide ePortfolios to its three million citizens, demonstrates how the ePortfolio can capture the idea of lifelong and lifewide learning, and the ability of technologies to support innovative policies. In this paper we will present the arguments for the goal set by EIfEL and Europortfolio that “in 2010, every citizen will have an ePortfolio.” And how this objective will contribute to achieving the Lisbon goal of making Europe the most competitive knowledge based economy in the world.