Development Issues for PDP with ePortfolios: Web Services and Skills

Abstract

This chapter describes approaches firstly towards a service-oriented architecture for personal development planning (PDP), and secondly towards representing skills for interoperability. We outline a personal information aggregation and distribution service (PIADS) which serves as the key concept within a distributed approach to storing information suitable for ePortfolios and PDP, and using it through Web services. Our skills “meta-framework” is outlined as a long-term practical solution to the challenge of widely diverse descriptions of skills. It uses a published specification (IMS1 Reusable Definition of Competence or Educational Objective, RDCEO2), and elaborates this to distinguish between conceptual “competency” definitions and operational “educational objective” definitions. If these issues are not addressed, the practical value of ePortfolios for PDP would be limited. Thus the chapter is of particular importance to those planning and designing future ePortfolio systems and services.